Trick question: how much mileage did your HS coach assign his athletes?

The problem is, some coaches do discourage extra stuff, plus if we were doing a workout, we generally had to do warm up and cooldown with the team. I could talk my coach into letting me run a mile or 2 more, but that was about it usually and somedays it had to be his way. We ran about 20-30 a week in season usually.

about 40 or so. It worked well for us.

Yeah- when I was in high school, we ran about 40 miles per week. In the past couple years he has really changed his running philosophy and now the top guys usually will get up to 60 miles a week and race every other week, which is a good idea in my opinion

Every Monday at practice we were told what the total for the week would be and if we needed to do any extra 40min runs on our own before school.

I did 35 miles tops. We did more quality in highschool whether it be workouts in meets or two track days a week, with our long run being 10 at its longest. I ran 4:32 in the mile my junior year. But never got any faster in highschol. maybe more mileage would have helped...

No one did the same mileage. It was assigned based upon how much you had run up to that point. So first year athletes (regardless of age) usually ran between a 1000 and 1500 mile year. We were then bumped to ~2000 miles for the second year, 2500 for the third and 3000 for the fourth. The mileage was periodized from summer to xc to winter to pretrack to track, with summer and winter beign about 23-24% of the year, xc 20%, pretrack about 18% and track around 15%.

I should note that the team was more or less panned into two groups: year round athletes and seasonal athletes. There would be seperate plans (although some workouts would be shared) for runners that ran with the coach/team 50 weeks per year, versus those that would only commit to in-season running.

If I recall correctly (1968-1972) it was 60-70MPW but the proviso was that you (from the best of my memory) "should run at 6:30-7 minutes a mile, otherwise you should reconsider going out, or should know that you will probably run JV".

This was in the day of the true minimalist shoes:

Adidas SL-72s, some Adidas that were more like today's bowling shoes, Onituska Tiger Marathons and the early NIKE models that were copies of the Onitsuka Tiger models.

The only injuries were the odd muscle pull or sprain or perhaps a hurler would crash into a hurdle and get cut up some or maybe one of the guys might get spiked in the 440, 880 or mile. I never recall PF or achilles issues back then.

Ahhhh, youth.

15 miles, maybe. It was all intervals, same speed for everyone, ran with the sprinters. All aerobic stuff was done on our own. Our coach sucked.

How is that a trick question? Anyway, depending on where I was in the season, 40-60. My coaches had me doing morning runs 3-4 times per week my senior year. I had scheduled break times throughout the year, but during summer and winter breaks I had scheduled miles to run. It was a little different for the athletes who didn't run post/late-season competition. I know the coaches told everyone they had to run over breaks, but it was less or they just didn't do it. -- kk

~ 40mpw

It's a trick question in that the discussion here has always been about how many miles you ran in HS, as opposed to how many the coach assigned. It would seem that you're one of the few whose coach actually looked beyond assigning workouts M-F in season.

A recent article in our local paper quoted a number of HS and youth coaches at lower numbers than I know their athletes run. Seems like they were distinguishing between what they would recommend as a general rule at least publicly rather than purposely downplaying the totals. Or maybe they were purposely unaware of the extra sessions the athletes took on themselves, as was me and my teammates' HS experience.

You've got to plan year round.

35-40 with at least one day of reps. during xc, and hill reps. after a 5-6 miler. Long run was 9 miles.

Our program was very solid, but the problems we had were: 1. We raced waaaay too much. 2. We pushed it every single day. Every day was like a race. Being the number one guy if someone ran ahead of me on any given day or sometimes even if they were close, I was hammered about "what was wrong with you today?" Really undue stress for a kid that was already near obsesive with his running.

I did 30/week max, that was usually 6 days a week, unless we didn't have a Saturday meet, in which I'd take both days off. It seems like I'd be dead by the end of the season. The coaches never encouraged running on our own. The longest I ran before my senior year was like 7 miles. Once. Everything else was like 4-5 miles. And I remember wanting to run a Thanksgiving day race and my coach freaked!

During the summer before senior year, I went to a running camp at Dartmouth and learned how much more others were running. Some kids were running close to 70 a week. We 63 miles that week at camp!!! After that experience, I took it upon myself to do more on my own. We'd run practice and I'd do a little extra, and I'd run weekends, ect. I started doing about 40-45/week. I never won a state championship or anything but took my mile from 4:47 to 4:36 junior to senior year.