Are humans undertraining in the marathons/ultras due to physical limitations?

To add to the last sentence - how much are humans limited in these events, and what do you think the limitations be if we could train like mile-10k guys in terms of distance?

Take a step back and look at your question. You’re essentially asking, “If there were no limits, what would the limits be?” It’s a question that fundamentally doesn’t make sense. People can’t practically run 200 miles every day. Asking how fast they would run if they could doesn’t lead to any answer.

To rephrase the question in the OP my question would instead be:

Given that the human physiology seems unable to take more than 120 mpw of running, why aren't runners doing water jogging/cycling or other things to increase total aerobic training?

The Japanese have trained 25-30 miles/day for extended periods with sometimes good effect. Rupp trains 120-ish/week plus many hours on the underwater treadmill.

Kipchoge seems to be the best on 120-140 mpw.

If more mileage was always better, more milers would be doing 120 mile weeks.

The diminishing returns arent just because of fatigue, they also have to do with how your body responds to a given stimulus. A given stimulus might have more of an adaptation as the length of stimulus increases, but then at a certain point just stop, even if your body can handle more of that stimulus comfortably.

There are a lot of complicates processes involved in distance training, but to very much overly simplify things:

- the more time you spend at a high heart rate, the more your RBCs hit each other and the vessel walls and become damaged and prematurely die. This means you could feel perfectly able to run more mileage, but the increased stimulus that generates more RBC production could actually become neutral (equilibrium) or a net negative (until you reach a lower equilibrium).

- endurance training increases intramuscular stores. It is entirely possible to reach "full" on these stores and not possibly increase this, even with more endurance training.

- all these changes are driven by complex interactions of hormones. Some of these hormones may reach full capacity of the tissues that produce them with a moderate amount of training and nothing non pathological can increase some of these tissues within your body. More training means no additional synthesis, so it becomes the limiting factor in that part of the adaptation.

So even if fatigue wasnt a limit, you might still find a practical limit to mileage for ultras near where most top ultra runners currently train.

Of course, some ultra runners might already be training past their optimum and actually making themselves "slower" by running 200 mpw. However, this might still be their overall best strategy, since part of training is the mental side. Grinding out 200 mpw will seriously mentally burnout some runners, but others come out mentally bullet proof, able to just grind through any brutal race to their limit.

Given that the human physiology seems unable to take more than 120 mpw of running,

you have provided no evidence that this assumption is correct.

what makes you think the human body is not capable of running 120 miles per week?

cheers.

We are underachieving due to mental limitations.

Ultra Marathon?

Half decent trolling, but needs more controversy--you want to channel your trolling into a topic with some controversy to really get somewhere.

ruppfanboi wrote:

Think about it, for a miler-10k runner you will often equal or sometimes double (way more if you're a miler/3k guy) the distance of your event daily, and will often run the distance equivalent of your race in workouts at race pace. You obviously don't see any guys running 52 or 200 miles a day, it would be impossible. Hell, many pro marathoners barely hit 25 miles for an average long run. Are our bodies limiting our potential in these events by a significant amount?

what an empty question/statement. you must be 15 yo, right?

I like the idea I read somewhere that you can only "race" a distance that is 3 times your average daily mileage. So to race 27 miles you need to average 9 miles per day or 63 miles per week. Less than that and you are death-marching or at least plodding somewhere on the course. Take the Hal Higdon (much love to Hal) beginner marathon plan, the average daily mileage therein and observe the plodding, marching. Under the 3 times daily theory, how long you should hold that average pre-race, I don't know, but I would guess the order of finish would correlate nicely with a plot of the 100 day moving average of daily miles of the finishers.

So, in the ultra world, to race a 100 and not death-march, plod it, the 3 times daily principle would require 33 miles per day average or 231 miles. I have never seen a 100 mile ultra runner not plod it at some point. The implication then might be that doing a race, beyond human "racing" limits is to see who can endure the best in spite of the excess.

It's not that humans are under-training in the marathon, it's more that the Marathon is the race that it is due to humans' physical limitations, and why marathoners generally don't race more than two of them a year.

Give it a try and let us know how it works out and demonstrate how well one can perform. Start with 50 miles per day. Check back in after a month and let us know how it goes.

I've got a question too actually!

If humans were better at running would they be better at running?

So 2 miles a week for a 1500m runner. Ok.

Running is more strenous for the body than most other endurance sports because the weight is unsupported (unlike in cycling, rowing, swimming etc.) and there is no option to glide to save energy and also reduce stress on joints (like in Xcountry skiing or skating). Most other endurance athletes can and do train more hours than runners and there are runners who have used aquajogging or cycling not only when injured. But of course one has to run to keep the body in running shape, so this has limits.

If you are training at or beyond your physical limitations you cannot be under training...

Yes Columbo, physical limitations DO put limits on the training of humans.

They say that we only use 50% of our brains....

I like to think we only use 50% of our hearts.

so that would be a limiting factor.