What times would you consider good for a self coached person who never ran in school/college?

Where I live, sub-20 M and sub-24 F puts you in first for alot of smaller 5ks. In the bigger 5ks, you tend to need 18 low to mid M and sub-21 F to win. In the biggest 5ks locally, you tend to need 16 low or faster M and sub-19 F to win. The main difference is the bigger races tend to include high school and former collegiate runners who haven't run competitively in a couple years. The biggest races tend to include that group plus the more serious club runners. I'd say if you win small, local races you can count yourself as 'good' and if you win regional or larger, more competitive races, you can count yourself as 'really good.'

I also agree with the comments about age-grading. I've met some men and women who didn't start running until their 40s and 50s. These people clearly will never achieve the times of serious runners who start in their late 20s, and those 20-somethings will likely never achieve the times of the serious people who started in or before high school and trained seriously through college.

Final answer - if self-coached and never ran in college or high school AND you are between 28 and 45 years old:

Good - sub 20

Great - 18:30

Incredible - 16:xx

where i live wrote:

Final answer - if self-coached and never ran in college or high school AND you are between 28 and 45 years old:

Good - sub 20

Great - 18:30

Incredible - 16:xx

Sorry ladies. I forgot to include you.

Women with the same conditional statements as above:

Good - sub-24

Great - sub-21

Incredible - sub-18:30

Those times are terrible. To answer the question, I consider sub 16 and sub 18:30 to be good for someone who did not run in college. Fewer miles on the body should make for faster times as you age, not slower times as some are suggesting.

Slow poker wrote:

Those times are terrible. To answer the question, I consider sub 16 and sub 18:30 to be good for someone who did not run in college. Fewer miles on the body should make for faster times as you age, not slower times as some are suggesting.

Except there's this thing call aerobic capacity which doesn't magically appear if you haven't been running that long...

are you a troll? wrote:

Slow poker wrote:

Those times are terrible. To answer the question, I consider sub 16 and sub 18:30 to be good for someone who did not run in college. Fewer miles on the body should make for faster times as you age, not slower times as some are suggesting.

Except there's this thing call aerobic capacity which doesn't magically appear if you haven't been running that long...

For some unfortunate people it doesn’t appear at all. There are at least ten guys in my running group on 50 mpw + workouts who cannot break 19.

Self coached.

Fan of Daniels/Tinman. Low mileage.

Started running at age 24. First two or so years just casual jogging. First half race about 8 years ago – 1:38:xx

Now age 34 and PRs of 3k – 9:2x, 5k – 16:3x, 10k – 33:5x, HM – 1:15:4x all of them set this year

Local god wrote:

are you a troll? wrote:

Except there's this thing call aerobic capacity which doesn't magically appear if you haven't been running that long...

For some unfortunate people it doesn’t appear at all. There are at least ten guys in my running group on 50 mpw + workouts who cannot break 19.

Links to Strava profiles? Such statements are always hard to believe. I wanna see how they do the 50 mpw and if they train optimally. Also, running form is VERY important and other things like nutrition, sleep, strength training, keeping life stress-free, etc. Doing 50 mpw if everything else is bad means nothing, if it's more than what their bodies can currently handle it will not improve them.

That doesn't mean they couldn't run sub 19 IF they would sleep 8-9+ hours, do strength training, maybe some cross-training, eat not more junk food, reduce alcohol consumption to an average of 5-max 7 beers or wine glasses a week, cut their job hours down to 40 hours, and build SLOWLY to 50 mpw, with a great distribution of workouts, long runs and easy runs.

Also, hobby joggers in running group often SEVERELY overstate how much they are doing, exaggerating by 100-200%, but have time every weekend and multiple times a week to get drunk. Then blame lack of talent and genetics while the guy next to them who dedicates 80% of his life to running is getting faster and faster and crushing local races.

Couldn't agree more with LateRunnerPhil.

I see dozens of these type of guys around me who "think" they train yet they actually don't have any consistent stretch of training. Mostly these are guys running way higher mileages without little quality work and often getting injured every few months that sets them back to baseline level.

If you follow reasonable training plan like Daniels/Tinman with sligth variantions for individual I guarantee you'd see significant improvement even on 40-45 mpw.

50 mpw consistent work is enough to go sub-17 in 5k.

LateRunnerPhil wrote:

Links to Strava profiles? Such statements are always hard to believe. I wanna see how they do the 50 mpw and if they train optimally. Also, running form is VERY important and other things like nutrition, sleep, strength training, keeping life stress-free, etc. Doing 50 mpw if everything else is bad means nothing, if it's more than what their bodies can currently handle it will not improve them.

While I don't disagree with you, you are pointing out things a coach would. Keep in mind the question was for when people are self-coached. I know you have personally done alot of work reading up on tinman's training philosophies and coached yourself with good results, but there are others (like me) who wasted 3-4 years reading, often contradictory, training principles/plans online and improving slowly before finally putting the pieces together.

Side note: We tend to gauge statements off our personal experiences - I think I remember you saying you were in your 30s so your response makes sense. I broke 19 after moving into the 40 mpw range on less than optimal training in my 30s, but were I 10 or 15 years older at the time I'm not sure I would have. So keep in mind, along with the other things you mention, age is also a huge factor when people post statements like that.

qw wrote:

Couldn't agree more with LateRunnerPhil.

