My daughter wants to reduce her 2-miler time and I was wondering the better training approach:

- increase distance so 2 miles seems less strenuous
- train at desired pace until you can hit the 2 mile distance

What's the general thought on which approach is better?

Mayor West said:

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My daughter wants to reduce her 2-miler time and I was wondering the better training approach:

- increase distance so 2 miles seems less strenuous
- train at desired pace until you can hit the 2 mile distance

What's the general thought on which approach is better?

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Some version of option 1. There are way more knowledgeable people on here that can help with a plan, but even I know the bold is extremely wrong.

Sounds like middle school cross country. Also sounds like you don't have a strong middle school or HS program, or somebody would be coaching her.

My daughter runs varsity for a top 5 state team in 6A, and finished 6th in 8th grade at the district 2 mile race.

Her mileage load can vary greatly, but I'd first see if she can handle around 20 miles per week. If she runs 5 days, that would be 2 longer runs of 4-5 miles (one slow and one tempo), a weekly time trial of 2 miles, and 2 speed workouts involving 8 200 repeats (jog 400 in between), and maybe 6 400 repeats, jogging a lap in between. A mile or half-mile warmup is always good. You can always cut a day and do 4 days a week, but you have to mix long/fast, long/slow, short/fast, and target distance runs.

Be careful with the long, slow runs. They produce long, slow runners. They are very important for us distance folks, but they are not the highest priority right now.

This will get her much faster, to the point where she'll need a real coach in no time.

2 miles will be very anaerobic. On off days, look at plyometrics for strengthening fast twitch, and crunches or pullups for core.

My daughter just signed to run distance at South Alabama. I knew nothing of running when she started her journey.

My answer depends on her age , desire, and ability.

My email is in my profile and would be glad to put the girls in touch.

Our school produced some really good middle to long distance runners (myself included). I'm 42 now but our coach probably still does the same for his athletes now. He still produces state competing athletes. Back then he would do all the workouts with the Jr High and HS runners to push us. I have no idea how many miles he logged in a day.

My memory sucks but this is what our workouts resembled.

Mon: (5) 400m repeats with a lap jog in between.
Tues: Distance runs that started around 30-40 min at the beginning of the season to 60 min runs at the end of the season. Within those runs we would do 5 min pushes but I don't remember how spaced out they were.
Wed: (I think) More of a middle distant interval training. (4 or 5) 1000m or 1200m repeats.
Thurs: Similar to Tuesday.
(We ended our workouts with strides. We would run the length of our football field simulating a sprint at the end of a race. We'd start off slow and increase to an all out sprint.)

What I noticed is that those of us that had natural speed but not necessarily sprinter speed were the better when it came to middle distance. (I consider a 2 mile race is more of a borderline middle distance for a HS athlete but long distance for a Jr High athlete)

I think a fan of mixing it up. When I was at my best I increased mileage by running in the mornings a few times a week outside of my afternoon workouts. But that was after few weeks of training, not something that I jumped into.

Thanks for the replies! This is part of a fitness test for middle school aged soccer (coach is looking for 13:30 2 mile)

Haha. I had a baseball coach who wanted a 6 minute mile. All it did was ruin my Christmas break one year. I got my 5:55, but turns out he was just jacking his jaw. I was cursed to be one of the kids who listened to coaches.

Gah, same here, though I think our number was 6:30. We had to hit that in order to get on the field coming back from summer or Christmas. Looking back on it now, it did nothing performance-wise for most of our team. Maybe the pitchers where there is conceivably some tie to leg endurance and performance, but that's even a stretch. I guess it was just a way to make sure we didn't sit on our ass all break.

Four things.

Long and slow ( 4 miles little regard to pace)
Tempo work (3 miles :15/mile slower then desired pace of race & 1 mile :30 faster then 2 mile time)
Sprint work. (400 and 800)
strength and flexibility work.(explosion work and mobility)

I ran the mile and played soccer and basketball. Dropped mile time from around 6 to 4:47 in 7th grade. Still works for me but I am too heavy and old to really fly.

