A Prep Runner's Summer Trial of Miles

Gelagle divided his miles into a series of workouts, and his 100-mile week -- like all of his weeks -- required several exhausting days: a 20-mile run at a pace of about six minutes per mile; a tempo run, which required five miles done at 85 percent of racing speed; six one-mile repeats, all run in less than five minutes with only three minutes of rest between each mile.

Each of those workouts required two or three miles of jogging to warm up and cool down. In order to break up those hard days, Gelagle took off days in between -- days when he'd merely run 10 or 12 miles.

As for real off days? Gelagle had three of those all summer.

The seemingly extreme regimen was grounded in common sense, Gelagle said. Having run 100 miles in a week, how could he become fatigued during a 5-kilometer cross-country race?

"I can basically sprint that distance now, and I'll never get too tired," Gelagle said. "Who's going to have the legs to keep up with me?"

So far, almost nobody. Gelagle ran the fastest 2,500-meter split (7 minutes 27 seconds) at the Sept. 17 Brentsville Relays, his first race of the season. He ran a 3.5-mile preseason training run in 17:19 -- more than a minute faster than the school record he set last year. As the season goes on, he expects to get stronger.

"The way my coach explained it, running miles is like putting money in a bank," Gelagle said. "The more miles you store up and put in the bank during the offseason, the more money you'll have saved up for the end of the season. Your base gets stronger."

Other coaches, though, use a different analogy. Think of a runner's body like a car, they said. No matter how well it's cared for, the car is destined to break down after a certain number of miles. So the more miles a person runs, the less his body has left.

That fear has convinced several elite area runners to train with lower-mileage workouts. Steven Duplinsky, a senior All-Met from Georgetown Prep, ran about 35 miles per week and cross-trained by swimming every other day this summer. Kelly Reinwald, a sophomore All-Met from North Stafford, took June off to recover and play soccer. Brad Siragusa, a senior All-Met from Chantilly, ran about 50 miles each week, and his longest run of the summer barely eclipsed 10 miles.

Even Maryland's 2004 state champion, Broadneck junior Matthew Centrowitz, limited his summer training. He never ran more than 46 miles in a week, he said, and he always took Saturdays off. "I don't want to get hurt and then have to slow down," Centrowitz said. "I'd rather be safe and take it slow naturally."

Forest Park senior Stefanie Slekis lost that option during the summer of 2004, when her high-mileage plan spiraled into a series of injuries. After running 70 miles a week for much of that summer, Slekis developed tendinitis in her left hip, then joint inflammation in the same area. It took 16 weeks of intense physical therapy before Slekis could run again. Even then, she could only jog gingerly.

"I ran too much, then I got hurt and kept running for awhile with injuries," Slekis said. "It took a long time to get back healthy, and now I'm taking it slow. I dropped down to about 45 miles a week this summer. I've heard that's the perfect amount."