Percent of Quality Mileage During Peak Weeks

[Justin Cole]

Just curious,
What are your optimal ratios of quality miles vs easy (junk) miles during a peak week. I know this will vary a lot from person to person. The last few weeks, I've been running 12% of my miles as speedwork and 25-30% as a long run (not a peak week) but I've been turning in race times comparable to when I was in college. In school I was running 25% as speedwork and 20% as long runs. Its been pretty obvious that my coach was having me do WAY too much volume as speedwork and I was pretty much just chronically exhausted and injured during the season. So what are your "optimum" percentages in a perfect world?

[Jake Krong]

This is a good topic. It definitely varies person to person, and will vary a lot depending on what event you are focusing on as well.

Lately my weekly totals have been 10-15% "high quality" miles (marathon goal pace or faster), and then my long run usually ends up being about 15% of the weekly total as well. But I run a lot of miles, so those numbers might look more like 20%/20% if I was running more in the range of 100mpw. I anticipate that the percentage of faster miles I run will creep up a bit in the upcoming weeks as I get closer to my goal race. I'm keeping a more detailed spreadsheet with all that kind of data this year - I think it will be interesting to look at the trends of different training cycles.

25% speedwork is probably a lot - especially if you really are thinking of speedwork as 5K/10K pace or faster. To me that could be a recipe for disaster. But again, it depends on the person - if you are running 40-50mpw, then maybe that is a realistic figure.

And since junk miles were brought up I have to toss in my one of my favorite sayings - "junk" miles got Bill Rodgers to 2:09 

[Jake Krong]

I looked at my totals from the fall - for the 10 week stretch that was the bulk of my marathon training (up until a week out from the race) - I averaged 118 miles per week, and 13% of the miles were "quality" (MP or faster).

[Rob Murphy]

There is almost always no such thing as "junk" mileage. It's all good.

[Jon Allen]

The year I set my marathon PR and had one of my best years ever of racing, I did less than 11% speedwork, with only 2.5% faster than marathon pace.  Last year, I trained mainly for ultras but still set my 5k PR with only 8% of my miles being speedwork, and only 1% miles faster than marathon pace.  Yes, a 5k PR with only 1% of miles faster than marathon pace (and all of that was simply races, no workouts).  It simply reinforced that base miles will get you 90+% of the way there.

[allie]

my current percentage (7 weeks into a marathon training cycle) is 0.51%. 

[Rob Murphy]

Allie, I'm pretty sure that .51% was an accident right? Like running from the law or a bathroom emergency?

[Jon Allen]

She was just feeling good one day running down Emigration Canyon and didn't realize she was running that fast till it was over...

[Andrea North]

During my marathon build-up last year, I was in the 10-20% range for quality miles. I was running 70-80 mpw and 18-22 miles for long runs.

Allie - just wait until you start your next marathon build-up with me! Tempo runs, track workouts, etc. are all in your summer future....

[allie]

sorry...math error (james just passed out). what i meant to say was 5.1%. sometimes my fingers work faster than my brain.
i'm never going to hear the end of this...

[Jake Krong]

You were only off by a factor of 10. I just figured you did 1 x 400m each week as your speed workout.

[Justin Cole]

Since my 2 big races this year are a 50k and marathon it sounds like I'm right in the money as far as percentages go! Sweet! I'm trying to balance that out to stay competitive in the local age group points series, which is everything from 2mi-marathon. It's been fun to think about and come up with a calendar for the variety of distances, and this plan seems to be giving good results! I love the quote about "junk" miles, there's gotta be a better term (I just dont know it).