Run High Mileage (Without Injuries)

so you want to run more mileage and you want to do it the right way you want to do it while staying healthy and preventing injuries i get it running more mileage is probably one of the most effective ways at becoming a better runner you're going to get a lot stronger you're gonna get a lot faster and there's a little bit of bragging rights that come with being able to run a certain high mileage number for the week and what i'd like to do in this video is talk about strategies to help you run more without getting hurt now first what i want to do is share with you my weekly mileage progression over the first nine years of my running career and it took me about nine years to get to my peak mileage level the level that i couldn't really personally go beyond every single time i tried i ended up getting injured and so what i'm going to do is put on the side of the screen here the weekly mileage levels that i typically ran during peak training so in other words of course i had some weeks that were lower than these when i was just coming back after some time off or maybe even an injury but typically speaking when i was training a lot these are the mileage levels that i ran so the thing to remember here is that the first four years or when i was in high school i was running cross-country indoor track and outdoor track the second four years is when i was in college also running cross-country and track for all three seasons and then that ninth year is my first post collegiate year that was the year when i was just starting to think about running my first marathon and i hadn't yet started the training but i was certainly getting into those longer distances like the 10 mile race distance and the half marathon race distance so there's a couple things that we can notice about this schedule first the first couple years of my running career i didn't run particularly high mileage i was a high school student i was just doing what the coach said and we were typically running roughly 30 miles a week some weeks were lower some weeks were a touch higher but unless you were taking more mileage on yourself we didn't really run any extra mileage now there's a big jump in year four right yes how to check my notes there yes there's a big jump in year four because that's when i transitioned from running in high school to running in college and guess what happened i got injured a lot i had an arch problem i had achilles tendinopathy that lasted for quite a long time and you can see why if we just look here at the mileage levels i started running a lot more while at the same time doing college level workouts very intense very difficult and so the addition of those kinds of workouts with almost doubling my peak mileage resulted in me getting hurt and after that you can see how i was much more consistent with my mileage and my peak mileage levels didn't increase too much from year to year i went from running maybe 60 miles a week to 70 but then only 75 to 80 and then for a couple weeks in that final ninth year i was able to hit 90 miles a week but we're going to talk more about that in knowing your personal limits but i want to give you some context around my training and the progression of mileage that occurred over those first nine years okay so what can we learn from this if we are going to think long term about our running careers if we want to continuously get better from year to year what lessons can we pull from building our mileage and really wanting to run high mileage because it should be something that every runner is striving for now the term high mileage is relative you're not going to be running 100 miles a week usually but if you want to get up there we can do that through these lessons even if high mileage for you is only 40 miles a week these lessons still apply so lesson number one is to simply remember to think long term if i was worried about getting up to 50 miles a week when i was a freshman in high school i likely would have gotten hurt and at that early stage of my running career the most important thing is to stay consistent and to ignite that fire to stay passionate about the sport so that you can build the habit and really stay a long-term consistent runner for years and years and maybe even decades that's what i want for myself and if you love running that's what i want for you too so think long term think in terms of years rather than in terms of days and weeks it's a much more productive way to think about mileage it forces you to think bigger picture which then allows you not to take so many little risks with spiking your mileage which is a great way to stay healthy when it comes to building mileage tip number two is to know your personal limit now this does take some trial and error and you're never going to know your limit unless you break it and that's exactly what i did my limit in terms of weekly mileage is about 90 miles per week every single time that i run 90 miles per week i've gotten hurt a couple times i was able to run 91 and i think i ran 91 miles twice two weeks in a row and then finally after that second week some niggle popped up and i had to dramatically cut my mileage so this is a game of trial and error but with that said it's still a very valid exercise to take part in know your limit and when you do find that limit do everything you can to work around it and really not push beyond it because if it is your limit it's going to end up getting you hurt tip number three is to remember that when you are in the process of increasing your mileage all that extra mileage that you're adding whether you're just adding a mile or two to several runs during the week if you're adding a whole another