Why do runners train so much and race so little

jamin wrote:

you only need one wrote:http://www.uwb.edu/5krun

$30

15:52 won last year

Can you tempo that fast?

Are you doing it? Maybe I will sign up.

I just mapped it. I'm 2,370 miles and 35 hours by car away. If I leave now, I should have plenty of time to get there before the race.

I did have a classmate that lived a few years on Bainbridge Island. I visited about 20 years ago.

If you race you can't start a "what's my 5k-time from this workout" thread.

justthefacts wrote:

Train,Train, get injured. Train,Train, get injured. Wait until next year.

Ha, great post. Story of my life. (At least recently.)

Sometimes after training for a while I start scrambling to get a race in because I want to "use my fitness" before I inevitably get hurt again and have to start over. Running is just great.

Lots of races in the UK, and plenty of 'club' runners who compete ~30 times a year or more. This guy takes the biscuit I think! http://www.thepowerof10.info/athletes/profile.aspx?athleteid=3369

Emily Post here. Let's get together.

Now at Miss Porter's School, Avon, Conn.

It's not racing too much that gets you, it's training too much. At least that is how I currently see it.

But as a poster above said most runners are too set in their training ways: Long runs on weekends, speed work during the week and race every 12-16 weeks.

Imagine how much fun football, baseball, LAX, volleyball, etc., heck even sex, would be if you practiced year round but only played a real game 3-4 times a year.

HRE wrote:

I think for most pros the prime sources of money are their shoe contracts and in some cases appearance money. The injury thing is a red herring. Guys like Rodgers, Benji Durden, Ron Hill, Ron Clarke, raced loads and were fine. Shorter was fragile and had lots of problems late in his career. George Young once said something along the lines of you can talk all you want about speed work and hard training but there is no better preparation for racing than racing.

And recreational runners? In college we'd race about a dozen times during cross country season and most of us were faster at the end than we were at the start.

I agree with this somewhat but once he was in his 30s Ron Hill started to have quite a lot of bad injuries that ruined his chances in international competitions. It may have been in part due to his training as well as his racing though he did mention taking a pain killing injection in his foot so that he could run a cross country race which he felt made his injury a lot worse after the race.

For many amateur runners, racing involves a fair amount of traveling, and once you have a full time job and young family it is difficult to be away every weekend running races. Rightly or wrongly, I think that very few families in western society today would accept that. In this situation, you have to be more selective with your targets.

In contrast, training does not involve the same time commitment; you can just get out of the door and do a tough workout within an hour or two without much impact on family life.

Another factor I think is the psychological make up of an individual athelte. For some racing is fairly intense emotionally and traveling and running every weekend would lead to burn out. You could say that someone like Roger Bannister was like this. Others like the examples you cited did not seem to be overly stressed by racing a lot.

I don't understand this statement. How many people get injured during the actual race?! I would suspect it's wayyyyy less than the amount of people who get injured during training. Most people get hurt during training, so let's NOT race because they could get hurt racing, even though almost no one gets injured during the actual race? Makes no sense to me.You don't have to taper and rest for every single race people! You treat your non priority races as workouts. I race frequently because it's fun and I'd rather do a race then some boring ass interval session by myself at the local high school.

Precious Roy wrote:

For the pros, all the good money is concentrated in a few big events--world marathon majors, diamond league, Nationals, WCs and Olympics. If you are racing between these events, you are wasting your time and risking injury. The prize money at lesser events does not compare to the big event's prize money, appearance fees and sponsor cash.

For the amateurs, most are chasing PRs instead of wins. If you race all the time, you plateau and do not see much improvement. It is more rewarding to woodshed for a few months and then take a shot at a pr.[quote]HRE wrote:

Jo Jo beans wrote: Why do runners train so much and race so little? Isn't the point of training so you can race and compete, etc?

This is a particular problem in the college ranks. Back in "the good ol' days" our college cross country team raced nearly every weekend from early September until late November, with the following exceptions:

1. Weekend off before the conference championship meet.

2. Weekend off before the NCAA regional district meet.

3. Weekend off before the NCAA championship meet.

When I first began seeing this trend of extensive training and sparse racing, I assumed it had something to do with the programs' budget constraints. What I eventually learned was that the runners were simply too soft and - let's be honest - too cowardly to race more frequently. Kids these days are too soft to race often and simply train through the early races, and they're too scared to risk failure in an early race and won't compete unless they're in near-peak condition.

Even sadder, this trend is starting to trickle down to the high school level. Teams that have great strength and depth will often "rest" their best runners in the sectional and regional rounds of the state meet series, presumably to keep their studs fresh for the semi-state and state meets. Really?! They're HS kids with plenty of energy. Have some balls, get out there and race, and have some FUN for crying out loud!

Kids would do themselves a favor by backing off all the high mileage crap (read: junk mileage) and focusing more on quality training. Included in the latter could be all the races they're currently missing by being pansies.

That is all.

Hill ran 2:13 when he was 36. The next year he came up one spot short of making the British Olympic team By then he'd been an internationalist for over a decade. Everyone's performances start to slip with the passage of time. And yes, Hill had injuries now and again. Rodgers too, you may recall, ran very poorly at Montreal because of an injury. Getting injured is part of the sport and you can injure yourself training as well as by racing. Specifically, in the case of Ron's foot injury, he probably would have been better off not having that injection and maybe skipping that one race but that's one incident in a career of well over half a century of racing almost weekly.

I do agree that even a 5k race sometimes can involve more time commitment that a 90 minute run in many cases and you don't have to fork out a $20 or more entry fee for that 90 minute run. But there are also locations where races are as thick as flies on a piece of something nasty on a hot summer day. And if running is your recreation spending a couple hours a week traveling to and running a race with a $20-$40 entry fee is not very different from a golfer, bowler, or tennis player having a weekly match or game.

I also think it's a pretty good question.

When I look back on my prime running years, I wish I raced more.

Real runners are insecure selfish and antisocial loners and can't stand the couple of real runners who are happy to be around others and especially all the happy hobby joggers at most races now.

Marcus O'Sullivan has a Heart Rate/Threshold video lecture out there talking about the "engine" of a runner and how the tank has three leaks:

1) Speed work

2) Racing

3) Time off from running.

Clyde Hart said something similar but used a piggy bank as the engine.

When you have big names like these teaching conservatism it's no wonder many other lower level coaches follow their lead and teach anti-racing.

"The point is that competing very frequently is not conducive to competing well when it matters."

I'm sure that some will counter that he was doped, but Lasse Viren ran something like 60 races a year when we won the Olympics (don't know if this was 72 or 76).. He ran pretty well when it counted. Of course, he was not tapering and these races were just another form of training (i.e he'd run some outta the way 1500 in Finland or a 3k over in Sweeden, or run the San Blas 20k while training in South America). He'd sometimes race 2-3 times a week.

El Guerrouj raced a lot as well.

As did Haile Geb.

Steve Scott

It is true that you need to balance it.

They would race a lot in racing season but put blocks of training together with no races.

You must train the cardiac muscle for optimal performance, while also providing time for its secondary pursuit...which is to fall in love.

It is just a product of the system. If college football teams could play there starters one game in September to get a qualifying mark for a bowl game you bet that they would play scrubs the rest of the year to have their starters practice more.

No they wouldn't. Do you think 100,000 people are going to turn out to watch guys who are second and third on the depth chart play a whole game? Do you think TV and cable networks would fork out hundreds of millions of dollars to televise something like that?

They don't want their racing to interfere with their training.