60mpw In 3 Months

1. Don't put a specific number on things. 60 is a nice number, but why 60? Why not 55 or 59 or 66?

2. Don't put a timeline on your increase. Take it day by day and week by week.

3. Start increasing some runs a mile or two at a time. Looking at your week you could easily bump your long run up to 11 or 12 and hold there for a bit. Bump up one mid-week easy day to 7. Hold for a while. Add an extra mile to your tempo or interval day warmup. Add another mile to the long run. Hold for a while. make another easy day 7. Etc.

Honestly, you can do a lot in 3 months time with slow, steady changes. Just take your time. I do think 60 on 6 days a week is mostly doable. You might need to double on that unless your long run gets pretty long or one of your mid-week runs gets medium long. If you wanted to stay in singles I could easily see you getting all your mid-week runs to around 8 (maybe 9 miles) and a long run of 14 or 15 miles. That would give you 54 to 60 miles a week.

Thanks for the reply. That’s some pretty solid advice there and I was thinking about ditching the GPS and running with my non-GPS watch for a while. Just going by feel and not worrying about the pace seems like a good option. Thoughts?

That could totally work. I could personally never do it because I'm something of a data junkie and I love looking over all my stats after I get back from a run. So if you can live without the stats, ditch the GPS. If not, consider changing the settings on your watch so you only know how much time you've been running.

I don't know about all watches, but my Garmin has a million options to put on four different screens. But I can also set up one screen and just put running time (I also put HR, to make sure I'm going easy), and that's it. No beeps or buzzes at a mile, and sometimes I get home and see I ran 9.9 miles and I'm weirdly bummed, because if I had a distance screen available I would have checked and surely gone .1 miles more. But that stuff gets silly, and the point of less info is to just run.

Have fun with your buildup. Feel things out and enjoy the increased fitness that comes with more aerobic miles.

I absolutely love analyzing all the stats but I feel like it’s in my best interest to run by effort. We’ll see how long I can stay away from the GPS. Great advice and I’ll be sure to post after the buildup.

Bump

bump

UPDATE

For anyone who cares, I’ve finished building my base and reached my peak mileage (62) last week. It was actually easier than I thought because I didn’t do ANY workouts during base building; only some strides every now and then. The progression went like this:

35 50 56 62

I know. Amazing right? I managed to keep my eyes off the stats for almost every run. I went only by effort and ran on hilly/soft terrain on all of my runs. Instead of mileage, I went by time. I wasn’t focused on pace at all, so I was only running 9:00/mile for the most part.

Now that the mileage is taken care of, I can slowly add workouts in. After my racing season is over I’ll post again. Until then...

-Hudsonthin

**Started the mileage buildup the second week in April and finished 3 times faster than I planned