high mileage question

By speedwork, I mean anaerobic, as in building a buffer against fatigue. I suspect my son's lack of improvement was a combination of overtraining and a radical switch in his coache's training methods. Over labor day weekend, for instance, my son ran 20 miles on Monday (with a friend), and I believe 11, 8 and 12 in practice the next three days. Probably a little much. None the less, good for long term cardio development. The previous year, the coach had him doing anaerobic twice a week from July through November. This led to some fast improvement, but probably not the best from a long term perspective.

Most of his mileage was at a 7 min pace, or better. Not many junk miles.

15:42 off of 50-60 mpw w/ a lot more intensity

I'm a huge Lydiard proponent so everything I say (or at least most of them) is based on the Lydiard principles.

First of all, I don't think it's that bad of a thing to jump the milesge as long as he doesn't get muscular-skeltal breakdown and as long as he keeps the effort comfortable and doesn't race those miles. If anything else, keep it at the "junk mile" effort than too hard. You get in trouble when you start running too hard; whereas, you can never run too slowly. As you get fitter, your pace will quicken so let it come to you naturally instead of forcing the pace.

However, don't be too concerned with weekly mileage. I'd rather see you double the longest run and keep the rest of the runs (ot at least on easy days) the same than scrumbling doubles just for the sake of piling up the weekly mileage (though that isn't a bad thing either). 20 is a good long run for high school kid though following that with, as you mentioned, 11 and 12 might be too much. Japanese coaches have what they call "point workouts" and the rest is pretty much "filler". The important thing is to improve upon those "point workouts" be it quantity and/or quality. If his longest run last year was 12, try 18 or 20 (which he did); if he's done one 18 last year, try twice a week this year...something like that.

In regards to anaerobic training / speed training, as far as Lydiard was concerned, they are two different elements. While your speed (mechanics) improves somewhat doing anaerobic training, anaerobic training is todevelop your anaerobic capacity to maximum. Speed training is more mechanical and "nerve" thing (reaction and reflex type of stuff) as well as to overcome muscle viscosity. Doing anaerobic training throughout the season (i.e.; during summer conditioning period), as far as Lydiard was concerned, is physiologically incorrect. Basically it upsets your metabolism and adversely affect other parts of your training or recovery. On the other hand, it would pay to include some "other" elements even during the conditioning like hills (resistance work) or strides (flexibility and nervous system). It would probably be even more benefitial during the younger age to include other elements even during conditioning period. It would help your transition.

Doing some sort of repeats, as many people like to do, during conditioning is fine as long as the effort is kept moderate. Hard interval where you get prolongued breathlessness too early in the season may hamper the progress in the latter stage of the program which should conincide the racing season; therefore not desireable.

There's a time for training easy and long; there's time to do some repeats at hard effort; there's a time for continuous drive; there's a time to run full effort but short and sharp. All these things would have to be sorted out and placed carefully leading to the most important race(s) of the season. You may not be as sharp as you'd like in the early season simply because you would have not completed coordination of all the elements; but that should not discourage you or make you change the course of the program. Random decision and change of direction during the season need to be avoided.

It should pay off come track season....be patient

I'm with you with regards to Lydiard. I was coached during the off season in college by a man who learned from him. Found him through Runner's World, and sent him $10 per month to be coached through the mail. From my freshman to soph. year I cut a full 2 min off of my X-C (5 mile) times. The staple of his traing was 3 long workouts a week during the off season, and a month of hill resistance before the start of the X-C season. Since the college I attended only had X-C, I had the luxury of training on a yearly cycle.

As far as my son being patient, I think he is, as long as he has some answers with regards to his hard training. His body doesn't seem to break down very easy, and almost seems indestructible, other than obvious signs of fatigue.

Your son did improve, though certainly not as much as you'd tink from that sort of mileage increase. How often did he race? And you say that he got as high as 80 mpw. But was that done with any consistency or was it just a week or so? And if the latter, what was his typical mileage?

