little violin wrote:
There have been a lot of high schoolers posting their training schedules and asking for advice lately and I've been surprised to see a lot of them in the high 60's to mid 70's, sometimes even into the 80's. Did anybody else do this much mileage in high school? I can't ever remember going above 50 mpw and wondering if I'm alone in this.
I ran about 15 miles a week on average in high school...sometimes as high as 20 and sometimes as low as 13.1...not kidding either.
We typically ran about 3 miles a day for practice...non-running coach would stand there smoking a cigarette as we ran, waiting for it to all be over so she could leave. We had no encouragement to run over the summer either.
A 13.1 mile week would happen like this:
Monday - 1 mile because of 5,000 race the next day.
Tuesday - 3.1 miles
Wednesday - 3 miles
Thursday - 3 miles
Friday - 3 miles
Saturday - Off
Sunday - Off
On weeks when we also had a Saturday meet, we'd run a mile on Friday and then 3.1 miles for the race on Saturday. We didn't have any organized warmups or cooldowns, so I might run for literally a couple of minutes before a meet, and I rarely ever did a cooldown. Just wasn't the culture at my high school...less was more, and we were told to "rest up" on the weekends, and there was not internet to check to see that what we were doing was not enough. I still managed a 15:48 off that kind of training, and we had several other guys under 17 minutes. Amazing.