miles that are physiologically worthless??

Where are these coe articles?

Geoffrey Mutai runs mostly physiologically worthless ~8 minute miles just because he likes being out in the nature.

from the front page

take two identical runners. have one do no running for a month, while have the other do 'junk miles' every day...4-5 miles at 8+ minute pace. who do you think is in better shape after that month is up? the 'junk' is worth something & adds up. you don't have to light the world on fire every run. long term, big picture.

I think easy runs should be easy, but let's put Mo Farah running 7:00 pace into perspective. His 5000 PR is 12:53 which makes that easy pace 5K pace * 1.68.

If you run a 15 minute 5K, that is like doing your easy runs at 8:07 pace.

If you run a 16 minute 5K, that is like doing your easy runs at 8:40 pace.

If you run a 17 minute 5K, that is like doing your easy runs at 9:12 pace.

My 5K PR is 18:40. If I ran 1.68 * 5K pace I would be doing my easy runs at 10:05 pace. I can't imagine running that slow if I tried. You are not Mo Farah. You are probably fine.

thats not my question though. that argument doesnt help in this context because im not talking about someone who runs versus someone who doesnt, im talking about running at a certain pace versus running by feel, and if that feel is 8 minutes plus does it help at all??

trottin around wrote:

thats not my question though. that argument doesnt help in this context because im not talking about someone who runs versus someone who doesnt, im talking about running at a certain pace versus running by feel, and if that feel is 8 minutes plus does it help at all??

Actually, that IS your question. And his answer is correct - running slow is better than not running at all.

this youngster seems to run well doing long slow distance work

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttgLuQITaiY

Miles driven by car.

ole codger wrote:

this youngster seems to run well doing long slow distance work

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttgLuQITaiY

Cool! Our own Ed. That deserves its own thread.

no, OP's question was running at prescribed paces versus running slowly out of those paces ranges.

to OP, Ryan Hall and Nick Symmonds do their runs around 7 minute pace. just goes to show everyone works differently

yidil wrote:

no, OP's question was running at prescribed paces versus running slowly out of those paces ranges.

No. That is no different than running vs not running. His question is 'will it help' not 'will it be just as productive'.

There are no miles that are physiologically worthless. There are miles that are physiologically stupid, though.

Starting out at 7:30 plus if your usual pace is 6:20-7:15ish is smart.

yidil wrote:

to OP, Ryan Hall and Nick Symmonds do their runs around 7 minute pace. just goes to show everyone works differently

It's not that simple... most of them have posted about doing runs that slow. Symmonds talked about doing an easy day at 8:30 pace once... after a long hard speed session I don't doubt it at all. But is that really their normal 'easy' pace?

Meb and Wejo are other guys who run/ran that slow. Meb used to do it all at 6:00 pace but said he slowed down his easy days as he got older. Regardless, 5:30 pace is still easy, very easy pace for Mo.

ksk wrote:

yidil wrote:

no, OP's question was running at prescribed paces versus running slowly out of those paces ranges.

No. That is no different than running vs not running. His question is 'will it help' not 'will it be just as productive'.

no my question was exactly what previous poster said it was.

maybe i was not specific enough. regardless is the consensus starting out at a slower than training pace and working into it?? thats whats ive gotten from this discussion so far

OP, it depends on your background. Training always does and when people talk about miles per week they almost always ignore this fact.

Running more miles can help sometimes, and sometimes running less miles helps, depending on how your body is doing. I would suggest to new runners to put off the marathon plan for a few years and just have a good time running a good solid 3-5 miles every day for a long time. And the other thing I suggest is allow yourself to experience easy running. I don't mean just run easy. I mean run until your running gets easy, and then keep running like that for a while. Let yourself experience enjoyable, easy, pretty fast, satisfying running. Stop thinking you have to be on the edge of breaking down all the time. If this means less miles then so be it.

People who are experienced at running fast can take periods and run more miles slower because they still have a feel and skill for running fast, and they can get it back fairly quickly. People who have never run fast have to learn how to run fast at some point if you ever want to be fast. And you're not going to do that while exhausted from running a lot of miles. You learn how to run fast on fairly low mileage. Then, when you get to a level where you can run pretty fast for 3 or so miles (this depends on what you consider fast and what is realistic), then start going for the bigger miles. You'll be doing those longer miles much faster than if you had started slogging big mileage from the beginning. Then after a while maybe go back to low mileage faster runs again.

The point at which there is supposedly NO training effect has been identified by physiologists as 55% VO2max. There is a point, BUT it is really slow.

I don't think Farah really meant worthless. But if you are capable of running 3K in < 8 minutes (~VO2 max), 7:00+ IS really slow. I think Salazar would call this non-optimal, as I would, and the first thing Salazar did after coaching Farah was to speed this pace up.

For elites, a typical target time for recovery runs is 1:30 slower than 5K pace (Kennedy with Kim MacDonald, and Rupp, and Farah these days), which would be ~5:40 pace. For a non-elite, the pace wold be more like 2:00 slower than 5K pace.