Maximum mileage for runners who do one session a day?

I didn't race much when I was doing daily 20s. Just intramural cross country and whatever else was on campus - maybe two races the entire year?

When I do race, I mostly don't worry about how much I do the day before if it's in the range of my daily runs. Keep in mind I'm thinking of races well under an hour. I'm not really a longer distance guy despite my high mileage habit. I once ran a really poor 10K road race. I was not training seriously (no hard runs) at the time, but was pissed because I ran slower than I thought I should have. So I ran a lot the following week, well over 100 miles. That included, I clearly remember, an 18-mile trail run the evening before another morning 10K. I ran that 10K in the 32-33 range, about 3 minutes faster than the one the week before.

Runner3000 wrote:

First of all quit using exceptions like one ore 2 elite runners to prove something. Cam ran over 140 miles a week with one week I believe being around 170ish that doesn't mean everyone should train like that. Have you ever looking into Jim Ryun's training? it's insane! "train like an individual" quote from the great Jack Daniel's

I know most high school and college runners running 6 days a week top out at 55 to 60 before adding a double. 65 to 70 if they are running 7 days a week. My body is a little more fragile then most so I add a double at 55. There's obviously people who's bodies can handle more, but after that point it starts to become difficult to recover, and I believe the common consensus is to start doubling after 55 or add a 7th day till you hit 70 and start doubling there.

Okay, for a decidedly non-elite example, I found that I could do 100 a week in just one run and it wasn't that difficult. I found 115 on single runs was kind of draining. I'm pretty sure 120 was the biggest mileage I ever did on just one run.That's not to say that doing those sorts of volumes on one run was the best way to do it and normally I didn't, but I did have periods where I did that much in just one run.

The Way We Were wrote:

Moto wrote:

How did you avoid injury doing 20 mile singles

If you ignore the pain and hobble through, your injury will eventually go away.

Respect

You hit the nail on the head that last sentence. An interesting storyline, but there's a reason Jared Hazen didn't run Western this year, and longevity likely isn't in his deck of cards if the 170-200 mpw continue. I don't care how anybody spins it, 200 mpw at any age, let alone 19, can't have any positive physical developments and has to put insane stress on the body and all important organs. Hazen is obviously a big time talent, I just hope he finds some balance in his training so that by his mid to late 20s, he isn't broken.

But to answer your question, I believe 80-100 miles per week is about the max for singles. I have read this is about the range Yuki Kawuachi does. However, he has done up to 220 kilometres in a week in singles. Quote,"One by one I started doing workouts that came to me intuitively like received wisdom from somewhere, something in my head telling me, “You should do this,” and as a result of that my training load went way up. I did two 50 km jogs and totaled about 220 km for the week. I usually do about 140 km a week, so doing that kind of long distance gradually gave me back my self-confidence and physical strength." But another important thing to remember about Yuki Kawuachi is his long jogs quote,"In October I ran 100 km mostly along the Tone River from Shibukawa, Gunma to my house in about 7 1/2 hours. Leading up to Fukuoka I did a lot of 50 km jogs which I hadn’t usually done in the past. ". This is very important, which is something I'm going start experimenting with. It isn't as hard as one would think Yuki Kawuachi sample week looks something like this:

Sunday race or long tempo run

Monday 70+ minutes (Yuki Kawuachi often jogs as easy as a 5 minute kilometer pace on his easy runs. So this could be about 14+ kilometres)

Tuesday same as Monday

Wednesday intervals i.e. 10 x 1k or 20 x 400

Thursday same as Monday

Friday same as Monday

Saturday long jog (I've read these are usually 4-6+ hours on a trail, I've read he has done easy jogging up to 100 kilometres) or he does a race

Another important note, he often does several long runs in a week. Quote, "The second point is that I had increased my long distance jogs. I’ve always done 4 to 6-hour trail runs, but last summer I started doing a lot more of them. Using the Shin-Etsu Trail I ran longer than 45 km two days in a row and jogged more than 40 km three times in a single week. "

