A sub-3-hour marathoner explains how higher mileage cut his recovery time after hard races and raised his capacity over time. He now runs above 80 miles per week, a level that would have broken him a year earlier. Volume works differently for everyone, but gradual increases help most runners improve.
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How important do you think training volume is in your opinion? Like when you look at other athletes looking to improve from, let's say, a 3:30 to a 3 hours, like I know a lot of people wanna run sub-3.
Yeah.
What is the training volume importance in your opinion in that?
Okay, so I can only speak for my experience, but I'll hear, Here's what my experience has been. I think different people respond well to different types of training. Some people respond well to volume. I appear to be one of those people. I know that in 2018, races, the mountain races, the 1-hour mountain races that would take me 4 to 5 days to recover from, that those same types of races in 2019, when I had increased my volume significantly. I could recover from instead of 4 to 5 days, it was only 1 to 2 days. Volume works very, very well for me. I don't know if that's true for everyone or not, but it certainly works for me.
Well, and I've, I've seen it across the board work quite well for, for most people as well. And I think it is a catch-22 to some extent where some people go out there and they, they could probably benefit more from actually cutting back their training a bit. If, if let's say they're putting in high volume, yet they have a lot of stress in their life or they have other things that are kind of not allowing them to properly recover.
I absolutely agree, uh, with a caveat of those limitations of what is a beneficial amount of training for an individual. With consistent training over time, those limits change. So right now, for, see, I am training, like I was going up to like above 80 miles a week for a few weeks. And if I had done that a year ago, I would be broken. So just because something is too much volume for you now doesn't mean that that limit is going to be in the same place. If you train consistently over a period of time.
Yep. Uh, very well said. And I think that's, that's true for, for marathoners of any type of level, whether you're trying to finish a marathon in 5 hours or 4 hours or 3 hours, just gradually being able to get your body used to a little bit more training volume can be very beneficial. But as long as that's not done too quickly either.
Yeah, I think, I think it's very beneficial to set, uh, reasonable short-term goals, but very, very big long-term goals. It's— people have a tendency to think that they can only be as fast as what they can improve in a short period of time, or that it'll be very difficult for them to be much faster than what they are now. I very, very strongly disagree. I think runners of all levels including quite elite runners, can be much, much better than the level that they are currently at. And if you'll give yourself enough time to improve, and it's almost like you have to give yourself permission to improve and just understand that over time you can make a lot of gains compared to where you are right now. Don't, don't limit your improvement or your goals to yourself to where you're at right now.
