With summer training in full swing for just about every high school cross country running across the nation, we figured we'd tap in to tackle one of the biggest questions looming over this important season of training: how much should I be running?
As you could probably guess, our general answer is an unsatisfying one: it depends.
The answer hinges on how you'd answer a seemingly endless deluge of questions.
How experienced are you as an athlete? What are your goals? What's your injury history like? What sort of mileage - and how many days per week - does your coach advise you to strive for in the off-season. (Does that figure change once racing and more structured workouts factor into the equation?) How do you feel at your current mileage and training load? What's the weather like where you live? (Seriously!)
But for a very good and general overview of how runners - primarily those just finding their footing in the sport - should aim to progress their mileage, here's an excellent overview from 2017 by Nico Composto. The primary takeaway is:
As you progress in fitness, you will be able to run more often. If you have successfully run injury free for 3 months and you are interested in increasing mileage, then you should do so slowly. If you have been running three days per week, add a fourth and stick there for at least a few weeks. If you still feel healthy and hungry for more, add a fifth day each week. As your goals evolve and you want to run farther and faster, you should slowly and carefully increase your mileage and thus the number of days you run every week.
Many runners will never have to run more than 5 days per week. For most, that will sufficiently improve fitness while minimizing the risk of injury. Some, though, will desire to run more. For those passionate athletes looking to compete to the best of their ability, running 7 days per week may be necessary. If you are interested in this path, it is important to learn more about advanced training plans. Incorporating a mix of easy runs, hard workouts and long runs will be imperative to success.
It's important to remember that for most runners, their improvement curve is steepest when they first start taking the sport more seriously. What this means is that the biggest gains come when every training stimulus is relatively new. Going from nothing, or even specializing in a different, less-endurance-focused sport like say, softball or baseball, to running three or four days a week with the occasional race, is going to result in some pretty spectacular improvement.
(Note: a widely accepted rule of thumb is to increase weekly mileage by no more than 10%, and to include a purposeful "down week" every three or four weeks where your overall volume decreases by at least 10%, to let your body absorb the gradual increase in work. There are other factors to ramp up slowly, too, like intensity, and even challenging terrain.)
But after that first season, if you catch the bug and want to keep improving, even if you change nothing, the simple act of "stacking" efforts over time will likely keep yielding modest improvements. Most athletes at this juncture find that they want to push themselves harder in training, however.
They'll want to run more, hit faster splits in workouts, try to keep up with a quicker teammate over a long run. These are all great ways to push yourself. But it's essential to keep the big picture in focus: you can't improve if you're hurt or overtired. As long as you feel appropriately fatigued - a tough point to recognize in the moment, so think of it as "occasionally tired but rarely or never exhausted to the point of frequent failure in training" - chances are you're in a sustainable sweet spot, and will continue to make gains in your fitness.
(And if you're really ambitious and your coach is cool with it, you can even try running more than once a day on occasion. )
Above all else, remember that the purpose of training isn't to train more impressively. It's to race up to your fullest potential. Obsessing over the numbers in your training log can lead to counterproductive work, where you risk injury or leave your race-level effort in workouts. To quote Nico, "I have known elite distance runners who max out at 130 miles per week and others who never run more than 50."
There may be general correlation between athletes who train more and harder and who race faster, but it's hardly a given that the winner at any given race is the one with the most mileage or fastest tempo runs under their belt. Multiple-time World champion Bernard Lagat famously never ran more than 65 miles per week during his competitive track career, generally taking a scheduled day off each week. He found what worked for him and stuck to it. It just so happened to be less than what a good deal of elite high school boys run.
So to wrap things up... how much should you run?
It's simple. (Kind of.) Find what works for you at each state of your development.
With summer training in full swing for just about every high school cross country running across the nation, we figured we'd tap in to tackle one of the biggest questions looming over this important season of training: how much should I be running?
As you could probably guess, our general answer is an unsatisfying one: it depends.
The answer hinges on how you'd answer a seemingly endless deluge of questions.