An Intelligent Discussion on Mileage Buildup

Super curious on this as I'm coming back from a rather long achilles injury and am building up slowly. At the moment I have opted for the painfully slow and much maligned 10% rule. I myself have poo pooed it many times. But I've never actually done it. So here I am putting it the test. Things are definitely slow right now, but if I chose to stretch it out I'd hit 200 miles per week next spring. That's not too shabby. And in no way will I do that.

Right now my mileage is still ridiculously low (I won't even hit 20 this week), but my injured leg does not feel the same as my uninjured leg, so I'm fine with that.

What I like so far is that I have a mileage bank going into the week and I basically see myself as 'spending' that in a way that feels right and is hopefully smart. Obviously that same thought could apply to other mileage building options as well. And I am not wedded to this goal by any means, but at the moment I'm thinking of seeing it through the end of the year and reassessing. My only goal right now is to be able to keep running. Injuries suck.

I stayed mostly injury free when I started back (some niggles nothing major) doing this ..

started jogging at 205 lbs in jan 2016

Jan 0-20 mpw

Feb 30mpw

March to April 40mpw

May first 50mile week

June - sept averaged around 50mpw building up the body

October 60

November hit 70

December hit 80

Jan into feb had an almost 400mile month. High of 101. By then I was 155ish lbs.

Key to me was from Jan to October I never wore a watch and never timed a run. First timed run was a 5k in October.

I've done the Jack Daniel's plan and got up to about 90 mpw before I got injured. I think I started getting too agressive with the mileage increases, I didn't follow the 1 mile per day rule, after I got passed 50 miles per week which may have led to me getting injured 90 miles per week.

Are we discussing building back to a volume that were able to handle in a previous season, coming back after an injury or building to a higher volume than we've ever previously hit? These are all different things.

I have stopped running and re-started several times, and have experimented with both aggressive/patient approaches, and have found a few things to work well over the years. I am in my late 40s, for age reference, and when fit I am a 17:0x, 35:20 runner. I have been running for about 20 years.

1. Most important: ignore how slow you are running if you are trying to build back up in a hurry. I believe you can build up fairly aggressively if you leave the ego and watch at home and run quite slowly at first. I can get to 70 miles a week in a fairly short time if I run slowly and even more slowly if I'm having a more tired than usual day.

2. Increases work better for me when I build to a new mileage one week and hold it for the next week, then increase again. In other words something like this - 40, 40, 50, 50, 60, 60 - is better than this - 40, 44, 48, 52, 56, 60.

3. Easy weeks are important, but I don't think they have to be every 3-4 weeks. I do quite well with 5 weeks of buildup followed by an easy 6th week. However, when I do reach the easy week, it is aggressively easy. As in, about 3/5 of the highest week in the most recent buildup (which should be the final week). So if I build up to 60 miles in the first round, I will take a week in the high 30s as the easy week. I do not want ANY residual soreness to linger when I resume training, particularly if I'm being a little aggressive (which my buildup is, particularly for my age - almost 50).

4. When I do resume, I start up with whatever the second-highest mileage was in the buildup and go from there, but move up to the next mileage level the immediate following week rather than holding on for the customary two weeks. In other words, if my buildup was 40, 40, 60, 60, 70, and then the easy week was 36, I will resume with 50, 60, 60, 70, 70, and then take an easy week of 3/5 again (42). Then I continue.

So here's an 18 week schedule, starting from 40 miles:

40, 40, 50, 50, 60, 36

50, 60, 60, 70, 70, 42

60, 70, 70, 80, 80, 48

If you continued for another 6 weeks:

70, 80, 80, 90, 90, 54

This has worked for me in the past. I do get pretty tired in weeks 4 and 5 each 6-week cycle, but the very easy 6th week helps reset my running each time and I am ready to resume the following week. Again, it works if you ignore the watch and run by feel. If in week 5 you have a 10 miler planned and you end up having to run 9 minute miles because you're tired, do it. Don't try to speed up because you are used to a faster easy pace.

5. During this buildup all runs are easy-paced except for on 6-8 mile LT run weekly and every two weeks I do 16x200min a decent, but not even close to flat-out pace, to help with turnover and help my legs not completely forget what it's like to run faster paces. This workout isn't too hard - I'm a 17:0x guy and I'm running the first eight 200s in around 40 seconds and the final 8 in about 36. It should feel refreshing with no strain.

6. Lastly, during this build up, I run no doubles. I've tried in the past and I progress faster if all done in singles. The caveat is that I've never progressed further than around 85 miles/week. Perhaps I would feel differently about doubles if I took the mileage further.

I prefer malmo's plan: "Run as much as you can" (freely interpreted).

You'll run too much a few times and too little other times but after a few build-ups you'll get it right if you learn to listen to your body instead of applying some scheme you found on the Internet.

lollerama wrote:

5. During this buildup all runs are easy-paced except for on 6-8 mile LT run weekly and every two weeks I do 16x200min

Sorry for the typo - should obviously read: 16x200m, not 200min (that would be pretty intense)

This is my question as well because when I had a higher mileage plan over the summer, it seemed to get me in shape but didn't do much for the end of the season (ran much slower than years past). I'd like to reach 60mpw again over the winter, but I don't know how I should build or if high mileage even works that well.

