High mileage on singles question

Because of work schedule I used to run only 1 workout per day, and achieved moderate success. I ran a 2:23 marathon off of the following schedule.

Monday - 10 miles easy on grass fields.

Tuesday- 3 mile warmup, 6 miles of tempo on bike path, 3 mile cooldown.

Wednesday- 14 miles easy on trails.

Thursday - 3 mile warmup, either 4 X 1mile or 6 X 1000m, 3 mile cooldown. (Early in the buildup I would do 10 X 500m hill repeats instead of the track workout.

Friday - 10 miles easy on grass fields.

Saturday - 12 miles on trails, with 6-8 X 1 minute bursts in the middle of the run.

Sunday - 20-22 mile run on bike path, trying to accelerate over the last 10 miles.

Total - ~90 miles, which is plenty when you have a full time job.

Cascadia runner wrote:

My question for those that have experimented with this before is am I heading for disaster? Should I cut the easy runs down a bit and instead double up? I'm just a bit afraid of working into a hole I don't see coming. I'm sleeping like mad but haven't seen a decrease in performance yet.

Thoughts?

How's your waking pulse?

When you wake in the morning--before getting out of bed--take your pulse for a full minute. Take it twice, if you wish. Tip: if you woke from an alarm clock, give yourself a minute to calm down (before you take the pulse) and be sure to hit the snooze button, so you don't fall back asleep while lying in bed for those few pulse-taking minutes.

If your waking pulse has remained steady or edged downward as you've built up your mileage, great! But keep checking it on a daily basis, to get an early warning of any overwork/underrecovery.

If your waking pulse is higher, esp. 10% or more, that's a sign of the need for more recovery. Again, a routine that you can handle fine now can become too much after a period of time, even though nothing (training, sleep time, nutrition, outside stressors) may have changed.

If singles continue to work for you, I don't see a problem with them. But I also don't know of any particular training benefit accruing from singles vis-a-vis doubles.

I have done a hundred a week off singles a fair amount in the past. I have never had a problem with burnout. I don't know anything about the relative merits of singles versus doubles, but I felt better doing 100 a week of singles than I did off doubles. When I did it off doubles it just felt like I spent ALL my time running, whereas doing it off singles didn't really feel much different than doing 50 or 60 a week. Also, I don't know how you like to do it, but when I was doing 100 a week off singles I preferred to do something like 10-12-16-10-18-12-22, rather than 15 a day. Good to see that you are getting in some quality too.

I found I could do 100-105 on singles without too much difficulty. Lydiard wanted his guys doing 100 in one run with a "supplementary" run on top of the main session.

HRE wrote:

I found I could do 100-105 on singles without too much difficulty. Lydiard wanted his guys doing 100 in one run with a "supplementary" run on top of the main session.

what you mean by a "supplementary" run on top of the main session.

I think the idea was to run 100 miles at a good, solid pace and then add a second run on top of that which could be a really slow, easy pace.

What "easy" said. Barry Magee, for example, told me that he became a national class runner doing one run a day and about 100mpw in his base phase but became world class when he added a short run in the mornings which got him to the 120-130 range.

Thanks for the good input guys.I did it by mixing up the distances similar to what you listed, I had a low day of 6.5 as about the only difference.I also totally agree with the poster who said that it didn't feel that much different than a 50-60 mile week. I was running the same number of times/at the same time of day so it didn't feel a whole lot different. Adding double just seems like it starts consuming my life when running before and after work everyday.I also used to track HR in the morning, but have fallen out of the habit, good reminder to take a quick read for the log to head anything off.

Someone who enjoys running wrote:

I have done a hundred a week off singles a fair amount in the past. I have never had a problem with burnout. I don't know anything about the relative merits of singles versus doubles, but I felt better doing 100 a week of singles than I did off doubles. When I did it off doubles it just felt like I spent ALL my time running, whereas doing it off singles didn't really feel much different than doing 50 or 60 a week. Also, I don't know how you like to do it, but when I was doing 100 a week off singles I preferred to do something like 10-12-16-10-18-12-22, rather than 15 a day. Good to see that you are getting in some quality too.