day of running to your schedule these extra miles should be at an easy pace mileage is best thought of just in terms of volume when we do workouts we're worried about pace but when you're just running easy mileage it's an effort not a pace keep it super easy and you're going to allow your body to better recover from all that extra stress and then better adapt to it tip number four is to remember why we're adding mileage in the first place why are we trying to run a lot what is the real goal here now ultimately it boils down to aerobic development you want more endurance you want staying power stamina and we can actually do that without increasing our mileage and so tip number four is to remember that you can do some cross training and get many of the benefits of extra mileage with either none or very little injury risk and because i was on this college track and cross country team i was training with some really competitive guys and i needed to be able to run a lot and i also recognized that my personal limitations my propensity to get injured really meant that i couldn't train as hard as some of my teammates that meant that they were going to be better than me and so what i did was added in a lot of cross training i spent hours and hours every week some weeks on my bike doing a lot of road cycling and in the pool doing a lot of pool running or aqua jogging those activities are very specific to running and the fitness gains that you get from them have great carryover into the sport of running so if you're someone who can't run a lot but you have a bike or you have access to a pool those are some great opportunities to get some of the benefits of extra mileage with none of the injury risk tip five here is to make sure that whenever you're adding extra mileage whenever you're trying to push the envelope a little bit maybe you're shooting for a new weekly mileage pr or better yet a monthly mileage pr couple that with a healthy dose of strength training a lot of running is fairly catabolic it can break down some muscle especially if you're not fueling appropriately especially if you're not sleeping a lot but strength training on the other hand is anabolic it actually builds muscle now you're not going to get bulky don't worry about that you're running too much to get bulky remember but instead what it's going to do is it's going to maintain your muscle mass is going to maintain your strength and it's going to really make your muscles your tendons and ligaments and bones and all those connective tissues in your joints more durable you're going to be building injury resilience at exactly the time that you really need it so if you're someone who thinks that well i'm running a lot i don't have time for the strength work we need to just flip that on its head i'm running a lot so i have to do the strength work to enable me to run a lot finally tip six is to remember you can't really increase your annual running mileage more than about 10 to 20 percent now this kind of breaks down at the low end and at the high end of annual mileage levels so if you're a new runner and you know maybe last year you were able to run 500 miles we can be a little bit more aggressive than 10 to 20 percent we can run a little bit more in our second year of running especially if we're taking into account all these suggestions in this video but on the flip side of that if you're someone who's running 3 000 miles a year we probably have to be a little bit more conservative and adding more than 20 percent or even 15 percent could be quite dangerous you could really be setting yourself up for an injury because a small percentage of a very big number is still fairly large so this rule definitely breaks down at the low end and the high end of annual mileage levels but if you're someone who might be writing one to two thousand miles a year or let's just say roughly sixteen hundred to thirty two hundred kilometers a year i just did that map on the fly i'm very proud of myself by the way to all my metric friends out there so if you're someone who's running those mileage levels stick to about 10 to 20 increases per year it's really going to help you gradually build that mileage level and if you look at my mileage progression over the first nine years of my running career you can see how for most of the time it was fairly constant it was only inching up a little bit during those peak weeks from season to season to season and that really helped the annual mileage levels grow from year to year so there we have it guys if you are trying to run more mileage this is a process this takes a methodical approach and if you heed these tips if you remember to keep things slow think long term don't increase your mileage too quickly supplement with cross training and what's the last one we're going to be doing a lot of strength training there we go then you are probably going to stay healthy now there's a lot of other things that can impact whether or not you stay healthy so we have all kinds of resources for that at strengthrunning.com but i want you to think more strategically about building mileage because it is a high reward activity but it also is a high risk activity if we can do it right we're going to be much better runners for it you

Channel: StrengthRunning

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Keywords: running, marathon, cross country running, track & field, 10k, 5k, half marathon, injury prevention, strength exercises, strength training for runners, barefoot running, running tips, run culture, run higher mileage, how to run more miles, high mileage running, how to increase mileage running

Id: pKsB9ZnX_gM

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021