By Phil Latter
Photo Courtesy of Chris Hinkel
How much can you gain by experimenting with your long run? Ask marathoner Andrew Huebner. After stalling out at 2:27 in his first two attempts, the 26-year-old New Hampshire native turned to local triathlon coach Shawn Crotto for advice while preparing for the 2014 Grandma’s Marathon. The training seemed fairly standard until Crotto prescribed a 30-miler and a 32-miler in back-to-back weeks, complete with marathon-pace segments. “It was pretty nuts,” Huebner says. “I was a little bit freaked out, but Shawn said the distance doesn’t even matter–just go out, focus on your heart rate, and don’t let it get too high. Honestly, it was a little boring to be out there for that long.” The boredom proved worth it as Huebner dropped 10 minutes from his PR and qualified for the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. We’re not recommending everyone start running 30-milers, but Huebner’s story demonstrates how shaking up the Saturday morning routine can yield big benefits. Since the 1960s, long runs have been a weekly staple in most serious runners’ training plans. This holds as true for half-milers as marathoners. But instead of sending runners out to simply “put miles in the bank,” many coaches are now advocating higher-intensity workouts that challenge the body in more complex and race-specific ways. Running longer or faster than before opens up the possibility of making big breakthroughs in your training, provided that you tailor those challenging runs to your current fitness.
How Long is Long?
As the name implies, a long run is a purposely extended effort designed to increase your endurance. These runs produce more mitochondria and capillaries in your muscle cells, increase your aerobic capacity, improve your cardiovascular system’s efficiency, increase the amount of glycogen stored in your muscles and liver, strengthen your musculoskeletal system, give you a greater ability to work through muscular fatigue, and increase your body’s ability to use fat as fuel. “The combined physiological benefits of long runs improve your ability to maintain a pace longer,” says Pete Pfitzinger, a two-time Olympic marathoner and coauthor of Faster Road Racing and Advanced Marathoning. “Psychologically, they give you the confidence that you can handle the race distance, especially in the marathon.”
Your training history and target race distance help determine how far you need to go. Esteemed coach Jack Daniels, who has a doctorate in exercise physiology, believes long runs should comprise 20 to 25 percent of your total weekly volume. In his formula, a runner putting in 40-mile weeks would do a long run of 8 to 10 miles; a runner averaging 80 miles per week would go 16 to 20 miles. These guidelines scale the run to your current ability level and training load.
Like all rules, exceptions exist. Usually this means going longer than recommended, to increase the training stimulus. According to Danny Mackey, head coach of Brooks Beasts training group in Seattle, experienced runners competing in events over a mile need to do at least 90 minutes during their long runs to recruit fast-twitch muscle fibers and metabolically prepare the body to race long distances. Mike Smith, the women’s cross country coach at Georgetown, will go beyond that; he isn’t afraid to send his 5K and 10K runners out for 16 miles, for a very simple reason. “If we’re seeking to stress the aerobic system and an athlete is no longer receiving a stimulus at 90 minutes, we have to run farther than that,” he says. And marathoners routinely put in 18- and 20-mile long runs, even if their weekly mileage tops out at 40 or 50.
“Those kinds of hard and fast rules of 20 percent or 25 percent of total weekly volume are good, safe things to start with,” says Corey Kubatzky, a coach with Hansons Coaching Services and the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. “You can’t have a 22-mile long run for someone running only 30 miles a week. But if you feel like you need to occasionally do something different, that’s fine as long as you’re comfortable doing so.”
Changing the Pace
As important as the distance, the pace at which you do your long runs influences how much training stress you incur. Traditional LSD (long slow distance) runs lay a solid aerobic foundation for all runners, but they’re inherently limiting. By mixing paces and intensities over a long run, you stimulate different energy systems, thereby creating a more potent training effect.
Long runs can be broken into three distinct categories.
