The highest injury risk for runners is inconsistency. You would be better off running xx miles over 6 days then running that same amount over 3. Running over 6 also allows you to add more time faster to increase your workload faster then running 3 days. ie if you were running 30min a day x 6 days you could add 5 min per run to get a 30min increase with little increase in the training stress. Now if you were running 3x a week for 60 min per run and added 10min per run your training stress would most likely be higher even though the increases and total duration are the same.

You have to look at 4 factors when trying to figure it all out. Frequency, duration, intensity, volume. You can keep volume the same but manipulate just intensity and get two weeks that have very different training stresses. Or you can have two weeks of the same volume but have different duration's or vice versa.

A good example of this is the post where the person stated that the progression show didn't account for down weeks or days off and would surely lead to injury. But if you manipulate the variables correctly you can see where this isn't the case.

In fact a 45mile week could be less stressful then a 35 mile week depending upon how you structure the week. Which means you could go from say 32, 33, 34, 36, 35 to 45 mpw and have those last two weeks be roughly equal in training stress.

Once you understand how these variables all interact with each other, manipulating your training load to meet your goals becomes much easier.

I went through this thread and there's a lot of talk about "miles", about 32mi/week or 40mi/week or 50mi/week.

Just as a reminder, because I sure hope that everyone knows this, measuring total distance to quantify training and comparing between athletes is only helpful for athletes that are at the same level. So elite athletes can talk about how they do 100mi/week or 120mi/week, maybe HS runners can talk about doing 60-70mi/week, because these groups of athletes are very matched in their training speed and 60mi/week represents essentially the same training load for a particular group of athletes.

When talking about age-group triathletes, training paces vary quite substantially. A top age-grouper might run most of his miles at 7min/mi pace, a MOP ag might run at 9min/mi and a BOP older age-grouper might run 10-12min/mi pace. If we're talking about the MOP ag, then 50mi/week is 7.5 hours of running. That's a lot of running. It's a lot of running not only from the point of view of the time-constrained age-grouper, but also a lot of running from a training load point of view.

Instead of looking at miles, it's a lot more "productive" to look at training time. For most age-groupers, training time on the run should be around 30-35% of total training (yes, this can vary). So for an age-grouper training 12 hours/week, that's roughly 4 hours of run training.

With this starting point, the job of the coach/self-coached athlete is to work on a training progression that builds towards maximizing training load in an event-specific way.

you know for all of the people that crack on you (and you know there are many) AND for all of the smarta$$ coach responses you've posted in the past (yah i recall when that was your username) all of your critics should check out this post. it is well thought out, informative and quite helpful. you have a tremendous wealth of knowledge. kudos for not always being a smartass and posting something that would behoove the majority of this forum to learn and/or remember.

I went through this thread and there's a lot of talk about "miles", about 32mi/week or 40mi/week or 50mi/week.

Just as a reminder, because I sure hope that everyone knows this, measuring total distance to quantify training and comparing between athletes is only helpful for athletes that are at the same level. So elite athletes can talk about how they do 100mi/week or 120mi/week, maybe HS runners can talk about doing 60-70mi/week, because these groups of athletes are very matched in their training speed and 60mi/week represents essentially the same training load for a particular group of athletes.

When talking about age-group triathletes, training paces vary quite substantially. A top age-grouper might run most of his miles at 7min/mi pace, a MOP ag might run at 9min/mi and a BOP older age-grouper might run 10-12min/mi pace. If we're talking about the MOP ag, then 50mi/week is 7.5 hours of running. That's a lot of running. It's a lot of running not only from the point of view of the time-constrained age-grouper, but also a lot of running from a training load point of view.

Instead of looking at miles, it's a lot more "productive" to look at training time. For most age-groupers, training time on the run should be around 30-35% of total training (yes, this can vary). So for an age-grouper training 12 hours/week, that's roughly 4 hours of run training.

With this starting point, the job of the coach/self-coached athlete is to work on a training progression that builds towards maximizing training load in an event-specific way.

you know for all of the people that crack on you (and you know there are many) AND for all of the smarta$$ coach responses you've posted in the past (yah i recall when that was your username) all of your critics should check out this post. it is well thought out, informative and quite helpful. you have a tremendous wealth of knowledge. kudos for not always being a smartass and posting something that would behoove the majority of this forum to learn and/or remember.

I've certainly made the same mistake in the past. Coaching high school girls made me realize male college-centric training loads were not appropriate for most runners.

I'm onboard with Paolo's post, but honestly it's not that an impressive conclusion. Of COURSE you're going to have vastly different standards for BOP vs FOP or elite athletes. That's pretty much what it comes down to.

If you want to get better at running as a triathlete, for most of us AGers, running more is the first and most important step. And even with different paces, the overall times for the middle of the range AGer training isn't that huge. For 30 miles a week run, 1min/mile difference of average pace will give the slower runner an extra 30 minutes of running per week. That's not likely going to break you at the 10-12hr or more training volume range.

And as most folks here know, the ability to average a full min/mile difference in the AG category for weekly training is a huge gap - like the difference between dead MOP and very FOP. Unless you're intentionally comparing groups that are so far apart in ability that it's ludicrous, the overall time differential in training even at 40mpw isn't that big. Heck, in my last Oly, where I ran a 6:50/mi, that was good enough for a AG finish that was only in the front 20%. Had I run 1 entire min/mile faster, I would have won the AG group run by a fair margin. I don't think you can even consider comparing runners who are more than 1min/mile apart, as it's obviously so different that even a nonathlete would know that you need different standards for training volume and speed.