Do you remember your first 100 mile week?

this thread is the reason why i still come back to lets run despite all the terrible aspects of this place. keep the stories coming people, fun to read.

There was some interesting talk about how people felt after consecutive 100 mile weeks. While I hit my first 100 week as a senior in high school I didn't start to hit 100's week after week until my senior year of college. I'll dig out the old log book tonight and post some stuff tomorrow.

aug of 2008. I don't remember anything too special about it. College gave me a lot of free time I didn't have in hs or working a summer job, so I used it to up my mileage. I lived on the coast on hs. I remember how fun it was to do an easy run in the mountains with real scenery instead of suburbia. Just a typical week with a couple workouts and a long run though.

10th Mtn Miler wrote:

Nothing to do but read, sleep, eat, watch Little House on the Prairie re-runs, and hammer miles in the rain.

That's good livin'.

Not so much the 100 mile week it just blended in , I remember moving to 120 then 140, 140 was hard in sense it was tiring , you never felt rested.

Consider This wrote:

10th Mtn Miler wrote:

Nothing to do but read, sleep, eat, watch Little House on the Prairie re-runs, and hammer miles in the rain.

That's good livin'.

Similarly, my highest week ever (less than 100)was the week between Christmas and New Years when returning home to just eat, sleep, meet up with old friends, and run during my first year of work post college. Good times.

A quick comment about higher mileage and a supporting lifestyle, relating to duration of higher mileage training.

During, and since running my highest mileages, I have itinerantly worked the spectrum of jobs, from farm labour to manufacturing, residential and heavy construction, to lab technician/statistician and technical writing gigs. This may seem really obvious, so it must be worth saying aloud: What you do outside of running, be it work, or spending time ferrying yourself to and from work, or caring for a spouse or parent, or drinking yourself into a stupor several nights a week, it all comes to roost in your ability to cope with and recover from the stresses of beating your body up on the roads.

It is no coincidence that many of these comments harken back to high school or college days, when time was (for most) aplenty, and responsibilities a little less so.

There are AAA personality type, work capacity monsters out there who work full time while going to medical school and knock out 100mi/week in singles year-round, without getting hurt, sick, or stale. They probably put on spring race series as well, have a couple kids, and a dog name Sprocket. These "people" should not be the guiding light of the general milieu; the line of thinking that you are the unique exception to cumulative stress, and a physical virtuoso (on top of being exceptionally good looking) has, at some point, gotten most ambitious distance athletes far into the gutter, limping, or out of the sport entirely. Most of us are not the uncrackable egg thrown at the wall of high mileage.

To put in the time (whether it is 10, 15, or 25 hours a week) and then stick around long enough to reap the rewards of that work in the form of results or fitness, one has to have a lifestyle that is somewhat accommodating to keeping the tank above empty. And not some of the time. All of the time. The ability to sleep enough, eat enough, keep the stress at home and at work down, they all factor in to your mortal self not disintegrating. And lastly, persistence and consistency are king and queen of volume. You see several "build up to higher mileage, then miss a year" stories from those who disobey these rulers. Obey, and go long.

piotr janowski wrote:

You see several "build up to higher mileage, then miss a year" stories from those who disobey these rulers. Obey, and go long.

Well said. As for me, it was earlier this summer. I'd been bouncing between 80-95 for a good six months and had hit 100+ in a rolling 7 day count, but not in a traditional Monday to Sunday. I ran pretty easy Monday - Thursday of that week then did an interval session Friday and a long run over the weekend to get over 100. I'm loving all the responses and stories, keep 'em coming!

My first week over 100 was 147 miles. In the 12 months leading up to that week I only had one week over 70 miles, and in the weeks immediately beforehand I was running 40mpw.

My highest mileage day ever, prior to that week, was 19, and I proceeded to run an average of 21 miles/day for 7 straight days. I doubled 3 days, and my mileage in singles was 127.

My last day consisted of a hilly 27-miler in the mid-afternoon (splitting 3:15 for my unofficial first marathon), and a bonus 8-mile shakeout that night. On that final night run I felt the best I had all week, and was seriously considering logging another 20-miler on top of the 27 I'd done a few hours earlier. I only made the sensible decision not to do so because I was staying at my parents' house that night and I didn't want them worrying about what had happened to me when I was gone for 2hrs longer than expected. Although I kind of wish I'd just done it anyway.

As others have said, running one week of huge volume is not that difficult, especially if you aren't hammering the pace (I averaged 7:30 for the whole week). Maintaining it is a different matter.

for average people

do you have to be talanted to even consider 100

it would just make me slower

I think I am VERY average and I hit 100 once. I was building a nice base and ran several 80 and 90 mile weeks. I felt good so I added some more mileage just to hit 100. I was running doubles at the time.