1. Conversational and Progression Long Runs
The most fundamental of the three approaches, conversational long runs serve a number of important purposes in the training program. For runners new to the sport, they develop basic endurance and musculoskeletal strength. For marathoners, they help teach the body to better use fat as fuel. And for more experienced runners, a conversational long run builds volume without interfering with other training elements.
“If you’re kind of beat up, you can get in some volume, and there can be a kind of recovery effect to the long run, depending on distance and pace,” Kubatzky says. “It’s a bit of a confidence booster. You’re building volume to a higher level [while] maintaining status quo in terms of training intensity.”
Pfitzinger suggests runners do conversational long runs at paces that are 20 to 33 percent slower than current 10K race pace or 10 to 20 percent slower than marathon pace. (For example, if you run 6:00 per mile for 10K and 6:30 per mile for the marathon, your long-run pace should be roughly between 7 and 8 minutes per mile.) This intensity should be comfortable enough for you to talk with a training partner in full sentences, but still quick enough to keep a normal stride pattern. It’s important that the pace not fall into a recovery jog, as this will mitigate some of the workout’s physiological benefits and alter your gait.
A more complex version of the conversational long run is the progression long run. These begin at conversational paces but gradually speed up over the second half. Often this occurs naturally; most experienced runners finish faster than they started, even if the effort level remains static. Pfitzinger believes progression long runs that finish near marathon pace (for marathoners) or lactate threshold pace (for shorter-distance runners) offer the opportunity to prepare for the challenges encountered in a race, without too much added stress.
“The best runners either do not slow their pace or only slow marginally during a race,” Pfitzinger says. “If you prepare with the right armory of long runs, you give yourself the best chance of being able to maintain pace during the second half of your race.”
2. Workout Long Runs
More challenging than their conversational or progressive counterparts, workout long runs fold faster segments into the mix. These segments increase the overall stress of the long run and allow you to work speed as well as endurance in the same session. They also allow you to practice running fast on fatigued legs, a critical factor in racing success.
Three and a half weeks before the 2014 Twin Cities Marathon, ZAP Fitness runner Tyler Pennel and his teammates headed to Minneapolis-St. Paul to do a challenging workout on the last 23 miles of the racecourse. Though confident in his training, Pennel had never raced a marathon. The workout long run would go a long way in determining how he approached his debut.
After a 6-mile warm-up, Pennel ran segments of 5 miles, 4 miles, 3 miles, and 1 mile at goal marathon pace, with a “float” mile in between. “It went well,” Pennel says of averaging close to 5-minute pace on the faster segments, including a steep 3-mile segment toward the end. “It was a big confidence boost heading into Twin Cities.” Pennel ended up winning in 2:13:32 with a decisive move over the hilly last 6 miles of the course, just as he’d practiced in his workout.
Pennel’s experience illustrates the ways a long run and training can be synthesized to create a powerful stimulus. The run closely mimicked what Pennel would experience on race day, in volume and intensity, but broke up the workload enough to allow for faster recovery.
Athletes competing in shorter events stand to benefit as well. Mackey guided his wife, Katie, to PRs of 4:04 in the 1500m and 15:04 in the 5,000m in 2014, making her one of the fastest Americans of all time. In an attempt to qualify for this year’s track and field world championships, Mackey has prescribed Katie the longest runs of her life (up to 17 miles) with workout segments included in the latter portions. “When Katie’s standing on the starting line next to [1500m world champion] Jenny Simpson, she can say, ‘Well, I’ve done eight long runs longer than I ever did last year.’ I don’t know what it’ll do on the track, but I think it’ll help her.”
Upping the length and intensity of Katie’s long runs allowed Mackey to develop the full range of her capabilities. “If you want to be a really holistic 5K runner like Katie, you need a mix of some of the stuff an 800m runner does and some of the stuff a marathoner does,” Mackey says. “But you need to taper it specifically to the metabolic demands and event demands.”
