Good read: Cam Levins college coach Eric Houle talks about how you can benefit from 190 mpw - Excercise phys disagrees

dsrunner wrote:

Think harder.

I thought harder. Nothing changed. Results trump lab experiments.

Have any other runners experienced this kind of training? What kind of foods do you find on the ground to fuel your runs with?

What was Cam's garbage diet like?

oh yah i just love warming up my legs for an evening 5k with a 15 mile morning threshold run

Avocado's Number wrote:

Appy? Really? wrote:

There's a reason one guy is a well known coach and the other is stuck in a lab at a university most people haven't heard of. Don't forget that 20 years ago a "top" exercise physiologist at UCLA was certain the women's marathon record would be under the men's by now.

Exactly. And there were others who claimed that there was no benefit to running more than seventy miles per week. The field of exercise physiology has long been awash with junk science.

I'm a bit skeptical about some of the statements in the article. For example, "the Cuban-American Salazar put in 200-mile weeks with 20- and even 30-mile full-bore runs the day before races." Thirty-mile "full-bore" runs the day before races? Really? I'd like to see the original source for that assertion.

[quote]overtrain to overperform wrote:

oh yah i just love warming up my legs for an evening 5k with a 15 mile morning threshold run[quote]

I think that would be excessive, but people vastly underestimate the importance of training volume. Read Rogers book and

http://www.bunnhill.com/BobHodge/

(look at what these people did). Read posts by malmo. I think it is certainly the case that one can overdo it and you want to make sure to recover, but to really achieve success in distance running it does require volume. Recently Merber has been running well and what he attributes his success to is better mileage, better long runs, and then the quality without losing time to injury. I was kind of shocked in his post race interview he said he wanted to continue to get his long runs up. A 15 mile morning threshold might not be advisable, but 6-10 (or longer in the am) with a pm run as many times as you can along with weekly longish threshold runs and 2x weekly strides will get you fast and ready to roll.

And look up Henry Marsh's training as well.

Yes. If you find 19 guys who run well on high mileage and one who runs well on low mileage always defer to and imitate the one in twenty doing the low miles.

HRE wrote:

Yes. If you find 19 guys who run well on high mileage and one who runs well on low mileage always defer to and imitate the one in twenty doing the low miles.

+1

Not many coaches out there handing out volume training plans, checking progress, then taking that 20th athlete not progressing off volume and finding a different plan that fits better.

Take 100 people. Train them for 4 years. 25 build up to and maintain 50mow. 25 build up to and maintan 100mow, 25 build up to and maintain 150mpw, 25 build up to and maintain 200mpw. Finally add another 25 that do no running at all

Measure Vo2max, RE, time to exhaustion at 75% Vo2max, and finally 5k time trial before, yearly, and at the end. Also record injury rates.

Out of 100 randomly selected people I will be suprised if 10 make it 4 years and they will be mostly from the 50 group.

The % of the population that can build up to and maintain 200mpw without injury is likely around .000001%. I work with people who run and workout everyday and 30mpw would make their joints and shins scream.

Given that successful runners are already 1% ers I would guess that 1 out of 1000 of these have the durability to go up to 200.

Alan

Bedford ran 200 mpw. I suspect he experimented with higher mileage before he got his first long-term injury.He probably didn't count his mileage anyway.

"I ran 200 miles a week and drank three to four pints every night, and that was the same for every runner I knew.” So says Dave Bedford, Britain’s legendary distance runner from the 1970s and now race director of the London Marathon, one of the biggest races in the world. “Those beers helped me relax, and I believed that I was running so much that I must be burning it all off anyway.

What? Really? I don't know anybody who runs everyday who would have trouble handling 30 mpw.

