Why You Should Rethink Training for Mileage
It’s a new year, and time for a paradigm shift in how many runners go about their running training. If you’re looking to try something new, it’s time to reconsider training for mileage.
Anyone who has spent time around distance runners has inevitably, and repeatedly, heard the question, “How many miles do you run per week?” with “high-mileage” weeks typically considered as a measure of success. However, this is not the most effective way of assessing your performance – and can actually be harmful to many runners.
Benefits of Running for Distance
Of course, quantifying total running distance is valuable, as it as it comprises some aspects of the mechanical/neuromuscular, cardiovascular, and perceptual/psychological loads that contribute to training stress and is partially predictive of distance-running success. However, running distance is only one aspect contributing to training stress.
Who Should Reconsider Training for Mileage
The common misconception that evaluating training solely on mileage is particularly concerning for new or beginner runners, pediatrics, and master runners recovering from an injury. but truth is, all runners could benefit from rethinking their mentality around distance.
Running distance as the sole training metric can often misrepresent and significantly underestimate training stress. Instead, progressing your running training based on time is more effective not just in reducing risk for injury, but also in improving performance.
Why Should Runners Reconsider Training for Mileage
Evaluating performance solely on mileage is unique for runners, and is not the way training is evaluated in most sports. In any sport, training stress influenced by both external (ie, application of mechanical load) and internal (ie, physiological/psychological responses to the external load) load factors.
For an understanding of the additional metrics that should be included when evaluating running training, see chart below:
What About Training Load?
More recently, the term “training load” has been used in coaching and sports science literature to generally describe the combination of various external and internal physiological loads of training sessions.
One of the major limitations of measuring external training load is that it fails to account for how runners feel during a given training session, which is not only influenced by the external load of the training session but also by the runner's inner load, or state of recovery and daily stress (eg, sleep, illness, relationships, etc). (Source.)
Coaches can qualitatively prescribe intended internal load with instructions like “easy” or “hard effort” or “submaximal effort.” Without monitoring the internal loads experienced by a runner, it is difficult to quantify the overall training response. Thus, training loads, including external load and internal physiological load, are valuable to quantify and monitor running training over time to truly understand the overall training stress.
What Does This Mean for Runners?
Solely evaluating your training based on mileage does not take into consideration many major factors, including training load. Refined approaches for better and safer recommendations for progressing running training are needed.
In the meantime, considering length of time ran is a good metric. If you use a fitness tracker, you can also evaluate elevation gained throughout the run and heart rate to determine basic difficulty and training load.
If. you’re curious of your average training load, as well as how injury is affecting your ability to run, contact Oregon Running Clinic and Dr. Jen Davis. Dr. Davis can evaluate your running using the University of Wisconsin Running Injury & Recovery Index, as well as many other tools to help you understand your body better.