Quick Guide 3: Variation (long runs)

Some runners do well with monotony. I've known runners who have run exactly 10 miles on the same course every day for several months up to several years. They don't race well, as a rule, because they aren't willing to risk not being able to run their 10 miles race day and the next day. Most people, if they tried to do this, would get injured the first time they tried to race, as they had trained to do one thing well and a race is too different from that.

There are two main ways to create variation in training run length: days off and long runs. If you're going to run the same thing every time you run, I suggest taking two days off each week; this seems to be the ideal amount of variation (depending on how much running you do on the days you do run, you may want to supplement your training by doing aerobic cross-training on your off days). This also drops one's average mileage by more than 25%, so several adjustments have to be made, either by running more on the days you run or by adding a second run on some days. If you're an 800m/1500m specialist, running an hour five days per week is sufficient in itself.

I recommend most runners have a weekly long run and a second weekly moderately-long run (which I'll re-purpose and rename in the next post). Aerobic endurance training seems to start at about 75 minutes and ends about 3.5 hours, where it becomes ultramarathoning stamina running. When I started running, there was an adage of "rarely run more than twice your average and never run more than three times your average;" this advice still holds well for those doing races under 3.5 hours.

When planning a long run, I suggest aiming for 20-25% of the week's mileage and 25-30% of the time spent running for the week. The difference in percentages is because one generally runs long runs a little slower than one's average pace. The easiest way to do this is to keep track of what you run for six days and divide the totals by three - that's about what you should aim for for your long run.

If your long runs are two hours or less, plan to do one every week. If they get longer, a lot of runners find that they can only do them well every other week or 2 out of 3 weeks. The long run in the off week should be two hours, or one can take a recovery day (either 30 minutes or a rest day of 0).

The total of long runs and of days off each week should be 2. For most runners, this means adding a second "moderately long" run each week of about 15-20% of the week's miles. These two longer runs make up a large proportion of the week's miles and require shorter days before and after them.