What is a Long Run?
Asheville Marathon Prep (Ep 9)
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One big question people have, myself included, when they first start out on this running journey is: how many miles should I run in preparation for my race?
When I trained for my very first half marathon, I wanted to run the full 13 miles so badly. It was mainly a psychological thing. I needed to know I could go the full distance.
Most training plans, influencers, and people you talk to will say you only need to get up to 10 miles and adrenaline, race day, and a proper taper will take you the next 3.
While that is true, I ignored that advice and ran the full 13 anyways.
It was a psychological boost, but was it the right thing to do?
How much should we run on those pesky long runs and what is the point of a long run anyways? Is it all just for psychological adaptations, physical, or both?
That is today’s topic…the long run.
Let’s jump in!
What is a Long Run?
I don’t actually think I have the proper credentials to answer this question. I think the long run is super simple, and yet can be debated forever.
It’s like asking someone what the purpose to life is. Even among Christians, you’d get diferent answers. But at the end of the day, all Christian’s answers will boil down to glorifying God. It might sound different, the actions they say might be slightly different, but at the end that is the goal.
Long runs are like that too. They may look and sound different, but at the end of the day we are all talking about the same thing.
So instead of defining a long run, I’ll just tell you how I’m currently thinking about long runs and how I’m currently implementing them in my training.
For now, in my training a long run is between 15 and 22 miles. I have “medium” long runs throughout the week that I would specify are in the 10 to 15 mile range.
Anything less than 10 is going to be some kind of quality session with more intense paces, or an easy run with the purpose being for recovery.
So What is the Purpose of a Long Run?
Part of the goal with long runs is we want to train our legs the best we can to handle the mysterious final 10K of the marathon.
After mile 20 all bets are off on what your body will do, but the more time you spend at race pace on fatigued legs, the more comfortable those final miles will feel.
The idea is to sprinkle marathon paced long runs in throughout the block, but not every single week. As your block progresses, you want to “build” towards peak fitness.
How Fast Should You Go?
This training block, I’ve tried a new strategy. There is a new term…or new to me…called “grey zone running.”
If you haven’t heard of zone 2 running by now, it has been all the rage for a while. Zone 2 has to do with your heart rate. It is a specific heart rate range where you are supposed to have the best bang for your buck in terms of endurance for longevity purposes.
It is a zone that is high enough to receive aerobic benefit, but still recover in your legs and not thrash them like if you were running at a faster pace.
Then if we skip up to zone 4, this is called our threshold zone. This is the zone where we will approach lactate threshold (LT for short). Lactate builds in your blood and is flushed out at a certain rate.
LT is the point when the amount of lactate we build up in our muscles exceeds the amount we can flush out. As a tangible example, this is the point when your legs start to feel like they are burning and you just can’t keep running anymore. It feels physically impossible.
They say zone 4 is a good spot for around a 60 minute to 90 minute long race like a half marathon or 10K.
Then we move up to zone 5. This is targeting our v02 max system. This has to do with how much oxygen your blood and lungs can move in your body in a given amount of time. More or less. Put into practice, this is essentially sprinting. And it is also one of the leading factors for longevity.
To recap…for longevity, the hype is around zone 2 and then zone4/5.
But what about zone 3?
This is that grey zone I was talking about. The longevity experts don’t love it, but endurance athletes are starting to dabble with it.
Especially when it comes to longer paced runs.
In other words, for a while it seemed like the idea for a long run was to run a longer distance, but at your easy zone 2 pace.
It’s starting to become popular to run long runs at a “moderate” pace. This is still slower than marathon pace, but now you are getting the heart rate up to zone 3.
Zone 3, by the way, is the zone you’ll want to race your marathon at anyways, so it only makes sense that the more time we spend running in that heart rate zone, the more accustomed to it we will be.
Types of Long Runs
This actually segues us into another topic of long runs: the types of long runs.
I won’t spend a ton of time on this, but for me there have been 3 different types of long runs I’ve tried this block:
One pace to rule them all
Marathon pace
Progression long runs
There are plenty of other ways to do long runs, but these are the 3 I’ve put into my training.
One Pace to Rule Them All
This is the kind of long run we were talking about above. The schedule calls for running 16 miles and so I head out and just run 16 miles at an easy or moderate paced effort.
Just cruising along…
If I’m going more for the “grey” zone running then the first couple miles might be a warmup of slower easy miles as I ease into that faster moderate pace. The exact pace I’m targeting is around 10-20% slower than marathon pace.
So if my marathon pace goal is 6:50min/mile then my moderate pace is around 7:30-8:00.
Marathon Pace
Marathon paced long runs are any long run where a certain number of miles are run at your marathon pace.
An example might be 16 miles with 8 miles at marathon pace.
So you would run 8 miles pretty easy and then finish with 8 miles at marathon pace.
This is good because the first 8 miles can fatigue your legs a little so that you can adapt to running marathon race pace on tired legs.
Progression Long Runs
The final long run I’ve used is a progression long run.
I haven’t done too many of these, but I’ve really enjoyed them and I want to do more of these in future marathon builds.