You can embed almost any type of workout into a long run: fartleks, marathon-pace segments, tempo runs, even mile repeats. The workout segments you put into a long run and where they’re placed is relative to what you hope to accomplish. A lower-mileage marathoner might do a hard fartlek workout at the beginning of a long run, to pre-fatigue his muscles, and then hold a steady pace over the second half. A 5K runner could include a 3-mile tempo run at the end of a long run, to practice running fast on tired legs. More than anything else, stressing the body in a new way can lead to improvement.
Not all long runs should be workout long runs, however. Coaches recommend alternating one or two workout long runs with one at conversational pace. Faster and longer long runs also require more recovery time. To help compensate, many coaches now build training plans on eight-, nine-, or 10-day cycles instead of the traditional seven. In his buildup for the Twin Cities Marathon, Pennel followed a 10-day cycle that included two workouts and a long run. “Even when we’re on a seven-day cycle, we’d only do a long run and a workout,” he says. “With the 10-day cycle, we’re still working out the same days [of the week], we just have more time to recover from the harder long runs.”
Most 9-to-5 runners default to a seven-day schedule for practical reasons. In those cases, it’s extra important to allot the proper amount of rest after a long run and to consider excluding a long run from the calendar occasionally. While you might be able to run a conversational long run on Sunday morning and hit the track Tuesday night for a group interval session, a workout like Pennel’s 23-miler requires an additional day or two to recover fully.
3. Back-to-Back Long Runs and Medium-Long Runs
In recent years, coaches like Renato Canova and Scott Simmons have popularized the idea of intense long runs and performing “special blocks” consisting of two long workouts in one day. These coaches work with world-class athletes; mere mortals who try this often end up injured or over-trained. For the rest of us, Smith suggests back-to-back long runs on consecutive days.
“I love the idea of chunking stress and chunking rest,” he says. “Back-to-back long runs are a great way to do that.”
In Smith’s system, the first day is generally longer than the second, though both are significant. These runs tax the body’s glycogen stores and help you better use fat. The challenge can be increased by adding a workout to one of the runs. Which day depends on your goal: If the quality and pace of the workout is important, put the workout in the first day’s run. If you’re seeking to put in quality work in a fatigued state, such as running marathon pace on tired legs, add the workout into the second day’s run.
Under this premise, a marathoner might run 22 miles on Saturday and 18 miles on Sunday. To practice running goal pace on weary legs, Smith says to run the last 6 to 8 miles of Sunday’s run at marathon pace. Other runners may use back-to-back long runs as an occasional boost to their training volume. A 10K runner could run 18 miles on Saturday and 14 miles on Sunday without any additional workout segments.
Back-to-back long runs are challenging, and you shouldn’t do them more than two or three times in a training cycle. A scaled-back version is the medium-long run. Popularized by Pfitzinger a decade ago, medium-long runs are 75 to 85 percent as long as regular long runs and done at a conversational or slightly progressive pace. The catch is they’re run midweek, often the day after a tempo run or speedwork session. “The muscles are being asked to maintain a sustained effort every three or four days, and the repeated demands lead to greater adaptations by the muscles,” Pfitzinger says.
Periodization, Frequency, and Philosophy
Getting the most out of your long runs requires more than just going long and hard every weekend. That can be a recipe for disaster, as overtraining carries bigger risks than undertraining. It pays to take the time to plot out your long runs over the course of an entire season, much the same way you would with intervals, speedwork, and weekly mileage.
Kubatzky says to first build the volume of the long runs to the maximum length you’ll be using for that training period. “Then, depending on the athlete and how advanced they are,” he says, “you can start mixing in some pace variations that allow more adaptations to occur.” Event-specific demands shape your long-run trajectory. Marathoners will want to increase both the length and intensity of their long runs as race day approaches (because these are highly event-specific), whereas milers gradually scale back their long runs to devote more energy to shorter repeats on the track.
