Between the end of World War II and 1967, only one American won the Boston Marathon. From 1968 to 1983, the men’s race was won by an American nine times, and U.S. women won it eight times. It was normal to find an American marathoner ranked at the top of the world in Track & Field News’ annual rankings. Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, and Alberto Salazar were all ranked number one in the world more than once from 1971 to 1983. Other U.S. runners found their way into the top 10 list on a regular basis. Joan Benoit, training as voluminously as her male counterparts, won the initial women’s Olympic Marathon in 1984.

Not only U.S. marathoners enjoyed the boom. U.S. teams placed well in the IAAF Cross-Country Championships; our distance runners began winning the 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters, and steeplechase at the annual dual meet against the Soviet Union. Bill Rodgers prefaced his 1975 Boston Marathon win (and U.S. marathon record 2:09:55) with a third place finish at the World CrossCountry Championship in Morocco, a race that Craig Virgin would win twice over the next few years.

Most of these performances were fueled by a high volume of training. In 1986, Mark Nenow ran 10,000 meters in 27:20. Nenow’s training was almost entirely volume based. His time stood as the American record until May 2001.

HUGE AMOUNTS OF MILEAGE

Stories abounded in Runner’s World of athletes putting in huge amounts of mileage. Bill Rodgers did a 200-mile week before running the World CrossCountry Championship. Marty Smith, now Martin Smith, head cross-country and track coach at the University of Oregon, immortalized in print the training logs of distance runners during this era. In a Runner’s World article from October 1977, Smith reported that these athletes were training up to 200 miles a week. The cross-country athletes and middle-distance runners at the University of Oregon, all in pursuit of or claiming to be in pursuit of an Olympic medal, reported average weekly mileage of 100 to 120. The distance runners’ typical week would include a track workout, a long run, and several easy runs. 

The mileage is more astounding when you consider that running was still a sport for the fewest of minorities, and that training technique was primitive. Shoes were essentially flat. The best shoes had 8 millimeters of EVA cushioning underneath the ball of the foot, and almost nothing under the heel. Shoes weighed four ounces and fell apart after 500 miles.

Most of the mileage was run on the roads, at close to race pace. 

This wasn’t always by choice. Road atlases and running clubs determined where one could run safely. Unless you were willing to risk the elements, and several nasty encounters with dogs and the unfriendly public, you rarely found yourself on a track. The few universities that had outdoor rubberized Tartan tracks were viewed as palaces. Most tracks were cinder or asphalt with no curbing. Indoor tracks did not exist in the 1970s.

The vast majority of road running was done at speeds approaching race pace. Hard efforts weren’t always labored because so few people were running regularly that there was little room for error. The running population was small. As a result, top performers were forced to try to out-experience and out-work their rivals. This is where the philosophy of more is better comes from.

During the early 1980s, a coach named Clyde Hart at Baylor would change the way humans train. But before his influence on middle distance running became widely felt, and before the high-quality, high-drop shoes in the 1980s changed running economy, his method didn’t exist. For distance runners, volume was the only way to win. The performance of the top marathoners during this 20-year period stands as a testament to human adaptation. Through the use of enormous volumes of training and the very best biomechanical machines their bodies could muster, they found a way to win. The success that Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers and Alberto Salazar achieved by running 150-200 miles a week is a product of the American dominance in marathoning