The best advice given!
The best advice given!
you need to be rested, strong and in shape by mid August. It seems like a contradiction, but it can be done if you run in moderation. When we were all young, we felt daily runs without a break was no big deal. The real big deal is what it is doing to you for your late 20's and into your 30's when you could be a great marathoner. Is it really worth it to be good in h.s. when you could be a great marathoner making serious cash in your 30's?
I'm going to say there is no reason for any high school kid to run more than 80 miles a week. They race 3 miles at the most??
runner1234 wrote:
you need to be rested, strong and in shape by mid August. It seems like a contradiction, but it can be done if you run in moderation. When we were all young, we felt daily runs without a break was no big deal. The real big deal is what it is doing to you for your late 20's and into your 30's when you could be a great marathoner. Is it really worth it to be good in h.s. when you could be a great marathoner making serious cash in your 30's?
I'm sorry you must be talking about another sport. Serious cash?
If your lucky you might save money by getting a large supply of shirts. And if your real good a free Turkey at Thankgiving.
Why should it matter that you're in highschool? What's the difference between you on your last day of highschool and you and you on your first day of college? Run fast when you feel good, run slow (or not at all) when you're tired, run far when you feel compelled and turn back early when you don't. The Summer of Malmo already tells you what to do.
Oh, and smile a lot!
What is so hard to understand about this? Some people do better on higher mileage, some on lower. For some kids 80 is a walk in the park and the minimum they can do to succeed. I'm sure there's also plenty of people who's bodies just can't handle more than 50 miles of pounding a week. Different strokes for different folks.
This is the attitude that has held American distance running back for decades. You think that easy running = no running, when your lower level energy systems require much more activity to develop than your higher energy systems.
When Geb was racing 5000m he was running 120mi/wk with most of it at 6:30-7min/mi... Food for thought...
jumparound wrote:
Dear Scrotum, quality is the name of the game. The 2 time ncaa 10k champ, did around 50 miles a week.
Ooooh anecdotal evidence.
It's almost as if there were a million examples of just the opposite!
I am big on miles, but for most high school kids 70 miles is what I feel is the max. For all runners young and old the gold rule of training is things. If your legs hurt, if your not moving along as you should, just run easy 45-60 minutes for a for a few days. Sure a young body can run a good deal more then that but the goal is to say healthy. One also needs to have some room to grow.
Mileage is only one variable in your training. Taken out of context, your weekly mileage is almost meaningless. How is your week structured? How fast are you running? What kinds of workouts are you doing? These are the questions that determine how much mileage is too much. If you are truly doing the Summer of Malmo - truly running your workouts at a comfortable pace - you will be fine running 70 or 80 miles. If you're pushing the workouts and pushing the mileage, you'll get into trouble. Even being careful, though, it may be a good idea to take a bit of a down week every 3 or 4 weeks, just to be safe.
Really, though, what you need to be more worried about is not what happens this summer - it sounds like you're doing things right - but what happens in the fall. Is your coach's programs set up for someone to come in with this kind of mileage under their belt? Or is it more of a high intensity, low volume training plan? Lots of coaches, especially at the high school level, just want to see you hammer intervals and really don't understand the balance between volume and intensity. If you have very low volume, this is sort of OK, because there isn't really a balance to maintain; but, if you're trying to put in good volume while running with a coach who wants you out there hammering short intervals two or three times a week, things will go bad for you in a hurry. The smartest summer training in the world is useless if you squander it in September by working out too intensely. And all the people who said you were doing too much mileage over the summer will see you burn out at the end of the season and boast about how they were right and saw it coming. Be sure that your fall training is a logical extension of your summer training, rather than a totally different approach that ends up undermining all the work you're doing right now.
I can already tell people will bash the name I'm going to throw out, but I heard Todd Williams speak about his weekly mileage in high school during the summers before each season of Cross Country. He went from 40 Sophomore year to 60 Junior year to 80 before Senior Year. If your body can handle the training, then do it. Just know your body and know if you're overdoing it.
As some of the other posters have opined, make sure you take adequate rest, stretch, eat right, and sleep 8 hours a night. Don't forget to take a down week every 2-3 weeks where maybe you back off a good 5-10 miles.
Come September, and hopefully into late October you'll be tearing it up.
Best of luck to you!
The answer for me was 80. I ran 100+ miles per week before my junior year in high school, and never ran faster than 16 mins for the 3 mile. I also ran a marathon in 3:23:00 that fall, but much slower than I had hoped for.
I then limited myself to 80 miles per week before my senior year. This allowed me to do more intervals, tempo runs, hill repeats, and to run on average at a faster pace. I ran a 15:36 for the 3 mile that fall, and ran a marathon in 2:59:00.
SalukiAlum wrote:
I'm going to say there is no reason for any high school kid to run more than 80 miles a week. They race 3 miles at the most??
