Mileage Matters Most
If you want to be capable of doing something, then you have to work at it. If you want to be good at it, not just capable, then you have to do it - or approximate it - a lot. That applies to running. In the current climate of the coronavirus pandemic, November 2020 as I write this, many runners are looking at races already being cancelled again well into 2021. This is an extended opportunity to become the runner you’ve always wanted to become without the distractions of races or events.
You may know of Anders Ericsson’s research and his book called called Peak: Secrets From The New Science Of Expertise. He died in 2020, at the age of 72, while still very active in his research career. Malcolm Gladwell used (some would say mis-used) some of Ericsson’s research to popularize the idea that’s come to be known as the ’10,000 rule’. The idea is basically that whether you have inherent talent or great genes you must put in a lot of time in deliberate practice to become great at anything. This notion of deliberate practice is central to Ericsson’s research findings. Practice is not enough. You can’t just slide the bow across the cello for thousands of hours and become a master cellist. It’s the deliberate part that misses the necessary amount of attention when people think - I’ve kicked this ball a million times, why am I not any better at crossing it into the box? Getting expert feedback, critical analysis, and attention to improvement are necessary to become a great cellist or land a soccer ball (aka football) on the six-yard line. Ericsson found that people who became exceptional at their crafts put in over 10,000 hours by an early age. While that research has been updated and modified, including a recognition that many hours of deliberate practice are only a part of the puzzle of expertise, you can appreciate that it’s a lot of time and, perhaps more important, it’s a lot of attention to the skills…the craft…of the pursuit. Luckily, running requires very little skill or craft compared with pursuits like the cello or soccer.
Nevertheless, to become the best runner that you can be, or even a significant percentage of your genetic best, requires a lot of running.
Do you have to be fully paying attention and engaged mentally while you're running to get the full benefit of the training workout? After all, an aspiring cellist going through scales while thinking about dinner can’t reasonably expect to improve much. Even if you don’t listen to music, podcasts, or audiobooks while you run, you’re constantly drifting into thoughts, conversations, problem solving, or planning. Do you have to pay full attention to every step, or at least try, in order to gain full mastery of running. The answer is a little slippery.
For your physical development, you don’t really need to pay specific attention. This is why zoning out to streaming movies while running on the treadmill can work just fine for most of your training for most runners. But, if you want to be good at running over technical terrain or zooming downhill, then you must put in deliberate practice. Run the same section of terrain over and over. Pay close attention to your foot placement and assess your performances. Repeat, a lot.
For your psychological development, it’s probably very useful to pay attention to your mind, and not be distracted by other thoughts or audio input, at least for a significant amount of your running. Learning about your own mind is an essential skill for optimal running performance and training it to be less reactive and chaotic is useful for an ultra runner. As Shri Munindra said, “If you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it.” And if you want to understand your running mind, I think it’s a good idea to run and observe it.
Running doesn’t require the skills or teamwork found in many other pursuits. Yes there are skills and there may be some teamwork - with your crew, for example - but it’s a pretty straightforward activity. So, you don’t need nearly the same amount of time in deliberate practice required of other fields. Nevertheless, we still consistently see that runners take years of highly consistent running to reach their best performances. Myriad factors likely contribute to them becoming their best over those years, from confidence to subtle features of experience to physiological capacity and psychological resilience. One thing is absolutely clear, you can not achieve your endurance best on 30 miles per week even if you're deliberate in every step and do so for many years. You’ll certainly get fit, and healthy, and possibly become a good runner. But you will be measurably more capable if you run more miles per week.
We accept that we must run a lot for the greatest improvements but what’s the point of diminishing returns? At what weekly mileage does adding more mileage give you noticeably less benefit? That’s a question to which we don’t have a good answer. Ask a group of experts and you’ll get answers from 60-120 miles per week. But there are many other factors, the most important of which is consistency. There is research on this question. For example, total distance run in training predicts up to 59% of performance score variability among world class long-distance runners, and easy running accounted for 2/3rds of the total distance run over 2 years in that study. Basically, this finding supports the rule that volume of easy running is the single biggest predictor of endurance running capacity. But let me be clear that ‘easy running’ is still running, it’s not slightly shuffle-jogging.
For most people, family, jobs and other factors must be considered. So, let’s take a step back and view the situation more holistically. Rather than asking how much running you should be doing, it may be more useful to ask how much time you have for running. If you have one hour per day Monday-Friday and then two hours on each day of the weekend, then you have nine hours per week to run. Deciding that you should be running 100 miles per week may not be skillful thinking. Stretching your running time beyond what your life can tolerate consistently, for months and years, is a doorway into suffering. Other aspect of life break down and the long term outcome is that you hurt relationships, hurt your own psyche, or otherwise fail to nurture the life you want overall.
Decide how much time you have to devote to running and make sure that it’s an amount that really does fit into the life you want. Then share it with those close to you. You don’t need to turn it into a PowerPoint presentation or a driver diagram, but have an honest and open conversation with those that may be impacted by your running. Don’t try to convince them of your perspective. Make them feel that you want open and honest input, because you do. Enter that conversation with the mindset that they know better than you how much time you can consistently put into running.
Let’s return to that question of how much mileage (or time) you need to be running. As you can see, the practical answer is that this isn’t a skillful question for most people because most people do not have enough time in a day or over years to run as much as they can.
