Longest duration of long run for HS athletes

I think it’s still useful to consider mileage since pace can be variable throughout the season as kids’ bases get stronger. 100 minutes at 7 flat is quite an ambitious long run for HSers and they might benefit from making it more like 85 (12mi vs 14+). If you have them stick to a prescribed pace, I don’t see why not. Longest run I ever did in HS was about 90 minutes @ 7:20 (PR 16:45, easy days around 7:30 most of the time).

I think minutes work more for when you can’t measure. Speed oriented guys train faster on easy days, and I’m not sure this distortion works well.

Why deny mileage advantages for endurance talents?

I think your proposed time make sense for your A group. 70 min might be too much of an ask for the D group depending on their ability; if they are truly poor runners (at this point in their life), an hour might be a pretty big accomplishment.

I don't follow the logic on this. At the end of the day your body only reacts to two things: Effort and time at that effort. Your body does not differentiate that you ran 7.56 miles or 8.34 miles, it gets the stimulus at running at an aerobic effort for 60'.

To be clear, when it comes to any form of speed endurance intervals or anaerobic threshold repeats, this is done over a measured distance loop, however all long runs and aerobic runs will be for time.

This will be helpful, largely in season when we need to recovery between higher-intensity stimuli throughout the season, a 6 mile recovery run can drag out a lot longer and be a bigger exertion than we want on those days the legs aren't moving so fast.

It's hard to say what exact pace my groups are running. Only two runners have GPS watches total and maybe half of the team has a watch period. I'd say my top end guys group keeps their aerobic/long run pace between 8 and 9 per mile, while my top end girls groups are 8:30-10 per mile. I really stress the importance of keeping our easy days easy and our hard days hard, and they have been receptive to that.

BUt at the same time, I am looking for them to push a bit more on long runs primarily on the back half.

I got everyone to at least an 8 mile run this past season. They all caught on to the progression of distance/workouts throughout the year, so they were actually excited for long runs to increase their "new longest run ever." However, it did really wipe some of my very green runners.

The program before I had inherited it never had anyone run over 6 miles.

I think in your case, running for time is absolutely a good idea since you do emphasize running easy. 100 minutes for your top group shouldn’t be bad at all, although as another poster pointed out, your D group might be closer to 50-60 minutes once all is built up.

I'll add that I don't think every long run should be 'easy'. The long run is a training day. I don't mean you have to crank it, but get a little uncomfortable for part of it. For example Cam Levins. He does his workouts in the 4:40-4:50 range, easy runs around 7:20, but his long runs are often a steady 6:00-6:10. That's not a hard pace, but it's not as slow and easy as his true easy days.

Also just do mileage. Your slower people might only get up to 7 or 8 miles, your faster people can get up to 12 miles. I think 100 minutes is overkill for high school 5k training. That's probably 15 miles for a 16:30 minute 5k runner, a stud would be running 16+ miles and that's not necessary for high school 3200/5k training.

Long runs should be just below lactate threshold, maybe go over threshold for parts of it.

Still have to think about mileage. You put things in duration for athletes glued to mileage numbers & pace to just take some emphasis off of that. You still can't have athletes running 70 & 100min if they're not ready for it. Athletes are different & probably shouldn't be grouped together as tightly as that. You might have some group A runners who thrive on lower mileage or who are injury prone & don't need to be knocking out 100min runs. Is there a plan to progress from those numbers? To be there every weekend now through the summer? In season? It does seem like a lot. 70min is probably a lot for Group D runners & 100min is going to get good HSers around 15 miles. Should be at ~70mpw for that.

Consistency is good for HS athletes. Getting most to around an hour is great. Good runners up to 80-90min is probably a good sweet spot area to live in. But there are kids who will thrive on mileage & will be ready to handle more. Just gotta make sure the kids are ready for what you give them & that they don't dread the sessions.

I think 12-14 is about all you need.

Yeah, most of the time on the LR day I will tell the top guys to go out for X amount of time and turn around, the second group to go out for Y, the girls for Z. Miles are nice to track and such, but all miles are not the same, time is probably a better measure in some circumstances.

Assuming you have something like 1 in 4 running with A Group, I don't like 100 minutes much at all. If you want them to get extra volume in, have them run a double that day. But I don't see any benefits to running more than about 60-75 minutes at a time for a 5K runner in HS. This isn't marathon training.

re the pacing concerns relative to time, we would do fairly throttled up runs for "distance" and slow recovery runs for "time." as in, 6x1 mi intervals; but 45 or 60 min. recovery run. 60 is as long as it got, because much longer starts to defeat the recovery point, and you can't get too far off campus into mischief (and back) in an hour.

re concerns about distance variability relative to time, that's gonna be 99% fake news. yes, in theory if kid A wanted 7 min and kid B wanted 8 min, then it's throttled different and serves different purposes. but that's neglecting you are telling kids, ok, today is a nice slow hour jog. my experience you didn't have to tell us twice. nor is the 8 minute jog of your fastest runner any quicker than a JV kid's 8 minute pace.

any event way it was dealt with at our school was varsity went one way, subvarsity were a group and went another. but there was literally no one at the school running so slow it mattered, i think it was more to keep group size down and make sure there was running and not just goofing off someplace.

My athletes vary from 6 to 12 as their longest run. Some are easy and some I give them a pace target to hit to make it more of an effort. Depends on where we are in the season.

Seems like a good consensus that 90' is a good cap for the highest end group.

My group A will likely only be a couple runners year in and year out, with B and C being the bulk of the team, and group D being the new runners.

With that said, what do many of you guys cap your aerobic/recovery runs at for distance/duration. Right now I have my A group up to 70' and D group up to 50', but 60' and 45' seems more appropriate respectively. Trying to figure how to get more volume in without doubling for the groups as many of my athletes work and early morning practices are tough since I know these kids are not getting enough sleep as it is.

For a runner with at least 10:00 ability, 8-9 minutes per mile is probably too slow. And for some, running that slowly can feal awkward.

As for the distance, there is a wide margin of error and it’s not going to have much of an affect on race performance.

After my first couple years coaching I also moved to more timed running. Logistics wise its easier with kids that way. 80-90min should be enough for 3rd or 4th year runners.