steady mileage = phenomenal performance...

Jim Peters lowered the marathon world record from I think 2:25 to 2:15 all by himself using nothing but hard steady mileage at 5:00-6:00 pace.

Derek Clayton I believe also just did a lot (upwards of 180-200mi) of mileage and very little else and dropped thw marathon world record under 2:10 then under 2:09.

Mark Nenow did little more than 140 hard steady miles a week with the occasional workout here and there and ran a US 10k record before Meb broke it.

Alan

Yeah, makes sense.

The key is this is not easy running. It's getting out there and running high end aerobic. When you feel good, you push. Actually, most runs should have some "push" in there.

This is nothing new, it's just that people mistake the base phase for jogging. Maybe when you're increasing mileage you take it easy for a while, but in order to get faster you have to run fast. Steady fast, but still fast.

It does seem to go against conventional wisdom. Whilst having an early season meeting with my coach we were talking about base phase and said he wanted me to do a good 2 threshold runs per week as there has been alot of research that has shown that just high volumes of steady milage often leads to an overtraining effect and staleness.

I have the same view and have experience of running terribly of just alot of steady running. However i would imagine that some of the runs thta foster did with his clubmates would have been so fast that they would have easily been tempo/threshold runs even without them intending them to be.

Also interesting to note if any of you have read Bill Adcocks book he gave up doing sessions at quite a young age and just ran heavy milage but ran it hard "rarely as slow as 6 minute miles" is one of my favourite quotes. And he had phenomenal success from this and had it not been for altitude would quite possibly have had an olympic medal to boot.

I think we've made a mistake in sort of making distance runs "easy runs" at whatever the distance and reserving fast running for those two or three "sessions" a week that everyone does now.

If you look at training trends over the past 20-30 years you'll see that not only are westerners doing (generally) fewer miles but they're also doing most of those miles slower.

I don't know about the claimed overtraining effect of high mileage, but I know about the slow effect.

Take all of those phenomenal old guys listed above, put them in a 10K...and they'd all get lapped if Bekele runs his personal best. That's what the phenomenal performance is by today's standards.

Ritz actually has a 10000 PB within a few seconds of Lasse Viren's. The difference is that in the 70's Viren's time was a world record, and today both Viren and Ritz would get lapped by Bekele. The thing is, that Geb and now Bekele DID those 100-130 miles at 6:30 pace PLUS they did it at 10,000 feet PLUS interval sessions like 4X2000 at 10K pace and 8X1000 at 3K pace PLUS a couple 100meter sessions (in spikes).

One can also throw Alan Webb in there, with 10000m of intervals a couple times a week. At US nationals, Webb talked about how he's cutting the interval sessions down to "only" 8K per session and getting back to doing what he was doing in high school. Shortly thereafter came 3:30, 3:46, and 1:43.

People can either get with the program (do what it takes to compete at that level)....or they can sit on letsrun and post about how everyone who works harder than they do is on drugs.

I dropped my 10km time in college from 35:52 to 33:35 in 5 months on hard mileage: weekly long run, tempo run, track session and rest of runs at 6:30-6:40pace, about 70miles on average weekly.

The only thing slower than 6:50 was the weekly 15-20miler and my early a.m. runs of 6km only because my coach ran with me and was a slowpoke. One day he wasn't there and I blew through 6km in around 22 minutes. My "idle speed" was pretty quick and I think for most of the 5 months I was hammering workouts I was somewhat overtrained. But when I took a few easy weeks and raced my race times plummeted.

Not that easy days of 6:30/mile is blazing but for a 35-34-33min 10km runner it was pretty quick. And it worked. (Also dropped my 1500m time from 4:39 to 4:15 and 800m time to 2:05 during this period and never ran faster than 1:12/400m in training).

Amen. Every serious runner should start right away. Next week run 130 miles with no running over 6:00 pace. Make sure you also include a repeat seesion of 1200-2000 meters at slightly faster than 5000 pace. A long run of 15- 18 miles getting down near 5:00 pace is important as well. Then repeat this for the next 10 weeks. Oh yeah, At altitude.

It really is as simple as this. Just do it and you'll be under 27:00 in no time.

Obviously I'm joking. You can only train as hard as your body allows you to. It has to recover. However I wonder if there is enough attention paid to in this country in thinking big and long term with some sort of systematic approach that strives for this level of training. The bad part is most will break down initially and racing will probably suffer for even the talented few that could ever handle such training. With college seasons and scholarships, few would take such a risk. And post-collegiately, bad racing means no dollars.

YES

Just run baby

I had the best training season of my life last fall. What's weird is I sandbagged every tempo and just ran by feel. I didn't do any interval workouts, and I only ran 3 hard races the whole season. Guess what? I was in FAR better shape at the end of the season then I'd ever been before, and I had come into the season several weeks late due to a hamstring injury. Maybe I'm different than most people, but I think almost everyone overtrains. Hard workouts are definitely necessary, especially interval sessions, but they should not be done nearly as often or as much as most teams do them.

Yep, we're making it too complicated.

There is a great Peter Snell story (I believe it was in a "Marathon and Beyond" interview) that tells about one year where he skipped the hills and track workouts which were key elements in the Lydiard program and just ran 80-100 mpw and then went and raced. He ran under 4 minutes for the mile his first time out which was the first time he had ever gone that fast so early in the season.

It made him wonder if it was that necessary to build miles, then do hills and then do track work. He decided wisely not to make an issue of it with his coach, Arthur Lydiard.

My best competitve years all came off racing myself into shape after building a solid base of steady running so the story resonated with me.

I've always believed that if you want to run high mileage, start out running two hours per day in two runs (one long run on the weekend) at a slow pace to give yourself a chance to adapt, and pick up the tempo over the years so that, to reach your peak, you are eventually running steady, continuous, long miles. Even Lydiard downplays intervals, and uses them only toward the very end of his program to emphasize sharpening.

Two hours per day at 7-7:30 pace is @ 115-120 per week, at 6:00 pace it's 140 per week, and at 5:48 per mile or so, it's @ 150 miles. The key, though, is to start out slow, and most runners are not able to temper their own "greed" and wind up injured. Adaptation takes years, not weeks or months. If you want to be good, start looking four years down the road and work back from there, rather than immediately going out and starting to hammer everything, while adding more miles. You WILL pay the price if you don't.