Surprised by the Mileage I've seen with HIGH SCHOOLERS

I was more of a mid distance guy in high school, and my mileage during the school season was around 45 per week. But the summer before senior cross country, I got up to 80+ three different weeks, and ran 750 total miles from mid May to mid August.

PRs: 1:56.8, 4:31, 16:30

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.

25-35 miles per week max, track and cross country. weightlifting.

400m-48.9, 800m-1:56, 1600m-4:27, 5000m-16:08. Speed work baby, that's all you need to be a state champion. more miles makes you tired and slow if you have natural speed. all the other guys who can barely break 60 seconds in the 400m, i feel sorry for them. i suppose gradual build up of miles and tempo runs are what's needed there but my XC team never did more than 35 miles a week. i did ZERO tempo runs in high school and we were top 10 in the state (xc) and top 3 in track because we came into the season very fast. one of our guys ran 1:51 on this plan. we had 6 guys on the XC team who could split faster than 52 in the 400m and run under 17 minutes. our coach developed speed over 4 years and never wore us out. i did ZERO tempo runs in high school

NU wrote:

I was doing 35-45, and got into the 50's on occasion. I ran 1:55m, 4:18m and 8:55 3km. Lot's of hard track workouts.

That was me, too. However, when I was in HS, when I wasn't at practice, I was on a bike, basketball court, football field, etc. Today's kids are not on any of those, for the most part.

400m wrote:

Speed work baby, that's all you need to be a state champion.

LOL. In the late 70s our upstate NY team ran huge numbers of miles and were pretty successful for a little high school facing some real giants. Of course none of us, including our sectional champions, ran competitively after HS, mostly because our win-at-all-costs coach pounded the joy of running right out of us.

For me, it wasn't the miles or the work - I switched to cycling and put in plenty of 400 mile weeks over the next ten years (not every week, of course) - it was the attitude. I hated the coach, not the mileage. So all those miles were wasted. By the time I rediscovered the joy I was way past my competitive prime.

Reading through this thread I would be P!SSED to be spending as much time and effort running 70 & 80 mile weeks to get the meager results many on here are reporting.

Sounds like there's a lot of "running for the sake of running" or just "running for the pretty log book" going on.

Just to clarify, I am not the norm here, and would in no way recommend what I did to any current HS'ers.

I built up to 106 mpw my senior year. I averaged 84.6 mpw for the XC season. Ended up with PR's of 16:09, 9:35, and 4:34. None of these are great times, but my starting point was way behind. My PR's as a frosh were 21:05 for 5k, 11:40 for 3200, and 5:28 for 1600. I decided to build as high as I could without getting injured.

Looking back on it, I probably could have achieved the same success with high weeks of 85-90 and averaging 70-75. However, I firmly believe that with my minimal talent I could not have achieved what I did on less than that. My problem was the mileage was inconsistent, as I was self-coached (with help from my dad). I ended up running PR's of 1:10:59 in the Half Marathon and 2:32:28 in the Marathon off of around 80 mpw my senior year in college (I ran collegiately at the D1 level for two years before illness and injury did me in).

The biggest reason U.S. runners experienced such a drought in performances during the 90's and early 2000's was due to coaches and athletes substituting hard interval work for mileage. The huge uptick in performances on a national/international level over the last ten years is almost entirely due to athletes simply running more, in my opinion. The idea that 70 mpw for a senior is a lot is almost laughable. Chris Solinsky, Galen Rupp, Dathan Ritzenhein, and countless others topped 90 consistently in high school. Their results speak for themselves. If others worked this hard, we would have many more elites than we do now.

In HS I ran 30-40 a week freshman year, 40-50 a week sophomore year, 50-60 a week junior year, and 50-60 a week senior year.

Most varsity guys were 45-55, a few hit a couple of 60s, I maxed out around 65.

We went to states my junior year, though didn't run very well there. We were decent on the track but better in XC.

High mileage wrote:

The biggest reason U.S. runners experienced such a drought in performances during the 90's and early 2000's was due to coaches and athletes substituting hard interval work for mileage. The huge uptick in performances on a national/international level over the last ten years is almost entirely due to athletes simply running more, in my opinion. The idea that 70 mpw for a senior is a lot is almost laughable. Chris Solinsky, Galen Rupp, Dathan Ritzenhein, and countless others topped 90 consistently in high school. Their results speak for themselves. If others worked this hard, we would have many more elites than we do now.

^^ Yes

70 - 80 is fine if the HSer has built up to it over 4.

