Heading into mid-summer, many people are out there watching YouTube videos of their favorite influencer train for a marathon and they think “hell, I’ll give it a shot”. This is all good and well, but most people turn to their “runner friend” who is known in their circle for raising raising a few thousand dollars every couple of years to get a charity bib at a world major. While this is also good, they may not be the best “coach”.
Almost always from these people I hear “what’s your long run at?” when they speak about endurance (and/or marathon) training. It’s as if there is no other marker for fitness or training progression.
This leads me to pondering, why do people obsess over their long run distance?
The long run metric is a trap. It’s not even a metric. I’ve seen training plans that simply focus solely on increasing your long run by 1 mile every week until you arrive at 20 miles, rest for 2 weeks, then race your first marathon. This is bad!
For example, if you google (please don’t do this) “Nike Run club marathon plan” you essentially receive a plan that has you run 3 times a week for 45 minutes, then proceed to run 17 miles in one go on the weekend, blasting over 50% of your weekly miles in one run.
**IF YOU SEE A PLAN THAT CONSISTENTLY HAS YOUR LONG RUN >40% OF YOUR WEEKLY MILEAGE WEEK OVER WEEK, STOP DOING THAT PLAN**
Day 1: 4 Miles
Day 2: 5 Miles
Day 3: 5 Miles
Day 4: 18 Miles
**DONT DO THE ABOVE OR ANYTHING SIMILAR**
The problem is that only focusing on your long run is easy. People see it as a linear progression, and view each weekend long run as a race in itself. “I’m slowly building up to a 20 mile long run, I’m currently at 16 this week”, is an example of this. The next week will be 17, the following 18, and so on.
What this does is cause immense amount of fatigue and each new new week you are consecutively more and more fatigued. Except you are new to running and do not know that fatigue is actually a bad sign, where in most other forms of exercise, it is viewed as a good thing.
Eventually you arrive to your 20 mile long run and complete it in over 3 hours. This is a disaster as you essentially just ran your first marathon, but you have to actually run a real one in a few weeks! Another factor is that you are extremely fatigued from running these weekly long runs week-over-week and your body will not be able to heal properly by race day.
Finding yourself on the start line just a few weeks after your peak long run, you’re tired, nervous, fatigued, and your legs are heavy. This could have all been avoided!
So how do we avoid this? Well, you have to understand what consistently hitting weekly volume feels like, versus solely focusing on your long run. When starting out, frequency trumps long run distance every time. If your first marathon build has you running 30 miles by week 10 (randomly picking a mileage and week), I’d rather see someone run 5 times a week, 6 miles each versus running a 15 mile long run and the other 15 miles are scattered throughout the week.
There is obviously a time and place to run long, but the right (and ability) has to be earned and created by you first. A base built on frequency and consistency will always beat a base built on long runs.
-BTR
Great post. I’m training for a late September marathon. The previous attempt in May suffered from not enough weekly volume and the long runs being too high a % of the week. I ran 14mile run this morning and it was relatively easy as this was a 40mile week, overall. The proportions are a bit more in balance. And will try to keep longs <40% of weekly total. Learned this from your previous post on the subject (and the links to fellrnr site).
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