Low mileage can work wrote:
He was either lying then, or he is lying now. Why do you assume he is telling the truth now? I don't get it. Either way, he has lied about his training. I actually like Seb Coe and was a huge fan of his back in his heyday, but it is disappointing to me to find out that he was either
lying back then or that he is lying now. Why doesn't that bother you?
Also, it is a pretty common occurence for the majority of runners, both world class and non world class, to exaggerate their mileage years later. Most people have this distant memory of their one 100 mile week and seem to remember that it was how they always trained. This would be a great case study: Ask 100 runners how many miles a week they averaged 20 years ago, and then go through their training logs and compare what they really did. I am guessing 80% or more will say they did more mileage than they did. It is human nature and it seems like Seb is doing the same thing.
Actually you are not representing what Coe said himself. You have forgotten in the space of 1 day what Martin really wrote, or you didn't read it well to start with.
He said, "twice daily," and "up to 100 miles a week," and "it probably averaged 70 miles per week."
This is still low mileage.
I do agree with you about the "20 years ago" mileage thing. We always remember ourselves as the best we were. When in control of my own training (over summer and winter) in high school I remembered running 50 a week before Freshman track, 60 a week before soph. XC, 60 a week before soph. track and then 70-85 before Junior XC.
I checked my logs to see how close I was and I actually averaged 46 (vs. 50 perceived), 62 (vs. 60 perceived), 58 (vs. 60 perceived) and these were the weeks before XC Junior year:
32 Taper for State Meet - Track
38 Rest week
32 Rest week
70
69
82
58
74
78
82
68
72
73
80
83
73
So, for myself that is ~ 75 mpw AVERAGE for 13 weeks, and there is only ONE week that falls outside of the remembered 70-85 range.
Why is it so hard to think that Coe could remember things as accurately as I did? It was the same time frame and he did everything else better than I did?