AnonymousPseudonym wrote:

Reading through this thread I would be P!SSED to be spending as much time and effort running 70 & 80 mile weeks to get the meager results many on here are reporting.

Sounds like there's a lot of "running for the sake of running" or just "running for the pretty log book" going on.

These posts seriously always crack me up.

On the one hand we get the usual monthly could average dude be trained to break 5/15:30/xx:xx where almost everyone says no way, maybe 1-2%.

Then people come in on these threads and consistently talk about the meager results people are getting from higher mileage.

My highest week over the summer was around 70 I regularly made it into the 50s anything more I would tend to get injured or sore.

I ran 50-60 mpw for my senior track season, and ran 1:55, 4:01 (1500), and 8:57 (3k). I didn't run more than 45 mpw until that January. Always wondered what I could have done if I had started real training earlier in my high school career. I was running no more than 30 mpw from freshman to junior year, with my longest runs right around 7 miles. Had a coaching change between junior and senior year that made a huge difference.

We need some runners who ran for Ron Helmer at Woodbridge (VA)HS tell us about their mileage and workouts.

I know hardly any of their many All-Staters did much in college !

I was running 50 miles a week for my junior and senior years. The best guys on my team would run 70 miles a week but for the most part my coach advocated caution. At the time I really wanted to move my mileage up but my coach didn't want me to get injured. I'm definitely in favor of higher mileage approaches.

During HS I ran up to nearly 90 mpw in the mid- to late 1990s, but that was experimental and I averaged in the low to mid 70s when my training was good. At the time, I believed this to be quite unusual in the States (I grew up in Canada). I get the impression that it would not be nearly as anomalous today.

This was pre-Garmin, of course, but my Dad & I measured a lot of my routes with the car. Typically, I think I ran about 6:20-7:00 pace. For context, my HS PRs were 1:58, 3:56(1500), and 8:33(3K).

Wow, at our school we rarely hit 20 miles in a week and only two of us ran at all during the summer. We only have one runner with a PR under 18

I just started my sophomore year, and I consistently run ~45 mpw, with the exception of cutback weeks, which are in the 38-40 range. My peak mileage is around 48-49, although I might break 50 this week.

We ran 30-40 per week in the early '80's. My coach had done some training in Oregon under Bill Dellinger and he despised"lsd" - long slow distance. We ran 30-40 miles per week. Did lots of farleks on trails, some repeat miles and lots of progression runs. Never heard of "tempo" runs until a few years ago. Longest run I ever did in HS was 12 miles in August. Never ran consistently over the summer. Our team was good, though. We had 6-7 guys run sub 16:00 for 3 miles and 1-2 were sub 15. My son is now running CC in high school and running 50-60 miles per week as a sophomore. Team isn't nearly as good as mine was, but his coach is a tool and the kids can't stand him. We loved our coach and I think that makes as much, or more of a difference, than number of miles run. Nevertheless, I do wonder what I and our team could have done if we'd put in good mileage over the summer and during the season. I suspect some would have run better but some would have gotten hurt or burned out.

By my senior year of HS, I was doing probably low to mid 40's a week during the season with 6 days a week, while (inconsistently) peaking at low 60's once or twice in the off-season. I never ran more than probably 63 miles ever in a single week of high school.

Granted, my coach was having us do quality workouts at least once a week, but the kids on my team were always coming into college with good PRs (15+ guys at sub-16:20, 9:30, 4:25, 1:56-type during my four years). None of us logged our miles religiously also, so we were running much more organically rather than trying to micro-manage our mileage.

Our coach also had us run more for minutes than miles usually, we kept track of our mileage more for pacing reasons than anything.

The team I ran happened to also podium all four years at our state championship meet, and I ran in one of the toughest states in the nation to do that in.

My high school PR's were 16:00, 4:13, 1:53.

I see too many kids now in college burn out and not meet expectations, partly due to their high school coaches running them into the ground with too much mileage during their HS careers. I think high school should definitely be a learning curve of quality over quantity in order to produce success both instantaneously as well as for long-term careers.

LM wrote:

These posts seriously always crack me up.

Then people come in on these threads and consistently talk about the meager results people are getting from higher mileage.

I'm not saying that high mileage doesnt work, BUT.. I'd hate be the guy running 80mpw, basically sacrificing my entire social life and then come in 60th at the Inv on Sat.

If you're running THAT much but getting beaten soundly by people running 30-45 mpw don't you feel like a sucker and a fool?