One of my favorite historical trends that I’ve used to illustrate the importance of high mileage and high quality aerobic work is the yearly count of elite high school boys performances at one and two miles, as measured by the number of miles under 4:10 and two-miles under 9:00. The graph below, which is based on data put together by (if I recall correctly) former steeplechase American record holder George “Malmo” Malley, illustrates plainly what many coaches and longtime followers of the sport already know: high school running was at a very high level during the 1970s, but plummeted throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, eventually beginning to recover around the year 2000. I'd love to look at similar data for girls, but due to the unfortunate history of sexism in sport, high school girls didn't even run the two-mile until relatively recently.
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Note that the moving average trendline lags by a few years in the 2000s due to lack of recent data |
The explanation for the rise,
fall, and resurgence of top performances has usually been ascribed to the
training methods popular during the various decades. Arthur Lydiard’s Run to the Top was
published in 1962, and Frank Shorter’s Olympic Marathon victory came ten years
later in 1972. These two events are
generally credited with popularizing not only the sport, but what can be crudely called the “high
mileage approach”—a training philosophy centered on building aerobic fitness
with high mileage and high-end aerobic work.
Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, Lasse Viren, and virtually all of the
top-flight runners "back in the day" were logging 15-20 miles a day and weren’t afraid to say it. High school times rose to new heights, with
over ten sub-9 two-mile times per year throughout the ‘70s. But by the end of the decade, the top-flight
performances had started to wane.
Some believe that the injuries
sustained by many high-mileage runners discouraged coaches and athletes from
training at large volumes, but the rise in popularity of low-mileage,
high-intensity anaerobic training, as popularized by Frank Horwill’s “5-pace
system” and used by Sebastian Coe to great effect most certainly played a
role. Horwill’s system emphasizes
quality over quantity. Sebastian Coe’s
famous quip that long, slow distance makes long slow runners held fast as truth
for a long time. Horwill and Coe-style
training focuses on fast paces and hard workouts as the bread and butter of
training. Two, three, or even four hard
days in a row is not out of the norm, and all “mileage” is done at a fast pace. While it’s hard for me to withhold my bias
here, I ought to point out that some athletes
were very successful with this high-intensity low-mileage approach, most
notably Sebastian Coe himself. And, anecdotally, many coaches and athletes
report that they see a rapid surge in performance after a few months of
Horwill/Coe style training.
But the numbers don’t back up the
promise of the system. The decline of
American distance running in the ‘80s and ‘90s is evident both on the elite
level and among top high school times.
American high school running was in the doldrums for several years; on
multiple occasions, not a single high
school boy broke nine minutes for two miles in the entire country. By 1999, high school running had begun to
claw its way back, and by 2004, top performances had returned to the level they
were at in the ‘70s. Several coaches and
fans of the sport (including myself) believe that this is because of a return
to higher mileage and aerobic development.
Advocates of aerobic development
and high(er) mileage training often have some choice words for the Horwill/Coe approach. Take this quote from modern-day Lydiard
acolyte John Kellogg:
People
like Horwill and Coe set back Western running 20 years. It took the advent of
internet message boards and mailing lists to bring the truth about training
straight from the runners of the 1970s to the aspiring runners of the present
day. That has undone much of what was destroyed by low- to moderate-mileage
"running" in those bleak years.
The advent of the internet allowed
coaches and athletes to draw from a much larger pool of knowledge about training. The huge success of top athletes in the ‘70s,
backed by their higher mileage and focus on aerobic, not anaerobic,
development, was a powerful testament to what constitutes “proper” training.
At least, that’s the traditional narrative
amongst runners who believe in the high mileage approach. I have encountered alternative explanations
over the years, none of which are satisfactory.
During the ‘90s, some people proposed that kids were living increasingly
sedentary lifestyles, which prevented them from reaching their athletic
potential. But in the 2000s, childhood
obesity and inactivity are as bad as ever, yet elite times have recovered. Another explanation is that kids during the ‘80s
and ‘90s couldn’t compare their times with those from around the country, though this doesn’t explain why high school running was so great in the
1970s.