They ran two invites at the end of sept, then league, sectional, and state at the end. Several duel meets in the middle. Most of his weeks I believe were in the 60-70 range.

why did he run his summer mileage so fast was he careful not to dip too much under 7 min/mile (preferably slightly over)?in my base building phase i am big fan of simply strides, a tempo once a week and the rest easy miles... i like the way one other guy put it... don't force the speed, let it come naturally and that will happen when doing base properly

running dad wrote:

They ran two invites at the end of sept, then league, sectional, and state at the end. Several duel meets in the middle. Most of his weeks I believe were in the 60-70 range.

His summer mileage was definitely slower than the previous summer. He also did 1-2 intense bikes rides with a friend each week of 1-1/2 hours at 25 mph.

Nobby wrote:

First of all, I don't think it's that bad of a thing to jump the milesge as long as he doesn't get muscular-skeltal breakdown...

Unfortunately, most of us don't have a reliable crystal ball. You can take a chance by taking a big jump in mileage, but it may make more sense to be conservative and consider the big picture.

Why do you think a lot of Div. I freshman red shirt? Their coaches know that an upward mileage adjustment will lead to crappy results initially, but great results later on. Your son should consider the following: 1) He has a good base upon which an excellent track season can be built. Since he did little or no anaerobic training, he can ease off for a couple of weeks, and rebuild starting with a high level of aerobic fitness. 2)All of those low 16's and some high 15's that think they own him will have a surprise waiting for them come spring. Sounds like your son did pretty darn good, racing overtrained and underprepared. 3) Consider this a good experience. If you have college running aspirations, you very well may travel this road again.

Yeah, I overtrained in my sophmore year, and had a terrible track season. But then........

If you can do a 90 minute bike ride averaging 25 mph, what the heck are you training for running for? I know that you are lying and your son probably went ~ 20 mph, but my god put a realistic lie out there. Everything you have posted is in serious doubt in my mind because of this post.

Who cares. It might have been 23, I don't remember the exact detains, but the point is that in addition to running he did some very strenuous biking. And his GPS watch had him going well in excess of 20 mph for over an hour.

Nobby, when you say:

" Doing anaerobic training throughout the season (i.e.; during summer conditioning period), as far as Lydiard was concerned, is physiologically incorrect. Basically it upsets your metabolism and adversely affect other parts of your training or recovery."

You are refering specifically to the very hard sessions which a runner needs to do before peak fitness for track racing is produced.

Since all running is both anaerobic and aerobic, this statement is bound to confuse people. Breathing rates don't tell us how much energy we are producing anaerobicallly, this is a false concept.

I consider the most important fact is to phase in the high intensity work gradually, doing some faster pace work in base training, to avoid too much slow running, which can be just as damaging as too much fast running.

Of course I'm not telling you anything new, I just want to highlight the aspects of Lydiard's training that people jump on to criticize. They need to be explained in light of modern physiological concepts in order to maintain the authority of the wisdom behind Lydiard's methods.

Thank you for clafirying. In fact, that's why I specifically put "as far as Lydiard as concerned". He was probably wrong when he said it. He knew enough about physiology to be dangerous (like my computer skill!). There must have been some "anaerobic" aspect involved when Arthur's Boys were running up those damn hills in Auckland at 6-minute-mile pace but of course he didn't count that as anaerobic.

As a matter of fact, according to Dr. Dick Telford of Australia (in 1986, that was...), he didn't think Arthur's Boys did "zero" anaerobic training, counting those 20X400m in 60 seconds. He claimed that he felt they weren't getting "anaerobic" in a true sense. So what is "anaerobic"?

I tend to consider training "fast stuff" and "slow stuff" and, as for intervals, there are "ones to work on your breathing" (longer reps) and "ones to work on your leg speed" (shorter faster reps) and that seems to work just fine. I think today people are way too terminology smart. They know hell of a lot more and better than Lydiard hever did; but they don't seem to produce results.

Wasn't Lydiards main point that too much lactic acid over too long of a period would eventually cause the blood ph to drop, thus affecting metabolism? I believe also that he thought that buffering against the effects of lactic acid could be accomplished within a 4-week time period, and that doing fast intervals during the buildup phase would only take away from aerobic development. I'm no Lydiard expert, so correct me if I am wrong.

That's pretty much as well as Arthur could have explained.