Are these usuall affects of high mileage?

Sounds pretty normal. You probably don't need to be running quite as much so soon (build up more gradually) if you're tired all day. Not that you can't do it and benefit, just that you're more likely to overcook the goose and less likely to benefit more. Or you can just stop increasing mileage for a while and (hopefully) it will balance out.

sounds normal, do you incorporate any recovery weeks? I used to build for 3 weeks, then drop back down a week to absorb. Maybe like 60, 70, 80, 60, then back to 80, 90, 100, 80. worked well for me as long as I took my time getting to the beginning of the base.

Thanks for the responses. Yeah I've been about: 70, 70, 60, 70, 80, 80, 70, 80, this is for my last 8 weeks. hopefully I can get 90, 90, 80, 90. I will see how I feel and how workouts go before I increase.

One thing I should've pointed out is this mileage is off of 7-9 runs per week. I have no time to do more doubles.

Sounds normal. Keep at it, and this will pass.

Brendan Foster's classic line was, "A runner is someone who goes to bed at night feeling tired andw akes up the next morning feeling even more so."

Brendan Foster messed himself up with overtraining. For many years his voice was so slurred from constant fatigue that he sounded drunk in interviews immediately after races.

As a young lad in the seventies I found this quite disturbing.

This is one of the greatest running truths I've stumbled across:

Real courage for a runner doesn't mean training as hard as you can or running yourself into the ground all the time, or gutting out a tough race even when you feel shitty.

Those are all fine and well and say good things about you as a person, not to mention about your potential as a runner. But the only courage a runner absolutely has to master is being honest with himself about his limitations leading up to a race so that on race day he can actually put it all on the line every second of the race.

Sometimes this is easier to grasp looking at one of the many counterexample runner archetypes. Here's one: The guy (everybody knows one, many of us have been that guy at one point or another) who almost always will not run to expectation at a race, but the poor to moderate performance will make some amount of sense, to him and everybody else, because he just blasted out a hard workout 2 days ago and is in the middle of a high mileage week. And that's how it's been for every race for the last two years, etc.

I know it has scared the shit out of me in the past to back off in training (that's what you build yourself up for as a runner, right? to be able to train harder and harder with consistency? the old Once-a-Runner obsessive compulsiveness?), but I now view going ahead and continuing to push as cowardice overcoming my better judgment to back off and give myself a chance (i.e. no excuses) on race day.

I think generally a lot of people stumble on this kind of thing by being forced to back off against their will and then being surprised by their performance. I've coached a lot of guys who I've seen it happen to because of a little minor freak injury, or a loss of motivation, or finals week, etc. And then they come back, run a race they think they have no chance in because they haven't been grinding non-stop for the past 3 months, and they hit the time they didn't think they'd actually achieve that season.

Sorry for the long post.

HRE wrote:

Brendan Foster's classic line was, "A runner is someone who goes to bed at night feeling tired andw akes up the next morning feeling even more so."

Brendan Foster is famously stupid. But I doubt he said that. Why would a runner be more tired in the morning? Lots of sex? True, overtraining can disrupt sleep, but runner does not equal overtrainer. In any case I'm sure I heard Foster say a runner wakes up tired and goes to bed exhausted. Basically you always have some residual tiredness, but you do recover a little overnight.

Foster's quote was cited in a couple of de Castella's books the other way around, i.e. all international level runners wake up tired and go to bed very tired.

yeah you totally f'ed up that quote. It's "The best runners in the world wake up tired and go to bed exhausted."

He was racing well throughout most of the 70's. But he was not the same after 1974. He was very mileage obsessed and had many other commitments. It took him many years to recover from those years of pushhing himself so hard.

Are you talking about Brendan Foster here when you say not the same after 1974? The Brandan Foster who was an Olympic medallist in 1976?

Yes, and he ran well in the 5000 too. But he was not as well conditioned as Viren or Castro. In 74 he was top dog in Europe at 300/5000 and then he moved up to the 10000 also, but he should have done similar training and not so many high mileage weeks one after the other. He took a pasting in that 10000 despite his medal, which was the only British medal in track and field in Montreal.

I have a hard time buying the argument that someone who gets an Olympic medal was doing it wrong, especially one who DIDN'T get a medal in the previous Olympics.