The idea here is you go out for a long run, say 16 miles again. But instead of a moderate paced effort the whole time or putting in a chunk of marathon pace, you simply progress the pace throughout the run.
When I did my 16 mile progression long run early in this build, it was 10 miles going from easy to moderate. Then the final 6 miles progressed from that 7:30 moderate pace all the way below marathon pace.
So every mile you would just speed up a little bit. I ended up running that final mile in sub 6:20 pace.
How Far Should you Go?
This includes total volume AND intensity.
If you level up both volume and intensity at the same time you risk not only injury, but also peaking too soon and then overtraining or plateauing as you approach the race.
In other words, at the beginning of your training block, running 16 miles at a moderate effort will increase your fitness. If our goal is to build fitness, why would you run 22 miles with 14 miles at marathon pace on week 1 when 16 will do?
Everytime you build a little fitness, then you can up the game a bit. But starting off too strong is like putting the turkey in the oven at 6am on Thanksgiving.
So the question of how long should you go depends first on your starting point. One general rule of thumb people throw out is to increase your volume by 10% a week.
So if you run a 10 mile long run, next week increase it to 11 or 12.
Move up slow and steady.
This includes intensity too!
My build this marathon had me running a certain mileage moderate one week, then we’d add marathon pace work at the same distance the next week.
It might be 16 miles one week, then 16 miles with 8 at marathon pace the following week. After that you can either increase volume or keep increasing intensity.
So you could run 18 miles moderate, or stay at 16 but up the marathon pace chunk to 12 miles.
You get the idea. The point is we want to build fitness slow and steady to decrease any risk of injury and build as much fitness as possible.
What Terrain Should You Run On?
This question is one I came up with because I think I did this wrong in my current build.
For my weekly runs, I have a few options:
The track at our local highschool
The hilly sidewalks in town
The flat greenway by the river down in Asheville (30 minutes away)
In my last two marathon builds, every long run I did was down in Asheville. But it was hard to get them in, and they would sometimes get cut short because I’d need to take a meeting, etc.
This build, I decided that on marathon pace or faster chunks of work, I would do them on the track. This would ensure I can keep the steady pace.
And it worked! My paces were strong and steady and it felt very encouraging to hit marathon pace work for 8, 10, or even 12 miles at a time. It felt equally encouraging to hit lactate threshold paces for up to 7 miles at a time!
But then I raced that half marathon, hit big hills, and watched paces fall way slower than on any of my training runs.
While there were more variables at play there like ongoing fatigue from a prior sickness, maybe lacking fitness from injury prevention weeks and injury tapered weeks, etc, I also think I could have gained more fitness by sucking it up and trying to hit paces on the hills we have at home.
The 22 Mile Long Run
Which leads to my recent 22 mile long run.
In the book I’m reading, they suggest that the 22 mile long run is a great fitness indicator for the full marathon.
In one sense…yea…duh. If you can run 22 miles, what’s 4 more after that?
So when my book says the 22 miler is a good fitness indicator, they are actually suggesting it’s a good test for your specific race goal.
Specifically, they suggest that if you can run 22 miles at a moderate effort (not marathon race effort, but not easy recovery effort either), then it should take you the same time to run 22 as it will your marathon goal.
So if you are trying to hit a 2:59 marathon, you should be able to run 22 miles at a moderate effort in 2:59.
I ran my 22 mile long run in 2:53!
Now…before I get excited…it was not all at a moderate effort.
Leading into the run
The week before this long run was the Suwanee Half Marathon. If you haven’t read my race recap on that, you can check it out here:
But as you all know, I didn’t hit my paces.
I’m still not 100% sure what has gone on during this block, but for some reason I find myself towards the end when I should be hitting peak fitness and I’m starting to fade, my paces are falling, my performance is falling (according to Garmin), and now I’m not so sure a 2:59 marathon is in the books.
The fear is if I go for 2:59 now knowing I’m not in that level of fitness, then I’ll burn out by mile 20 again.
And so it pains me to say, but I think I’m going to readjust the goal. One of the big goals I had for this race is to cross the finish line without having hit the wall, but cross it strong.
I don’t think that will be possible if I try to hold 6:50min/mile pace out the gate.
However, if I target a 3:10 marathon instead, then my race pace is now 7:15min/mile.
And that was the goal with this 22 mile workout. I wanted to break it down this way:
5 mile warmup
12 miles at marathon pace
3 miles faster than marathon pace
2 mile cooldown
Unfortunatley, even with a slower target of 7:15min/mile, I ended up averaging 7:40min/mile for the marathon segments.
But! That’s ok! It was a big training week, and I still had a lot of fatigue in the legs from the race and more training.
All in all, it was my last big long run workout before the race.
That doesn’t mean I am stopping training. But as I begin to taper, my volume is going to decrease slightly, and my intensity levels will stay higher. The goal with a good taper is that my legs should feel springier and fresher each week. The intensity should feel easier since I’m reducing total volume.
And I can crush that 3:10 marathon!
Which also means as a sneak peek, I’m already looking at a couple of Fall marathons to attempt the sub 3 once again!
Until next time, run with joy!