I see dozens of these type of guys around me who "think" they train yet they actually don't have any consistent stretch of training. Mostly these are guys running way higher mileages without little quality work and often getting injured every few months that sets them back to baseline level.

If you follow reasonable training plan like Daniels/Tinman with sligth variantions for individual I guarantee you'd see significant improvement even on 40-45 mpw.

50 mpw consistent work is enough to go sub-17 in 5k.

Inspirational story - I have a very similar profile to you...first HM 4 years ago in 1:38:xx and just clocked a 1:20:xx during a 12 week marathon block - first time I have done "structured training" over the past 12 weeks and your comments are spot on..

50MPW CONSISTENTLY throughout the year is 2,500 miles! Few hobbiest joggers achieve that!

Good: One second faster than my PR.

Bad: One second slower than my PR.

3hr-marathoner wrote:

depends on what you mean but good, but where I live 18 and 22 for men and women is good for about 3rd so those are apparently roughly equivalent times. I don't really understand why the gap is so large, well more than the 10% that typically separates elite men and elite women. I wonder why.

Its because in women, the performance curve is not normally distributed, it has a long tail out front, with a few outliers. The reason is because of higher variation in body type that significantly impacts performance, whereas men in general have lower body fat and straight bodies which is more suited to distance running. A few outlier women also have this body type and thus can achieve higher performances than most other women who have more typical body shapes for a woman.

ShiRan wrote:

Men

Sub 18

Women

Sub 22

That’s just my opinion. What say you?

Come on, people who don't run at college run f#cking world records. Hardly any Kenyans ran in college and they do pretty well. Some of them don't start running until the late 20s and set WRs. I know plenty of guys who played soccer in high school and didn't run until mid s 20s.....one guy never ran until he was 24.....went on to sub 15 5k and a 2:25 'thon, and won Milwaukee. It's just genetics and when they take it up.

Mpw is always misleading. Miles per month is the better metric.

Missed runs have a way of hiding from mpw calculations, but they can’t hide from miles per month calculations

northeast female runner wrote:

3hr-marathoner wrote:

depends on what you mean but good, but where I live 18 and 22 for men and women is good for about 3rd so those are apparently roughly equivalent times. I don't really understand why the gap is so large, well more than the 10% that typically separates elite men and elite women. I wonder why.

Its because in women, the performance curve is not normally distributed, it has a long tail out front, with a few outliers. The reason is because of higher variation in body type that significantly impacts performance, whereas men in general have lower body fat and straight bodies which is more suited to distance running. A few outlier women also have this body type and thus can achieve higher performances than most other women who have more typical body shapes for a woman.

It also occurs to me that childbearing may have something to do with it. My wife and I were roughly equivalent runners for our respective genders when we were younger and a lot closer to the 10% separation you see in elites but having kids understandably hit her harder and now our times are about 20% apart.

Local god wrote:

are you a troll? wrote:

Except there's this thing call aerobic capacity which doesn't magically appear if you haven't been running that long...

For some unfortunate people it doesn’t appear at all. There are at least ten guys in my running group on 50 mpw + workouts who cannot break 19.

In running, as in everything else, talent is not distributed equally. We all have different talent capabilities. That's why running is great for average talented people. There's always lots of people to race against.

Free_the_thigh wrote:

runnerchef wrote:

Inspirational story - I have a very similar profile to you...first HM 4 years ago in 1:38:xx and just clocked a 1:20:xx during a 12 week marathon block - first time I have done "structured training" over the past 12 weeks and your comments are spot on..

50MPW CONSISTENTLY throughout the year is 2,500 miles! Few hobbiest joggers achieve that!

Mpw is always misleading. Miles per month is the better metric.

Missed runs have a way of hiding from mpw calculations, but they can’t hide from miles per month calculations

This is so true for a lot of hobby joggers who picked up running in their adult life. I was a Baseball player growing up and a 20-21min 5k runner after 6mo of running in my early 20's. Stuck there for 3years. I was running "50mpw", but in reality it was more like 120-150mpm. I would hit 50mpw 1 or 2 weeks and miss runs on the other weeks. Once I actually hit 200mpm consistently for about a year I got down to 16:44. Doing strides and drills regularly also helped a lot in my opinion.

In running, as in everything else, talent is not distributed equally. We all have different talent capabilities. That's why running is great for average talented people. There's always lots of people to race against.

A lot more hobby joggers are out there too. 10+ years ago, a 22:00 5K placed me near in the back 10-20% of local races. Today, that puts me in the top 15-25% of the field.

For a guy who sits at a desk 40-50 hours a week, eats like trash, has an hour commute, is 40 years old, etc...and can manage the discipline to put in 150 mile months, I think a 45:00 10K is "good".

My answer:

Anything faster than you've run before.

And then, that soon becomes "not so fast" as you aim for something better.

That's the beauty of running that is so often missed. If you know someone running in NYC marathon runs a PR by 10 minutes, they did a great job, no?

Unfortunately, many (in media and elsewhere) will treat the race as having one male winner and one female winner, with tens of thousands therefore being "losers". (Well, as I type that, I also lament the type of coverage where it's all just a parade or cultural event, who cares what you run..). Worse yet, if you don't sent the WR, you've "failed".

So, look. Start running. Get faster than you used to be. Then, aim to get better than that.