The prince of the Kenya highlands wrote:
[quote]OlympicRunningTeamCoach wrote:
You see Tim.....LRC is a place where most runners and coaches got stuck in the belief that more must be better! It's of course
almost impossible to convince them of the opposite that a more balanced approach is preferable to achieving the same or better results.
And there is good reason to be stuck in the belief that more must be better because for at least sixty years now the people who have been winning and placing well in races, especially big ones, have for the most part, with some notable exceptions, done high mileage. But throughout that time there have always been more people running , say, 50 to 70 miles a week than those running 90 to 140. If 50 to 70 was really enough to get most people to their full potential there should be far more 50 to 70 mile types winning and placing highly in big races than there are 90 to 140 people.
You might counter by saying that the 90 to 140 group has more talented runners but that argument doesn't hold up if you're defining talent as it usually is defined, i.e., an inherited characteristic. In that case there is no reason why there would more talent in the 90 to 140 group. Genetic characteristics are usually distributed randomly among sufficiently large populations. A group of 10,000 will have more people who have blue eyes or are at least six feet tall than a group of 1,000 will have so the largest group doing the minimum amount of adequate training should be producing the most winners and high placers.
After all the decades of the kind of success high mileage runners have had the onus of proving that you can be your best, again, with some small number of exceptions, falls on the advocates of lower mileage. When those sorts of people start supplanting the high mileage types you will likely see people unstick from the "more is better" mindset but it will, and should, take a lot more than a few physiology articles and a relatively small number of low volume success stories.