If you still have an internal voice coaxing - I get it, but how much…then I encourage you to observe your mind some more. Play out a visualization game where you’re trying to complete the training plan titled “what I’m supposed to do” vs trying to complete the plan titled “here’s the time I’ve set aside, on which I’ve gotten support from the key people in my life - how am I going to spend this time today”.
Most runners overestimate how much they can improve in the short term while underestimating how much they can improve in the long term. Skip the allure of hacks and short-cuts. There are no singularly magical workouts. Focus on consistency and comfortably adaptable progression. While you may have a base-building period early in your calendar year, appreciate that the entire year, and even next year is building the base for the runner you can be in three years. The runner you are today is a product of your attention to those fundamental principles of consistency and adaptable progression from years past, not just weeks or months past.
Now that you’ve fully appreciated that you can only sustain what is a part of your life rather than what you’re trying to squeeze, stuff, and wedge into your life, we can return to reasonable planning and expectations. In the Resources area, you can find a tool to serve as a rough guide for the minimum desired running volumes to successfully complete races of different distances.
The volume of running is the most influential training factor in both amateur and elite runners. Authors of a study published in 2016 analyzed the training features and race times of > 2,300 recreational runners. Weekly running mileage was strongly correlated with race times for distances of 5K to marathon. The more miles the runners ran, the faster they raced. In 2019, a training-feature study of 85 elite distance runners concluded that the amount of easy running was the best predictor of race times. Similarly, a study of cross-country runners found that total training volume at low intensity was the most important training variable for performance in events, even when those events were short - like 35 minutes - and high intensity. Whether you're running for the podium or much farther back, running mileage is the first factor you should program, and you should run as many miles each week as you can handle - both physically and within the context of your other life demands.
In a 2020 study in Nature Communications titled Human running performance from real-world big data, the authors analyzed real-world running activities of ≈ 14,000 individuals with ≈ 1.6 million exercise sessions containing duration and distance, with a total distance of ≈ 20 million km. They found that the fastest runners keep most of their training easy while slower runners spend more of their running time at relatively harder efforts. "Our findings can be interpreted as faster runners train typically at lower relative intensities which is consistent with high-intensity performance improvement due to low-intensity training.”
These observations - from amateurs to elites, and from short events to massive studies using big data - extend also to ultra-marathon runners in training. In a study from previous podcast guest Beat Knechtle, the data showed that weekly training distance is a significant predictor of ultra-marathon performance, even more than the number of hours trained per week. Mileage matters most.
There are important but rarely interwoven considerations within the statement that mileage matters most in your training. Specificity and diminishing returns. If all of your running is over flat and smooth surfaces but you're training for big-mountain events, there's less event-specific benefit accumulated as you push your weekly mileage near the maximum amount you can handle. The adage that mileage matters most applies to all running, and especially for event-specific terrain.
Mileage must be programmed first, before anything else. As my guest Andy Jones put it, when you’re designing your training, you have to run enough mileage for the event first. Then you can add higher intensity intervals. Stöggl and Sperlich evaluated the programs of well-trained and elite endurance athletes in a meta-analysis. They found most retrospective studies on well-trained to elite endurance athletes report a pyramidal training-intensity distribution. With the pyramidal distribution, most training is at low intensity, with decreasing proportions of threshold and high-intensity training. The only sport that really differed was cross-country skiing, where the training-intensity distribution was more polarized.
There are three general approaches to increasing weekly mileage:
Run further on some or all runs
Run on more days each week
Run more than once per day
Running more in any specific run has the benefit of not needing to shower twice, possibly less dirty laundry unless you don’t mind putting on funky stuff, the comfort of knowing that your workout is done for the day (check!), and so on.
Running on more days is easy because the day is there, available. But not everyone can readily tolerate running more days per week or even every day. I’m a big proponent of taking rest days only as you need them, and if you need a rest day then you should evaluate why and make adjustments to your program if warranted.
Running more than once a day can be a hassle unless it fits into your lifestyle. The most common example of twice-daily running fitting into ones lifestyle is using running as your commute to and from work. Another important reason to consider running twice in a day is to boost the adaptation stimulus, which we discussed in my recent episode with David Bishop. Doing so can give you a synergistic, not just additive, benefit.
Is there a clear point of diminishing returns in the relation between mileage per week and performance in events? Of course there has to be. At some point, you know that your mileage or time could get so high that you just start breaking down - when it’s more than you can recover from. That point will be different for each person and will differ for the same person as other life stresses arise (poor sleep, poor nutrition, and so on). This really isn’t very complicated though; just add a few miles, and then continue doing that until you begin feeling a little more stiff or fatigued during a week, then back off slightly. Hold that level for a couple of weeks and begin incrementing again as you feel strong, or back off a bit more if you don’t. If you just feel like it’s your bones, joints, and muscles that are fatigued (not your whole body or mind), you can replace some of that running with biking or try running some of those miles slower.
The key in my philosophy is to not let any weeks slip to extremely low mileage, to increment slower than you think you can handle, and take the multi-year view that you’re looking to add a certain number of miles over the next 2-3 years, not months. The central factor in long term development success is consistency. We don’t want to cram in a lot of hard running then have to take it easy for a week or more. Instead find the highest level that you can comfortably sustain over months and years . If in doubt, err on doing a little less. It’s much better to finish a series of weeks and think you could have done just a little more than discover you should have done a little less.