Anyone should be able to handle 50 mpw if they work their way up to it, and serious runners should be able to do 80 mpw as a matter of course.

light years ago I had a college teammate who ran 3 200+ weeks, 3 years @ 7286, 7288 and 8060 mi. I'm thinkin he was an elite for that era (2:15.4x - AAU champion)+ several 2-3-4 ..? 2:17 efforts. We also had at least 2 other guys who ran big miles 140 ~ 3 yrs over 6,000, (one of whom ran 2:17) per and possibly 2 others@140 * low 2:20s - just don't have anything from them that documents such. Even I ran 168 in a week but found my body just couldn't handle a steady diet of that - I did end up with about 120+/-. For me, on my team, I was on the far left of the mileage per week bell curve. I don't think I was all that unusual as I knew of guys in our general geographic that were doin similar - not all but a goodly number.

Remember this is before the huge leap in the 80s that saw marathons having 50-60 -??? breaking 2:20 in a single race (Malmo would know which one - maybe some others here do as well). I don't know what their mileage was, but I know a few - big mileage producing big results. To say that one should NEVER run big mileage is setting themselves up for excusing themselves from the serious dialogue.

big mileage is not a new phenomena although Levins is certainly impressive. The risk it seems has to do with injury or exceptional fatigue.

one race (NYC I think) 63rd place 2:19.51

another one 2:18.50 33rd place

[quote]runningart2004 wrote:

To do that experiment Alan, you would have to have similar training experiences in the background as well as ensure they are all getting the same recovery, nutrition, etc. It would be an interesting thing to examine, but we might even have a natural experiment like this going on in Japanese society already. I might simply ask for the training logs and nutrition logs of some HS, College, and Corporate teams over there. In any case, I am not arguing for mega mileage in the 200 range. If one could build up to 120-150 with break weeks that seems big enough to get optimal results. For mere mortals I think 60-100 is solid, but I suspect that if the training was progressive and there was good focus on recover as well, as one got higher the results would be better. Personally, I have never run well unless I am in the 70-90 range and as my mileage has gotten higher than this life got in the way. I think you might be right about the 50 mpw being the most common for simply randomly choosing some people, but that might speak more to their enthusiasm about doing it and less about the training benefits of increased mileage.

Fullerton, right?

How did these people running such high mileage get stress fractures???

Cytochrome carriers wrote:

Any of you that have been in and around exercise physiologist's know that the paper theory and premise they explain and work on is just that, theory. Lab treadmill tests, blood tests , graphs and picking the odd exceptional athlete as absolutes does not translate to real life practicality. Whats so convincing on paper, a thesis or in a power point presentation, most times doesn't not translate to the athlete. Its takes an astute coach to translate all the various components to assemble the most beneficial training program.

Right. You get a much better sample from "10-20 runners someone has trained with," because they do not include middle aged women who started running to lose weight and such. They may vary in talent levels, but they are all committed. And durability is a matter of commitment, not talent.

So if 10-20 runners someone has trained with can all handle and benefit from high mileage, then any committed runner could do the same. If you don't benefit from a high mileage, that simply means you are not committed enough.

You're so f-ing stupid, it's unbelieveable. You benefit only if you're genetically programmed to have the capacity to do so. Bone strength, leg shape, muscle fiber type and muscle composition, and total lung volume capacity are just some of the variables that control whether or how much one benefits from running mileage of various amounts. Those are just anatomical examples; there are far more physiological factors that control benefits.

Thank You. Finally, someone on here speaks logic that is beyond common sense! By the way, I 100% agree with the exercise physiologist from the article. Running 190 mpw for a college student is about as smart as taking a piss into a wind storm. You guys all know it. That is why 99.9% of ALL college runners do NOT run that much. These are Student-Athletes, with student coming first.

ThxYou wrote:

Thank You. Finally, someone on here speaks logic that is beyond common sense! By the way, I 100% agree with the exercise physiologist from the article. Running 190 mpw for a college student is about as smart as taking a piss into a wind storm. You guys all know it. That is why 99.9% of ALL college runners do NOT run that much. These are Student-Athletes, with student coming first.

Haha nerd alert