3hr-marathoner wrote:

Are we discussing building back to a volume that were able to handle in a previous season, coming back after an injury or building to a higher volume than we've ever previously hit? These are all different things.

Building to a higher volume than previously hit. There are a lot of theories out there on mileage build-up, it seems like at this point we should have the best way figured out. It has always been something I've tinkered with throughout my training with mixed results. I've sometimes gotten injured in really slow build-ups and sometimes I've stayed healthy in really fast build-ups. I've been running competitively for almost 20 years and I have still not figured out a fool proof method to building mileage. Like any other part of training I think we should know the "why" behind the way we build up mileage. I like hearing others experiences with this, maybe there is a good common denominator out there that gives the best chance of a fast build-up that is injury free.

bump

At what mileage does bone remodeling occur?

I found this to be an interesting read:

http://www.teamoregon.com/publication/online/hardeas.html

jtface wrote:

I found this to be an interesting read:

http://www.teamoregon.com/publication/online/hardeas.html

I just read this, and it doesn't seem like anything that most runners wouldn't already fully know intuitively.

(I don't in any way mean this as a 'jerk' comment - I know sometimes text comes across in unintended ways!)

lollerama wrote:

I just read this, and it doesn't seem like anything that most runners wouldn't already fully know intuitively.

(I don't in any way mean this as a 'jerk' comment - I know sometimes text comes across in unintended ways!)

That's cool! I was mostly interested in their perception of what hard and easy days meant. Particularly in relation to 'easy' mileage during base building. The percentages for the days are kinda neat if you're into percentages! :-)

Maybe a better way is for everyone to list your build-up experiences.

Here are a couple of mine.

One of my biggest buildups, consisted of mostly easy mileage, nothing anaerobic:

22

34

36

37

45

50

50

50

61

62

62

54

65

73

73

74

82 - Started really pushing the pace of my long runs

40

85

87 - Added a tempo this week and pushed the long run

Ended with a stress reaction in foot.

Another time after about 5 months off, went pretty easy for the first 8 weeks, then added a tempo and intervals the last 5 weeks:

17

26

29

26

34

35

42

39

44

45 - Started picking up the intensity this week and the weeks following

42

50

48

Ended up with a knee injury that put me out for a few months. At the time I was very into streak running so I didn't take 1 day off during this entire stretch which probably contributed to getting injured.

I have had several other build-ups than these two and the common denominator for me seems to be when I start adding intensity I am much more likely to get injured, no matter what the mileage is or how fast I build up. Does anyone else share this experience? Maybe it would be better to spend 10 weeks going from 0 to 80 then cut back the mileage 30% once I start adding intensity. The other option is to add intensity from the very beginning, but being a big lydiard guy I don't touch intervals until about 8 to 10 weeks out from a key race.

bump

I had a discussion with Gary Towne of Chico State a few years back. Basically for him, it's an increase of 10mpw per year. So if a kid came out of high school at 60mpw, he'd be at 70 as a frosh, 80 as a soph.......

We didn't really go into how he approached ramping back up from a layoff, but overall, the concept makes a lot of sense to me. I'm going to try to give my hs kids a little more autonomy over in-season mileage this spring and have them try to figure out their weekly mileage based on what they did this year in cross (I keep a spreadsheet of everyone's weekly mileage, so the kids can easily compare where they were in cross then try to go (on average) 5mpw better, then after track, building up for cross, they can try to go 5mpw better than track.......

As far as building back up from an injury or a planned layoff, I personally believe that adding in doubles early in the process (even at relatively low mileage) is a key component of safely ramping back up. From my experience, my athletes that have added doubles during the summer seem to stay more injury free during the fall than those who try to do everything in singles (even if the total summer mileage is close to the same.).

Where we really run into trouble is the transition from the relatively easy summer base period, where the kids mostly run in the morning or evening to the beginning of our actual CIF sanctioned season (which begins the 2nd Monday in August. Just transitioning to running in the heat of the Central Valley of CA (often over 100 degrees at practice time) seems to zap their energy and stymie recovery. I've played around with lots of different strategies to try and deal with this issue, but none have been really spectacularly successful.

I wish I could saybhat I took a more scientific approach to this, but as with most things running, the right approach for each person is going to be a little different and will be a mix of art and science.

My personal approach has probably been closest to Gary's 10 mile approach, but I've done that per rraining cycle rather than per year, which turns out to be a little more frequent increases in volume.

Age, injuries, fatigue, weather, etc. all impact that progression, but from cycle to cycle and within each cycle.

Within cycles, I tend to go up 5-10 miles per week. Whenever I increase volume for a week, I try to decrease intensity for that week.

I came across this article on down weeks by runners connect. I appreciate how well researched it was compared to a lot of the other mileage build up advice that I've found.

https://runnersconnect.net/down-weeks-why/

I think my next build-up will be a more aggressive version of the Galloway plan. Instead of increasing by only 5 miles every 4 week block, I'm going to try to increase it by 10 to 15 miles. The goal is to build up mileage as efficiently as possible.