Long runs also have to fit the overall philosophy of a training program. No runner better illustrates this than U.S. Olympian Amy (Hastings) Cragg. In 2011, Cragg trained for her marathon debut with the high-altitude, long-run centric Mammoth Track Club in California. Pouring herself into weekly high-intensity long runs, Cragg ran 2:27:03, the third-fastest American debut. In 2014, training at sea level under the guidance of Ray Treacy, Cragg prepared for the Chicago Marathon. Treacy fed Cragg a steady diet of long intervals and tempos, with more conversationally-paced long runs. She again ran 2:27:03.
“Ray thinks long runs are important,” Cragg says. “It’s more emphasized that you do them well, but never go over that edge. When I can get in my long run and then come back and do my workouts with consistency through a 10-day cycle, then I know I can hit a good race. It’s not about one great tempo or one great long run, it’s all the little pieces of the puzzle coming together.”
How that puzzle fits together is highly individualized. Thousands of marathoners thrive in plans like the Hansons’ that top out the long run at 16 miles. In contrast, Arthur Lydiard led a squad of New Zealand middle-distance runners to Olympic glory on a steady diet of 22-milers back in the 1960s. Then there are the Andrew Huebners of the world, hard workers who have a physical and mental breakthrough after an epic long run.
“The thing I like about long runs is they’re so flexible that you can kind of manipulate them to anyone’s training situation,” Kubatsky says. But he quickly cautions, “Anytime you’re using a long run, it’s got to make sense within the whole training scheme.”
* * *
Long, but Not Always Slow
Try out these long run variations for your next race.
Mid-Distance Progression Run
Who: Olympic 800m finalist Nick Symmonds, racing 800m to the mile
What: An hour steady, followed by 4 miles at a moderate tempo
When: Early to midseason
Why: Long runs help middle-distance runners stay strong over a period of hours or days. High school and collegiate runners often run multiple events at a meet, while professionals deal with the grind of getting through the rounds. Endless easy miles aren’t necessarily the answer for this group. “It’s going to be quality over quantity,” says Mike Smith, Georgetown women’s cross country coach. “Slogging out slow miles for lots of volume is recruiting the wrong muscle fibers and is probably poor mechanically. It’s not closely related to what they’re racing.”
To help runners like Symmonds keep up their aerobic strength, Brooks Beasts coach Danny Mackey prescribes an hour of conversational running followed by a faster final 4 miles. For a runner used to racing less than 2 minutes, this prolonged uptick in pace is challenging. It’s also effective: Symmonds’ training partner Cas Loxsom set an indoor 600m American record in February.
Second-Half Tempo
Who: University of Colorado-Colorado Springs women’s, racing 5K to 10K
What: A hilly long run of 10 to 14 miles, with the second half close to lactate threshold effort
When: Midseason
Why: As you increase your racing distance, you rely more heavily on aerobic energy. Running only easy miles limits the muscular and cardiovascular adaptations you can make on a long run, coach Corey Kubatzky says. He likes to prescribe a hilly long run that progresses from a conversational pace early to faster than half marathon pace on the hill climbs during the second half. “It’s a little shorter than our regular long runs,” he says, “but they really work that back half of that course. They’ll usually be running right on their lactate threshold over the hills at the end.”
Using inclines to increase the intensity of the workout reduces impact stress on your legs and speeds recovery. That’s important for a 5K or 10K runner, who needs to balance intervals, speedwork, tempos, and recovery days, in addition to the long run. To further reduce stress, Kubatzky alternates longer long runs with medium-length ones.
The TLT (Tempo-Long-Tempo)
Who: Olympic marathoner Janet Bawcom, under coach Jack Daniels
What: The TLT sandwiches a steady long run between two tempo runs. After a 3-mile warm-up, run 3 to 4 miles at LT pace, then immediately continue into a steady pace for the next hour. When that hour is done, once again run 3 to 4 miles at LT pace before cooling down.
When: Two to three times during a marathon buildup
Why: “The reality is that competing in the marathon is really about running a solid 10K after nearly two hours on your feet,” says Bawcom. “That will mean increasing effort, if not pace, late in the going. This workout helps get you ready for that.” Sounds simple, but it’s a grueling, and effective, workout.