Mileage: How to keep quality with quantity?

you periodize. high mileage then competition phase. so D. all of the above

Slowly increase your miles without workouts. It will take years of patience. Once you get to high mileage say 90+ miles a week, then start adding in workouts slowly. Good luck.

been there bud wrote:

Slowly increase your miles without workouts. It will take years of patience. Once you get to high mileage say 90+ miles a week, then start adding in workouts slowly. Good luck.

False. You can't neglect speed work.

This is actually a great question. If somebody could address my question also, it would be much appreciated. Should my "easy running" (runs other than workouts), be fast with lower mileage weeks, or slower with higher mileage weeks? I know you have to recover from the workouts but will fast "easy runs" will hurt you? Faster and lower mileage seems appealing.

I am of the belief that you should run lower mileage with faster easy runs. If need be, you can take recovery days.

Bump. Answer second question!

By the "second question", I assume you mean the one about whether fast easy mileage will hurt you. That all depends. If you are racing it, then yes, you will become burnt out. However, running "fast" will actually help you. You will be able to recover faster. Just make sure you have a down day every week, and about every third or fourth week should be a bit easier, in terms of volume.

peopleareannoying wrote:

you periodize. high mileage then competition phase. so D. all of the above

coach d says periodization is dead. Because he claims to be a big-time D1 track coach with a STEM degree from MIT, I believe him.

Would like to hear from more runners.

gullible's travels wrote:

coach d says periodization is dead. Because he claims to be a big-time D1 track coach with a STEM degree from MIT, I believe him.

Nope. I didn't say it. Prof. Yuri Verkhoshansky said it, and he said it 15 years ago. And he didn't say all periodization was dead, just the block periodization (mileage, then hills, then intervals) used by Lydiard. I just pointed out how out of touch with reality the Lydiard cultist nuts are.

What people who actually know what they're doing do these days is concurrent periodization. You do some of distance, power, and speed all the time, and you change the emphasis of each as you go through the season.

And the people who just increase mileage have lousy results because the point of diminishing returns starts as early as 40 mpw. You increase the total load, which includes mileage, hills, intervals, sprints--everything--as your condition allows you to handle an increase and still recover, and doing it right takes time.

Too often people will be fooled into cutting quality so they can increase just mileage, and they get very little out of it.

Interesting, nice post. So a runner should first focus on keeping great quality and hitting on all the majors parts of training like hills, intervals, sprints, distance etc. Once a runner can handle these and recover well, it's ok to increase the load as long as you keep the quality of all the different parts of training. Correct?