philosophy

The high mileage/low mileage, quantity/quality argument goes on for ever if given the chance and at the end of it neither side is convinced.

Dr. Nicholas Romanov, developer of the Pose Method, just made me laugh with his view of the Long Slow Distance philosophy:

"Imagine you want to be able to high-jump 2m, and to achieve that you practice high-jumping 1m 50cm"...

to which I would add....

very slowly and for 2-3 hours at a time.

Whenever I am tempted to get involved in one of these discussions, I remind myself of a couple of things.

First, the elites constitute, what?, maybe 1 percent of all runners. They are genetically gifted. The elite of the elite, the world record setters and Olympic champions, are genetic freaks. The reason that some of them run 150 miles a week is because they can. The reason that some of them run sub-4 miles in training off 40 miles a week -- is because they can. They have the genetics, the physical ablity and the mental capacity to take extreme and/or intense workloads. (Thank you Richard Gibbens of the amazing www.powerrunning.com site for pointing this out to me.)