Jon Browns Training

Does anybody know or have heard of how many miles Jon Brown or other top athletes put in a week and how many times train a day?

Not sure about Jon Brown but I gather some elites run aroun 120 miles a week.

Dave Bedford was the last (& first)of the big mileage monsters and he used to run up to 200mpw.

There are probably some who can get by on 90-100mpw.

as JRM said

most club runners ran 90-100 in the 70-80's

which pushed the better or should i say more determined runners to greater things

but of course thats just my opinion

If you're thinking marathon runners then during the few months before a marathon the men would be running 140+, I've seen some talking about 160 miles as a peak. They'll average over 100 miles a week for the whole year and the norm is to run twice a day most days. Sometimes they'll do an early morning and a late afternoon run with the workout session mid-late morning perhaps.
Have a look a http://www.chasingkimbia.com/

I wouldnt know... the British arent up there with the rest of the world in long distance so you dont hear much about them, Jon Brown, he ran this week in the great wales run, wasnt even in the top 6.. and Paula where is she? She's some competition out there now.. younger talent, theres no young British other than Mo Farah who isnt even British! he's Somalian.

Ultra Hamster,

Chasing Kimbia is good, i've watched it, but we're European, cant compare with the Africans.. that's why they win everything

AR5

why do you say we can't compare?

they are human like everyone else maybe it's just that there hungrier than europeans are for success

200miles a week?
what a great life....not!

There was a series about Tim Hutchings (elite 5000m and Cross country athlete) training in Athletics Weekly a few years ago.

I think it was what training he did in the winter of 1988/89.

I've looked, but can't find the relevant back issues if AW.

I recall it was a 'high volume and speed' mixture.

It was probably the same article that Frank Horwill trots out about Tim Hutchings and how he managed to get a silver in the World X/C off just 70mpw. I like Horwill, he writes some great stuff – but he also writes some rubbish and working out which is which is not always easy.

The thing about Hutchings was that he was a great x/c runner and targeted it in a way that perhaps many others don’t. It wasn’t simply a preparation for the track season but was just as, if not more, important to him. Therefore you will find in his winter training a little more ‘quality’ than many other distance runners. Having said that if you talk to Hutchings privately he will admit to running a little more mileage and a little less quality than you would imagine from Horwill’s constant references to him.

Rather than getting obsessed with the weekly mileage a different of thinking about training load is just think about doing as much as you can. So, if you are trying to be the best you can you probably need to be training twice a day for much of the year. If you do train twice a day you will probably end up running at least 70mpw, probably nearer 90mpw and quite possibly 100mpw. However during spring and summer you may be training twice a day but much shorter distances – 4mile jog in the morning followed by a fast 5miles in the evening or a short track session for example.

Steve Ovett often ran 100mpw during the winter months – he once did 186mpw ‘just to see what it was like’. Steve Cram also regularly clocked 100mpw – I recall him saying he once did 130mpw but at the end of the week he literally couldn’t get out of bed so he didn’t go up to that much again.
Seb Coe who famously was viewed as a low-mileage runner often ran more that realised at the time – he never used to log his warm and warm downs for example.

Top guys from the 70s like Foster and Stewart would often run 120-130mpw and I gather that Jon Brown will often run that sort of amount as well during his marathon preparation.

The intangible for a lot of us is: how much better would we get by seriously upping the mileage? If doubling your mileage would mean improving by, say, 15%, it might well be worth doing, and making sacrifices on other aspects of your life to achieve it; for 5%, it is a lot more marginal. But you just don't know before you try it.

Bazza, I posted a typical Steve Ovett winnter week on the Steve Ovett 1977 'thread'.

It was taken from the 1999 Spring edition of the British Milers Club magazine.

Ovett ran approx 100mpw as you state.

Recall Cram stating that during the winter of 84/85, he was running regularly 100mpw. Probably motivated by being runner up to Coe in Los Angeles 1500m.

Cram didn't have a bad 1985 track season !