What fraction of college males run 100 mpw?

I think we had 2/18 go over 100 last year (D3). They graduated and I'm guessing now we have 1 at most reaching 100 this summer. All of these people are/were seniors.

On my team, D1, 2 out of 26 did last year. This year I'll guess that we will have 0 out of 30

of the fours years i was in college, there were four guys who got over 100 miles a week, including me. my sophomore year was when four of us did it - one other guy would have done it regardless, the others were experimenting with coach.

freshman year, 0 out of 19.

sophomore year, 4 out of 22.

junior year, 0 out of 20.

senior year, 1 out of 31 (just me).

we were D1, and very competitive in our region.

the exact fraction is hard to say. it depends on the program maybe 30%, on the athlete, 70%. but my best educated guesstimation would say on the whole that maybe 3% or 4% of all college males run over 100 serious miles a week in preparation for their season.

If you mean *all college males*, the fraction would be terribly small, probably right around 1% of 1%.

If you just mean *all male intercollegiate cross-country runners*, I'd say the fraction would still be under 1%. It's easy to forget how many guys compete--at some level of seriousness/fitness--in intercollegiate cross-country.

Been doing it since I was in HS. It's a lot easier in HS.

By the way, i'm way better than you.

You are a giant walking pussy if you think you can beat someone who works harder than you.

I'm DIII and one of 22 on our team running log to best the 100 mile mark this summer. Expecting one other person to make the mark before we both drop our milage significantly in the fall.

If you are talking about those that really run 100 mile weeks consistently and not just once in awhile, I would say the answer is very low, like 5%. So many people talk about running 100 mile weeks, when in reality they are doing maybe 5-10 100 mile weeks for the entire year and averaging around 80 miles a week.

No way 1 in 20 guys run 100 mpw, that's more than one per team for every college team in the U.S. I bet it's not close to that even in DI alone.Heck, even of the field at DI nationals (and somebody probably knows the exact stat, because they did a survey of every athlete there), I bet the answer was under 5%. Of the 255ish guys in that race, how many do you think were averaging 100 during the fall? I'm guessing maybe 10-15.

Letsrunclown

Been doing it since I was in HS. It's a lot easier in HS.

By the way, i'm way better than you.

You are a giant walking pussy if you think you can beat someone who works harder than you.

Not sure if you're serious or not. But if that were true, everyone would run 24 hours per day at all-out, and everyone would be unbeatable.

This is a great thread.

Everyone knows you should run a lot and still very few people do it. I'm known as a high mileage coach and I always wonder what our team average is - no where near 100 mpw - although we get a fair number of guys there each summer for a high week.

I always say if you aren't training 90 minutes a day you aren't training - and therefore most collegians including my own aren't training.

I think an equally good thread would be "What percent of of the top 50 guys at NCAA xc hit 100 miles in a week at one point during the previous 6 months?"

The best guys I've ever had were all high mileage guys.

If you know what you are doing as a coach, then it makes sense that the more you train, the better you'll be as a runner.

I go to Dickinson college. We had 1/40 go over 100mpw last summer, this summer it will probably be a lot higher. Should be about 34/40.

I think far, far too many runners look at mileage as the goal instead of mileage being one aspect of a training regimen. Mileage accomplishes several things, but you still need to put in quality work with that mileage to run fast. 100mpw is no magic formula. If you turtle through a 100 at 8 minutes per mile for a few weeks you're not going to run sub-30 for 10K. At some point you need to do the fast running. A high-mileage allows one to get through good workouts without injury or breakdown.

I "turtled through" 100-110 mpw at 7:30-8:00/mile, with nothing more than 6x150 strides 3x/week my senior year and ran 29:52 for 10k. You don't understand what the volume can do for you until you actually put it in for several months.

We probably have about 9 out of 30ish on our team. Division 1.

rojo wrote:

I always say if you aren't training 90 minutes a day you aren't training - and therefore most collegians including my own aren't training.

You're joking right? Or are you counting abs/core, weights, stretching, whatever else in the 90 minutes? If its just running, you seem to be suggesting that, at 7 minute pace, we must run 13 miles a day, all of us.

come on now wrote:

rojo wrote:

I always say if you aren't training 90 minutes a day you aren't training - and therefore most collegians including my own aren't training.

You're joking right? Or are you counting abs/core, weights, stretching, whatever else in the 90 minutes? If its just running, you seem to be suggesting that, at 7 minute pace, we must run 13 miles a day, all of us.

That actually sounds about right. Doubling without too much effort I get in 14-20 a day. 4 easy in the morning. 10 quality at night mon-fri. 2 10 milers saturday. one 18 sunday. Rojo stated he's a high milage coach so, no, it's not really that ridiculous.

I was just speaking earlier this evening about a kid in our area that graduated HS this year. In preparing for his freshman XC season he hit 100 mpw this summer. I guess his college coach told him he needed to. To me, that sounded crazy for a freshman. The most he probably ran as a high schooler was about 70 mpw. Come to find out, he is out with a stress fracture right now.

I was surprised in reading this thread that more college runners don't reach 100mpw. I just assumed that, at least, be the jr and sr years it was fairly common.

I beg to differ wrote:

I "turtled through" 100-110 mpw at 7:30-8:00/mile, with nothing more than 6x150 strides 3x/week my senior year and ran 29:52 for 10k. You don't understand what the volume can do for you until you actually put it in for several months.

...and I think you're not telling the truth.

[quote]rojo wrote:

This is a great thread.

Everyone knows you should run a lot and still very few people do it. I'm known as a high mileage coach and I always wonder what our team average is - no where near 100 mpw - although we get a fair number of guys there each summer for a high week.

On my D2 State U team in the 70s, we ran a mostly Lydiard style program and in the fall-Aug-Dec; the distance guys (about 10 of us) ran between 80-120 mpw. The 4 top runners averaged 100 mpw. We would run an easy 5-6 miles every morning on our own. And WE WERE GOOD. Kicking ass on most D1 teams in the area back then. At my school today, the current coach told me that the guys wouldn't or couldn't run that much.

rojo wrote:

The best guys I've ever had were all high mileage guys.

If you know what you are doing as a coach, then it makes sense that the more you train, the better you'll be as a runner.

I must disagree; I think there's some fallacious thinking here.

"Great runners run high mileage, therefore high mileage makes you great."

Or

"If being really good and high mileage are correlated, then the second causes the first."

Not necessarily true, and one of the toughest things in running to get to the bottom of. Great distance runners can handle high mileage, so on 100mpw they get better and not injured. That's not to say that the average runner would benefit from or be able to handle 100 mpw. Maybe they would run their best off of 75, because they'd get too tired or injured at 100. Maybe they'll be able to handle 100 in two years, but not now.

Again, that second statement is definitely false if read literally. As I said before, if that were true, everyone would train all-out 24 hours a day and everyone would be unbeatable.

Recovery is crucial in the training process. The more you train, the less recovery you get. The key to improving is balancing training and recovery. I'm not against 100 mile weeks at all, but more is not automatically better.