How many miles a week should a varsity high school cross country runner be running?

Question

Drew Wartenburg · Answer

So for a high school cross-country runner there is no magic number for mileage. It's going to be very individualized and in a lot of ways it will also probably pertain somewhat to the philosophy and the sort of the coaching strategy within your high school program. One of the things that I often refer to when I talk about athletes is the training age of an athlete which is not your chronological age. You may be 18 years old or 16 years old but your training age might be three or two or if you're a new runner you're a one-year-old so your training age is the number of years that you've been engaging in in running as a sport. One thing that is important and possible is to progress your mileage from season to season and year to year so that's something that in conjunction with your coach you should discuss. Everyone's gonna have different strengths and weaknesses and part of that process is finding your sweet spot as an athlete and what's going to make you compete the most effectively.

Brad Hudson · Answer

So Cameron good question, so like anything I think it depends on your running experience Okay How many years you've been running? Okay your injury history? Have you had a lot of injuries? Your biomechanics. Okay, the surfaces you're running on So to develop as an athlete you want to be, you know, increasing your volume obviously, but it depends on what you've done before Okay, so I think a lot of the success we're having with our high school athletes is they're running more Okay, I don't know exactly what high school kids are doing in my day. I ran, you know too much I think I ran a hundred forty miles a week sometimes in high school and I think it was it was too much I should have been working on some other skills But you can run a lot. I don't recommend that much Okay, I think you know 80 to 90 is probably a very good area for high school athletes to aim for I don't think it's too much. Okay As long as they're progressing and they've started, you know It's a likely area for them to go to gradually building up. Listen to your coach. Okay? I do think people can run more and Provided there's a balance in there, you know, they're doing core work. They're doing drills They're doing hill sprints. They're doing mobility work and strength work So a balance of things I don't think You know people should stress too much on how much they're running other than it's a development of where they're going Okay, the goal hopefully is to run in college and continue running the rest of your life So you have time to extend this up and work on some other skills and I think Listen to your coach use proper smart, you know Train smart, train hard, develop your aerobic system, but be smart about it

Dave McGovern · Answer

I don't know that there's a right answer for that. It really depends on your individual situation. Whenever I'm coaching somebody, I need to know what they've been doing, what their goals are, how old they are, their injury history. So there's a lot going into it. Just in real general terms, I mean, I think back to when I started out, I think I was probably in the 25 to 30 mile range freshman year and then you go from there. Most seniors are getting up towards 50 miles a week. Certainly there are some doing 60 and 70 and successful at both ends of the spectrum. Some do very well in 50 and some do very well on higher mile at 60 or 70. So it really depends. If I knew you said varsity, so you're probably not a freshman. But if you're a junior or senior, I think heading up into the 45, 50 mile range is certainly safe. I just don't know what your times are, what your level is, but 100 is too much, 20 is too little. How about that? So

Aliphine Tuliamuk · Answer

This is a really good question about, you know, how many miles a high schooler should be running. So when I was in high school, you know, I was already training at a very high level and actually we never tracked our miles, but I think I was running anywhere between 40 and 50 miles. And so I would say, you know, anywhere between 35 maybe to 50 miles a week, depending on where you are in the season, you know, if you're loading, I think, you know, going up to 50 miles will be okay, but I do think that during the racing season, you know, the miles could go down and then you just add on some more speed for turnover and then, you know, hopefully that will help. But yeah, again, I am not, I don't, we didn't track our mileage when we were in high school. We just focused more on like speed and I think our long runs back then were actually about, you know, 50 to 60 minutes and it wasn't hard, it was mostly moderate. It was like when we did the speed walks was when we tried to push the button a little bit, but yeah, the long runs were moderate and we didn't even do tempos at the time. But of course, you know, training groups, training models have improved since when I was in high school.

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"How many miles a week should a varsity high school cross country runner be running?"