Sources:

http://japanrunningnews.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-miracle-in-fukuoka-real-talk-from.html?m=1

http://japanrunningnews.blogspot.com/2017/03/bringing-all-my-experience-into-play-in.html?m=1

http://japanrunningnews.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-lessons-of-past-are-not-outdated.html?m=1

Moto wrote:

How did you avoid injury doing 20 mile singles

I also hit 140 miles per week on singles but usually only held that for no more than 3 weeks. Typical mileage was around 100 with most of the miles being a 26-28ish long run and a 22-24 Tuesday run. Only ran 2:20s and 1:07s though. I did it in Colorado on lots of gravel roads.

I always thrived on high miles and never raced much faster when I lowered miles.

I agree, however in later years I found that staying injury free and being able to recover on a day to day basis and stay fresh, ~90 miles per week on single workouts seemed to be ideal.

An example of a weekly schedule for Marathon training would look like this:

Monday- easy 10 miler on soccer fields.

Tuesday- 3 mile warm up, 10 mile tempo run, 2 mile cool down on bike path.

Wednesday - 12 mile easy run on trails.

Thursday- 10 mile run steady on roads.

Friday- 3 mile warm up 5 X 1mile repeats with 400m recovery on track, 2 mile cool down.

Saturday- easy 10 miler on soccer fields and wood chip trail.

Sunday- 20-23 miler on roads.

Smoove wrote:

I always wonder why people like to point to what guys like Yuki or elites or record holders are doing as guidance for what the average person may want to do in their training.

These guys are, almost by definition, outliers. What they do, while interesting, should bear very little on what you or I should do.

Hi Smoove!

Do you think Yuki Kawauchi is an outlier? I don`t think so. Well, maybe a reservation for his fantastic fast recovery after races.

But I think mostly this talk about outliers comes down to there is built up an idea that high amount of training is a must to reach top performance or just individual optimal results. There is of course many examples more of these "outliers" and one I came to think about is another Boston winner and world champ , Geoffrey Kirui. He used to mostly train up in the Kenya highlands and mostly doing singles for a high score mileage around 85-90 mpw. On this he did 2.06.27 PR in Amsterdam marathon 2016. After his win in Boston it was communicated that if he only did "some real training" and increased his mileage, he should probably run even faster and threaten the WR at marathon. So far in 2018 he has not shown shape to run faster than his 2.06.27 even if he sometimes was "specially treated" with some "real training".

Maybe we will see an interesting pro venture by Kawauchi from the beginning of April next year training fulltime . If he will stay with his singles and just get more recovery instead of now his job we don`t know yet, but it sounds like his idea is to run more mileage. My guess is that he has reached his highest individual aerob capacity already and more mileage wont help,maybe just marginally.

But it can also be that he chose to stay with his singles , and without the normal job to think about gets more rest and more effect out from his singles and quality training, and that way runs faster. Interesting case I say and hope for.

Yes, I think Yuki is an outlier. Perhaps not in terms of raw aerobic capacity., but that is only one thing to measure.

In college I used to think that guys who would grind high volume and run the same times as me had less talent or were less gifted than me. Maybe I'm getting softer, or maybe I've just matured, but I now recognize (or perhaps just believe) that the ability to grind high volume is a running talent/gift just like having natural speed for a kick is a talent/gift, just like having an above-average aerobic system is a talent/gift and just like having the killer instinct as a racer is a talent/gift.

Like with any natural talent or gift , I suspect that the people fall along a bell curve with respect to capacity for high volume work. The better runners fall at the far right side of the bell curve. The true greats are those rare people who are on the outside edge of the bell curve with respect to multiple factors related to their specialty.

I don't know where Yuki falls on the bell curve for other features, but his capacity for high workloads or for recovery seems pretty clearly to me to be a couple of standard deviations from the median.

So this is a pretty old thread. Obviously singles are a bit limiting, for example a guy running 120 in singles could prob run 140-150 in doubles, but maybe not if he would have to get up at 3 am to get a run in before work or something. Anyone else have success on high mileage singles?