Triatheletes don't run enough (Page 3)

Interesting thread. I can certainly say I never had an injury prior to starting to train for tris. When I was just running, I was doing 35-40 miles a week, almost always 7 days a week, with my mileage in a fairly constrained range betw. 4 and 10.5 miles a day. During tri season, I'm typically running about 18-22 miles a week, 3-4 runs a week. I've actually gotten faster, but I've also experienced greater frequency of minor injuries (runners knee last winter, Achilles strain this summer, that sort of thing), esp. when I upped my mileage for marathon prep. Don't know if the one thing has anything to do with the other...it could be I'm just gettin' up in years...

Sounds similar to Jack Daniels, who says runners shouldn't have their long runs be more than 25-30% of their weekly mileage for injury prevention reasons. His reasoning is that the long run will be too hard on the connective tissues if it is too big of a training load.

However, Daniels says to be sensible about this, and that a person only running 3 or 4 times per week wouldn't really fit in these guidelines. Add in the cycling, which strengthens some of the connective tissues even more, and you can get away with a little more.

More than frequency for the sake of frequency, I think being sensible about your long run is more important, and if you're only running 3 times per week a second long run would be a good idea. For example, there's a big difference between running 13m/10m/7m per week and running 20m/5m/5m per week, even though the training load may be the same. The later, in my opinion, is asking for trouble, at least for a large sample of people.

That said, as long as it doesn't effect the quality of your other runs, I think adding a couple 20-30 min runs off the bike is a great way to get more running done...