Former 5k world record holder Haile G..... ran 15 miles round trip to school every day as kid growing up. Did he run too much mileage?
Thanks for all the advice and responses.
I'd have to say it seems like the greatest advantage to running high mileage is the confidence it brings. I feel like I will be much more prepared in the fall than my competitors who ran much less, or no, mileage.
The main reason I am doing the Summer of Malmo and am running high mileage is to counteract my coaches bad training so hopefully the training I did in the summer will last until the State meet.
Let me explain a little bit about me and my coach. He's a good guy, but not a good coach. He knows next to nothing about running. Of the three years that I have ran for my current school (I moved after my freshmen year) I am the only runner that has returned to the XC team for more than 1 year. I hardly improve at all over the course of the season. We race 2-3 times a week. Occasionally he'll give us a "distance" day consisting of 2-3 miles on campus.
A typical week will look like this
Mon- 8x800- Mile pace, 5 min rest
Tue- Race
Wed- 4 x 3000 - 5k pace, 5 min rest
Thur- Race, or Time Trial
Fri- 12 x 400- 800 pace, 2 min rest
Sat- Race
I love running. If I didn't I would have quit long ago. I've read a couple Lydiard books, a Cerutty book, and a book by Daniels. I'm really tired of not being able to live up to my potential because of faulty coaching.
Next year I have early dismissal,so I get out an hour early. I think I will take that oppurtunity to get in longer runs before practice. I'm going to try to run my weekday races as tempo runs. I'll try to run my intervals at threshold pace, and occassionally run them at 5k pace. Fridays I'm going to run easy no matter what he says. Do you think this will work? Hopefully I'll be able to pull this off without getting kicked off the team. Thanks
actually that schedule could work except use your own set of training paces. run the 3000m repeats at 10k pace. run the 800s at 3k pace and run the 400s at mile pace. never go into the well in practice or early races.
A typical week will look like this
Mon- 8x800- Mile pace, 5 min rest
Tue- Race
Wed- 4 x 3000 - 5k pace, 5 min rest
Thur- Race, or Time Trial
Fri- 12 x 400- 800 pace, 2 min rest
Sat- Race
That is some of the worst coaching I have ever seen. Please give your coach a copy of this
http://www.londonrunner.ca/documents/2004_01_23_Molvar_sLydiardThesis.doc
Tell your coach that everyday between a interval/race you just want to run an easy distance run. If he does not listen then I suggest transfering to a private school or not running for him. That schedule is just stupid and could really hurt you in the long run!
Haile G. went to school everyday as a kid growing up? Wow, I only went to school 5 days a week and about 8 months a year. (so if I ran to school roundtrip that would be 75 miles a week).
SalukiAlum wrote:
I'm going to say there is no reason for any high school kid to run more than 80 miles a week. They race 3 miles at the most??
tell that to a large percentage of the trials 5k field, who have no intention of racing longer than 3.1 miles any time soon and many did significantly more than 80 miles a week.
having been a runner who did very high mileage in high school (got up to 80, averaged between 65 and 75 pretty routinely soph through senior year), and been around runners who did both more and less than that, i can tell you that mileage always has been and always will be an individual thing, as many people on this thread have already said. there is no magic formula that works for EVERYONE. if there was then everybody would be doing the exact same thing. some guys can run 4:15 off of 40 miles per week. other guys will run 4:14 off of 80 miles per week. and those 40 miles may not have been done out laziness, but because that runner gets injured if he runs too much, or his body just responds better to short, hard runs as opposed to long and more moderately paced runs.
to conclude, you certainly CANNOT say that high school runners who run high mileage will not turn out to do anythign. there are several olympians who have been high mileage guys and girls since their teenage years. it's what works for them.
"too much" completely depends on the person. you cannot assign a number to it. who knows, you could be a genetic freak who can withstand 200 mpw at age 17, and that gets you your best results.
my opinion is that unless runners really chiseled themselves down, or their bodies just matured too early, high mileage will never cause a runner to 'peak' in high school. perhaps they will not see the same improvement as kids who were lazy and ran 20 miles a week. obviously kids that have never seriously trained (it always amazes me how this is somehow 'attractive' to college coaches) are going to have more room to improve. but if the high mileage kids keep training hard, it won't be the mileage, which has always worked for them, that prevents them from improving.
That training schedule is seriously nuts and will burn you out if it doesn't injure you first. Your coach must be a serious dumb ass if he can't take the trouble to do a little research on the Internets and write a decent training schedule for a HS kid.
That training schedule is seriously nuts and will burn you out if it doesn\'t injure you first. Your coach must be a serious dumb ass if he can\'t take the trouble to do a little research on the Internets and write a decent training schedule for a HS kid.
BWDIK