Can you?
Can anyone?
Can you?
Can anyone?
Glenn Cunningham ran a 4:03 mile on cinders training 15 miles/week. This is a guy who was told he would never walk, and had no toes on his left foot.
It can be done
of course they can....but you cant
Yeah.
Do a weekly 5K time trial (4 miles, including warmup & cooldown), and a weekly 10-mile run. Since you have plenty of time to recover from these workouts, you should be able to do the 5K as an all-out effort & run the 10-miler as a pretty hard tempo pace. Toss in some intense sprints & plyos. It's hardly optimal training, but it should get you under 17:00 eventually.
Many people can run sub 17 on 0 miles a week
You may not believe this, but I know a guy who runs 17.48 and the ONLY running he does, is intervals, twice a week. No mileage nothing, not a single continuous run. Don't ask me how its possible, I just think he has loads of talent. His coach has him doing only intervals (short ones, maybe longest 600's) because he says you lose speed by doing continuous runs. If he would train the right way, he would be a beast.
Yes, I could run 17 minutes off not running for a few months.
Flying Dutchman,
I am not that impressed by your colleague. I myself ran sub 17.30 off about 10 miles a week and know a few others who could as well. Now doing 40 miles a week im a sub 16 5k man.
of course wrote:
Many people can run sub 17 on 0 miles a week
I assume you are not counting the 5K itself as part of weekly mileage, because if you are then, sir, you have blown my mind.
Bare Essentials wrote:
Can you?
Yep. Now I can. But I couldn't before I ran/skied/biked/played/climbed all those trails/trees/mountains/dreams.
Quit wondering.
Didn't Abdi run a sub-15 5k without any training at all?
I had a friend in high school who ran less than 20 miles/week. His senior year, he ran 4:15 and 9:18.
17:00 on 14 miles/week? No question.
Im pretty sure I could, it might take a while, but I could.
I ran 17:04 after a running twice in the month leading up to the race. Can be done... but it hurts like hell too.
averaged about 25 mpw for 6 weeks during the summer. cross trained biking twice a week and swimming once. came out after a short break and ran 15.50 for 5k. i am also pretty big (5.11, 172). been running much more now and feel like i am in horrible shape, who knows.
Some examples:
1. Letsrun used to have an interview with Bryan Berryhill where it was mentioned that in high school he ran 8 milea a week. He was the Oregon state 800 champion two years in a row.
2. Craig Massback apparently did ONLY 400 sessions 4 times a week in high school. He ran close to a 4 minute mile on this training.
3. One of Hickson's research projects in the 1970's had untrained subjects train by running as far as they could in 40 minutes 3 days a week and doing VO2max intervals on an ergocycle 3 days a week. The result was a documented increase in VO2max of over 40 percent (possibly the largest increase ever seen in peer-reviewed research) and the ultimate VO2max seen was over 60 in 10 weeks (although follow-on research showed that continuing the experiment caused performance to peak and decline somewhat).
The key is TALENT and muscle fiber content. People with significant amounts of IIa fibers can develop the the ability to produce significant amounts of ATP from relatively low volumes of high intensity training. This works well actually for events where VO2max is important (800-5000), but it doesn't work so well for 10000 and longer where slow twitch fibers are much more important. See the old research by Dudley and Holozy.
Didnt Roger Bannister run about 20 miles a week, he could probably run under 14.30 for 5k
I can run a 5:48 mile on 10 miles a week and I'm 60 years old.
Propose some training routines for a week in week out program, all. I was hoping this would get interesting & it has.
He said 5K. Cunningham had brass ones, no question, but was a miler.