But yesterday I encountered a new explanation put forth by Greg Hitchcock at Slowtwitch.com, a triathlon
website. Hitchcock argues that
population demographics explain all of the variance in top high school
times. He points to trends in birth
rates as evidence for this. When I
looked into this, I was worried, because birth rates do indeed seem to track
about 18 years (the age of a high school senior) behind the trend of running performances. Could this spell the end of the road for the
high-mileage/high-end aerobic camp? I did some digging and decided to match the
number of elite mile and two-mile performances per year with the birth rate 18
years prior—essentially, calculating the rate
of elite high school performances among high school boys.
To make things easier, I translated the ratios into elite performances
per million 18-year-old boys. If
Hitchcock is right, then the line should be more or less flat. This would mean that training differences were
not so important, and some fraction of every million kids is destined to become
an elite high school runner.
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Population demographics do not account for the trend in elite times. Note that some years are missing. |
However, as illustrated in the graph
above, the trend still holds true after controlling for population
demographics. High school running is still in the doldrums for much of the ‘80s,
and still doesn’t recover until about
2000. Now, my methods are a bit crude: the
number of births 18 years prior is not a phenomenal measurement of the number
of 15-18 year olds in the United States, because of immigration, emigration,
and a few other factors. But I’d be
willing to bet a lot of money that even after controlling for these relatively small factors, the trend
would remain.
Indeed, there are a few subtleties
that bolster the different-training explanation for the rise, fall, and
resurgence of high school running. As
lower mileage and hard anaerobic training become more popular, the rate of top
two-mile times falls more sharply than the rate of top mile times. This makes sense, as lower mileage programs
often find success with shorter events.
The two-mile relies more heavily on aerobic fitness than the mile does,
so it is logical that two-mile performances would be inferior to mile
performances if the average high schooler was neglecting his aerobic fitness
with low-mileage training. Similarly,
two-mile performances drop earlier and recover later than mile performances. Given that building aerobic fitness is a long-term undertaking, this trend makes
sense too. By extension, you could even
argue that the upswing in American distance running at the international level
in the late 2000s through today is a direct result of better high school
training during the early and mid-2000s.
So, after a bit of statistical
number-crunching, the trend holds up. Higher
mileage and a focus on aerobic development set you up for success in your later
years. And increased competition has a
self-perpetuating effect too. In my own
state of Minnesota, the top high school runners were cranking out unreal
performances in the mid- and late 2000s.
Now, four or five years later, many of those runners are now at the top
of the sport. Off the top of my head, I
can think of four or five sub-4 milers, several NCAA DI All-Americans, and
multiple Olympic Trials and US Championships qualifiers. No doubt all of this was enabled by high
school training that was designed with their long-term success in mind, not
just short-term results.
Are there any records showing distance-related injuries of the elite runners during the same period, and was there a correlation? It would bolster your position if you observed significantly fewer injuries during the episodes of highest performance, eg 1976 and 2005.
ReplyDeleteJohn,
ReplyDeleteSome excellent research & good analysis.
Here in the UK the lessons have by and large yet to be learned. Part of the reason is that talented youngsters tend to join "track clubs" rather than the old style "harrier clubs" that we used to have. As a result the coaching tends to be skewed in the direction of anaerobic type interval style running rather than building an aerobic foundation.
One caveat that I would throw in .... from a personal perspective as a runner of limited talent who recorded lifetime bests of: 5K 14-30; 10K: 30 minutes; & HM: 66 minutes on an average of 60 miles per week of predominantly aerobic running ... it may not be the overall mileage (volume) that's critical but the BALANCE between aerobic & anaerobic training .... Bernard Lagat is not big mileage but his coach has him training the right balance of aerobic v anaerobic type training.
I think the Horwill/Coe approach, while part of the problem, is just a part of a larger equation. I think Runner's World shares a large part of the blame. The magazine dumbed down the training and way too many high school coaches picked up Runner's World to glean their workouts rather than seek out Lydiard's book. Just my opinion, but you're right, the Internet and more specifically Dyestat reshaped the approach to high school training. Mileage was something no longer to be feared.
ReplyDeleteYou are Correct .
ReplyDeleteTake a look at this post on literary terms.
ReplyDelete