Edit: I just saw it was for a middle school fitness test.

Running consistently is the very first thing that will introduce big results.
Don't start having her do Fartleks, 400m repeats, or anything of the like if she isn't already running consistently for at least 20-30min a day 5 days a week for 3-4 weeks. If she isn't there, then that is a great goal to get to!

That is the start and then you can build into something more specific from there if she needs it. For what she's looking for, all she needs is just a consistent base of moderate to easy running.

Sub4 said:

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94chem said:

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Be careful with the long, slow runs. They produce long, slow runners. They are very important for us distance folks, but they are not the highest priority right now.

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With all due respect, this is a Myth, One I used to believe. Easy running should consist of 80% of an athlete's workload. (easy as a relative effort, paces can vary greatly within the same athlete day by day)

There is speed so slow that there is no benefit, but it feels arduous for an athlete. Far far too many athletes train too hard on their easy days. Best to error on the side of too easy than too hard.

Want to know the current best methods? Look at the pros, how to they train

Current professional training regimens follow the training style set out by Arthur Lydiard in the '60s and later set the foundation upon which most all Professional and College coaches build their programs on. Shortly later on Jack Daniels began Lab testing training theories and arrived at the same conclusions as Lydiard did a decade earlier. The science is always getting better but one thing we know for sure is that keep hard days hard, and easy days easy.

The Daniels Running Formula is a great resource on this.

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Pros run more than 20 miles per week.

94chem said:

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Sub4 said:

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94chem said:

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Be careful with the long, slow runs. They produce long, slow runners. They are very important for us distance folks, but they are not the highest priority right now.

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Pros run more than 20 miles per week.

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Aerobic Strength is a function of time spent running. You would rather run for longer at a slower pace than faster.
There is a tradeoff in speed and how far you can go while exerting the same relative effort. Workouts are different but for regulars runs, this holds true.


If you run exclusively at a butt slow jog that has no relative effort, then yes I agree with you because you're not getting fit. If that's the point you were trying to make I apologize.

Usually, when kids hear that running slow will make you slow, it leads kids to believe that running slow is bad. On an effort scale of 1-10, kids should be doing their easy runs in the 3-4 range, which still feels slow, but is not in the category I called, "Butt slow jogging"

I came down kinda hard on this issue because in Texas there are a lot of Highschool programs that emphasize Fast training above all else and scare kids away from easy runs. (Pavvo Programs) These programs get fast results but end not setting the kids up for the long term beyond highschool.

Kids are different, they recover a whole lot better than us old farts. Look at the fastest long distance runners in the world, most ran shorter distances growing up. Want to run a fast mile? Do fast 400s. Same goes for this, do 400s and 800s to get faster in the 2 mile. I never raced a mile growing up but did 400s in middle school, was sub 5 minutes in the mile.

P.U.T.U said:

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Kids are different, they recover a whole lot better than us old farts. Look at the fastest long distance runners in the world, most ran shorter distances growing up. Want to run a fast mile? Do fast 400s. Same goes for this, do 400s and 800s to get faster in the 2 mile. I never raced a mile growing up but did 400s in middle school, was sub 5 minutes in the mile.

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Exactly. Kids don't need big mileage, and don't need 8 miler snail slogs on Saturday morning to consume half their training schedule.

13:30 2-mile time for a junior high girl soccer program fitness test? I've coached soccer at the 6A level for a solid program north of Dallas and we didn't even start our freshmen boys at that goal. Heck, even most of our freshmen cross country girls weren't running that split at two miles and we were a dang good program.

TheClaw07 said:

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13:30 2-mile time for a junior high girl soccer program fitness test? I've coached soccer at the 6A level for a solid program north of Dallas and we didn't even start our freshmen boys at that goal. Heck, even most of our freshmen cross country girls weren't running that split at two miles and we were a dang good program.

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Yeah, it's coach blowing smoke. Kinda been addressed in earlier posts, but yeah, you're right.