Are there any low mileage men's/women's college teams these days?

My high school program was pretty low mileage. We never ran more than 30mpw and our yearly 'long run' was 6 miles on a Monday in the middle of the season. We still had 5 guys under 17:30 though. I don't think low mileage high school programs are a bad thing. I learned a lot from those experiences.

My college program was low mileage. This was a very low-level D1 program. I mean, yesterday in the Week that Was, they were featured as one of the D1 schools that took last in both the men's and women's races. The summer before freshman year, my coach had me run up to 40mpw, and then bumped me up to 50 when the season started. If someone were to follow the coach's daily mileage without deviating from it, you'd end up in the 60s for mpw and maybe as high as 70 sometimes during XC or 10k training during track. The longest runs were 12-13 miles. Some of us started putting in extra mileage and occasionally changed workouts because our coach wouldn't pay attention. We'd be doing repeats on the track and we would literally change our distances, number of reps, and rest, and he wouldn't even notice. You may think I'm making this up, but this was literally our D1 program. We tried so hard to change the program, and by my senior year he let started letting me do my own training, 70-90mpw, saying "you know what you're doing". Bad teams are bad for reason.

This improvement was after high school, while running 65-85mpw for a few years (I ran 35mpw in high school). I didn’t include high school improvements because they were probably influenced by physical developments during puberty and growth. I was also up to 10 pounds heavier in high school and did much more weightlifting, so I don’t think that strength could be blamed for the improvements. I guess it could be argued that I’d be faster if I had done sprint training instead of mileage, but I already admitted that. Mileage didn’t ruin my speed by any means though.

Pretty much every US college team is low mileage. That's why we have essentially no presence in the 1/2 marathon and above.

UNM doesn't run very much, I'd be surprised if any of the guys consistently ran more than 80 mpw and the women probably 50-70.

A runner can run high mileage in the fall but can reduce it in the spring for shorter distances and should be olay.

Maybe Clayton Murphy isn't a fair real life example but he was a guy who could run 55 MPW during the fall and still run 46 seconds a couple months later. Not that 55 MPW is high mileage but I don't think mileage ruins speed. As someone mentioned, it may be counterproductive for a time because of loss of enzymatic and neuromuscular efficiency, but it can be fairly quickly brought back.

Mack fat wrote:

Nocturnal running wrote:

No guys need to be running 120 and girls need to run 90

No they don't. Galen rupp only does 110

+ another 20-30 on the underwater treadmill

Galen Rupp is anywhere from 110 to 140

No galen rupp runs 50 miles a day. He's training for an ultra

Eilish mcclogan a 14 minute 5k runner only runs 45 miles per week

Laura Muir also a 14 minute 5k runner only runs 40 miles per week

Basically quality and consistency will always beat quantity, don't listen to these guys who ran 120 miles a weeks just to run high 14s for 5k. I know a guy who ran 14:35 off 50 miles a week, 3 quality sessions the rest easy/steady paced. It took him 7 years to get there though.

I used to run faster wrote:

If I stated my school, one may look up XC results and give a less than favorable response. My coach had a low mileage cross training philosophy. He viewed XC as merely training for spring t&f. Coach wasn't going to have sub-48 400m men who were 800m specialists ruin their speed running 120 miles a week.

Sub 48 guys should not be running XC

hmm-callingyouout wrote:

I used to run faster wrote:

If I stated my school, one may look up XC results and give a less than favorable response. My coach had a low mileage cross training philosophy. He viewed XC as merely training for spring t&f. Coach wasn't going to have sub-48 400m men who were 800m specialists ruin their speed running 120 miles a week.

Sub 48 guys should not be running XC

Running XC ruined Coe and Ovett.

Yes but they aren't good

Duymaanis Heartbringer wrote:

hmm-callingyouout wrote:

Sub 48 guys should not be running XC

Running XC ruined Coe and Ovett.

I am not the OP, but I seem to be in the crosshairs on this thread. Did you read, Better Training for Distance Runners by Peter Coe & David Martin, PhD.? If so, you would know that Peter Coe got Seb away from high mileage training somewhere around middle school age. I never said my college coach canceled fall XC. I stated my college coach was not a high mileage advocate.

I used to run faster wrote:

Duymaanis Heartbringer wrote:

Running XC ruined Coe and Ovett.

I am not the OP, but I seem to be in the crosshairs on this thread. Did you read, Better Training for Distance Runners by Peter Coe & David Martin, PhD.? If so, you would know that Peter Coe got Seb away from high mileage training somewhere around middle school age. I never said my college coach canceled fall XC. I stated my college coach was not a high mileage advocate.

Yes, I've read Coe & Martin, as well as a few other books. I was responding not to you, but to hmm-callingyouout.

My coach is retarded so we seldom go over 45 miles a week. We do two speed workouts a week and then the meets on Saturday. We are training for 8Ks.......

Laura Muir only runs 40 miles a week?

This sounds like me and my friends during high school.

He wanted us to run 25-30mpw all season.

In the end we changed the mileage and the workouts and he could care less. It was a paycheck to him, nothing more.

By my sophomore year he let the varsity team do what we wanted and hired an assistant coach.

We ended up running 40-50mpw freshman and sophomore year. Then during sophomore track we ran 50-60. And junior year we wan 60-70. And during senior year we ran a few 80 mile weeks.

corticosteroid face wrote:

Laura Muir only runs 40 miles a week?

I bet she runs closer to 50-60mpw