I remember that I slept alot. I would fall asleep at 9:00 on the couch which is very unusual for me. But, I would be up at 5:30 no problem the next morning to get the day started with a run. That is very unusual for me also. I am not a morning person at all.

The week actually started off with a team relay race I was a part of. On the first day I had 2 legs of about 6 miles each and I ran them hard. I thought this was going to bite me for the rest of the week but it didn't. After the 7th day I kept the mileage up for 2 or 3 more days before taking a day off.

I felt good and had some very good training in the following months with no physical issues whatsover. Best shape of my life.

Yep. Ended on New Years Eve 2005. It gave me a stress fracture which cost me Boston that year. Never gone beyond 85 since then.

In college, the closest I came after a string of 10 weeks averaging 60, with a high of 70, was 91 miles with doubles and a 16x400 relay workout in the 60s. There were a lot of afternoon recovery runs after drinking heavily. I got a stress fracture out of this as I had been a bit injured for weeks and hadn't run much beforehand.

That August, I got tendonitis and couldn't run again for fifteen years.

Four years later, in 2008, I had gradually worked up into the 90s per week and ran my first hundred mile weeks in Albuquerque. Except for achilles issues in the 2nd month and shin splints in the third, from the achilles exercises, I kept up primarily hundred mile weeks about two-thirds of each of the next five years, peaking at 4920 miles in 2012--where I got injured twice in December and had to stop running short of 5000. In 2008-9, I ran almost all my lifetime pr's, though I broke the marathon pr in 2011 and would have broken all of them easily in late 2012 if I'd stayed healthy and gotten in some races while fresh after ten weeks of 112 mpw and three workouts.

So, I've done a lot of 100 mile weeks without their impacting my health. I used to get injured almost every week when I was young at 20-40 mpw. What you want to do the first time out is obviously to get there very gradually, but also to stay off of concrete until a few years after you start the hundred mile weeks and again very gradually adding concrete running. The other thing you really need to do to stay healthy on the higher mileage schedule is to get more sleep and do preventive strengthening exercises, particularly at the first sign of, say, hip problems or achilles, and to back up any speed or tempos if you have calf soreness. Finally, many people quit the hundred mile program far too quickly. What happens for me typically is that I get faster the first week and then get very, very tired and lethargic the next two to three weeks, running much slower, and then around week 4 and 5, I come out of that and start running pr's or close to them. From running 112 mpw before marathons, I don't respond in the same way to hundred mile weeks and have to get up to that maximum mileage to see the same effects now.

I walked away from my drink at a party, came back, drank it, felt funny. At first I didn't worry but I passed out soon after. I woke up in a dark room sometime later - I couldn't tell how long - and everything was sore. I could barely stand. Some of my friends say I ran a 100 mile week, and that they have video on their phones to prove it, but I don't know. They won't show it to me.

Watchsocks wrote:

Was there anything that made it particularly memorable?

100 mpw is not necessarily good for all distance runners....you know that don 't you?

M - 10 miles am and 10 miles pm. T - 10 miles pm. W - 14 miles am and 10 miles pm. TH - 10 miles am. F - 10 miles am. SA - 26 mile marathon (6:30)! SU - 10 miles pm. After this week, I knew I had world class potential as an athlete! Walked every mile with my pedometer to make sure distances were acurate and smart phone in my fanny pack to take pictures documenting this milestone. With proper training, I'm sure some of you LRC readers could do this too.

I had a similar experience as you (and I was also an idiot). Ran a breakout race at the 2007 Boilermaker 15K the summer after my freshman year of college. 5:14 pace in hot/humid conditions off mostly easy running. Nothing crazy good, but I wasn't even a sub-15 guy and the big deal was that I beat Olympic Marathon Trials 4th placer Trent Briney.

After that I was on top of the world mentally (physically I was very sore as it's a hilly course and I ran the whole thing in XC flats) and ran my first 100+ mile week the next week, hitting 103. The killer was this intense mountain run I did that involved running back down a steep paved road at near sub-5 pace. After all that I hurt my knee so bad on a run I had to walk it in for a couple miles (to this day I don't know what I did, but it was BAD and behind my knee still "pops" and gets tight where this initial injury was).

That started a string of me being injured on and off for the next three years as I would try to run through pain, take massive time off, come back still in pain, but try to run/race through it for a while anyway and eventually have new injuries pop up and take more time off.

I essentially didn't run for my entire junior year of college and was pretty close to quitting.

Happy ending though (sort of). After about 20 doctors, a great massage therapist and a whole lot of trial and error, I got healthy, PRd for the first time in years as a 5th year senior and now run 100 mile weeks routinely and train for half and full marathons. But damn, that first 103-mile week really set me back.