September 24, 2016
As I run my long run Sunday Saturday night is all about getting ready for the early morning start (we meet up at 6am come hell or waters high!) and the time on legs and everything that encompasses. Normally the long run is at recovery pace but as you near the end of a marathon training block it’s time for that long run at MP pace (marathon pace) . This is normally, or at least should be, a challenge. This article from Ed Eyestone from Runners World sums it up really…
Whether you hope to win your age group in a local 5-K or run a sub-2:19 marathon to qualify for the 2012 Men’s Olympic Trials, the long run can help you accomplish that goal. How can I be so brash to suggest the long run has such wide-reaching benefits for achievements so diverse? Easy. I see it work every year. I’m convinced the improvement most of my freshmen runners experience in their first year is largely due to the cardiovascular development they acquire from running long.
Long runs deliver a slew of physiological benefits: The heart gets stronger because it works harder to boost blood flow to leg, arm, and core muscles. Our ventilatory capacity—the ability to move oxygen in and out of our lungs—increases as we develop our respiratory muscles. Muscle strength and endurance improves because mitochondria (the energy-producing structures in cells) and capillaries (tiny blood vessels that transfer oxygen and waste products into and out of cells) become more dense. Long runs also teach the body to use fat rather than glycogen, or stored sugar, as a fuel source. This saves our limited glycogen reserves for fast running at the end of a long run or marathon. Finally, going long calluses you mentally and gives you confidence in your ability to cover many miles.
In order to reap the rewards of the long run—and avoid injury—keep the following three principles in mind.
NOT TOO FAST
Think conversational. For slower runners who race at close to their training speed, that’s 30 seconds to one minute per mile slower than 10-K race pace. For experienced racehorses, it’s about one to 1:30 per mile slower.NOT TOO LONG
If you’re gunning for a faster 5-K, your long run will likely last an hour; marathoners should build up to three hours. Run longer than that, and the physiological gains are outweighed by the stress put on your body. I believe that anything over three hours should be saved for race day—if you’ve consistently run at the proper pace for two to three hours, and tapered adequately, you’ll safely complete 26.2 on race day. Over six consecutive weeks, stair-step your long run as follows: two hours, two and a half hours, three hours, two hours, two and a half hours, and three hours. Taper the run down for three weeks before marathon day.NOT TOO FAR
The appropriate distance of your long run is one and a half to twice as long as your normal-length run. Another way to determine distance is to make your longest run 20 to 30 percent of your overall weekly mileage. So if you’re running 40 miles a week, you could run eight to 12 miles for your long run.
GO FAR: Long runs should last between one and three hours.
Golden rule number 6 is baseline everything. This involves a Garmin ( http://www.garmin.com.au ) or any other device that records distance, pace, heart rate, steps, temperature etc. I have mentioned before that over the last few years I have become a Strava tragic ( http://www.strava.com ) . I cannot run without the resulting data being uploaded as soon as possible afterwards. Strava, although predominately still cycling software, has been embraced by the running community and has turned itself into the Facebook of running. Over time it has added the ability to add photos, comments and now you can even tag fellow runners and add groups. I envisage soon the interface will start to morph more and more into a social media type look. In Australia it has been taken the place of CoolRunning which use to be the go-to site of choice for runners, which is a pity as I use to love that site. ( http://www.coolrunning.com.au ) i did manage to get to a 1000 posts before it really stopped being the place to go. I’m hoping it can reinvent itself but Stava has become so widely accepted it will be hard to dislodge.
So baseline, what does that mean and what is the benefit ? In the ‘good old days’ before GPS watches and the Internet (Yes, once there was no internet !) a runner would keep a diary of distance (normally estimated) but pace and heart rate or cadence was unmeasurable. Once GPS watches and the internet came along all this changed. Now the data you produce from the GPS watch can be uploaded to a variety of software tools in the internet and all sorts of reports produced. Training peaks ( https://www.trainingpeaks.com ) is a good example of whats available.
So what is the benefit ? If you don’t baseline how do you know when you improve ? All this data is useful to show how week on week, month on month, you are improving. That may be running the same pace at a lower heart rate, or average pace increasing for known runs or just keeping tracks of your PB’s and race times. Software takes out all the guess work and the watches themselves give you so much information, real time, there is no hiding from a bad run or instant gratification from a good one.
I remember back in the day running marathons with a stop watch and the mental arithmetic needed to work out splits and target times as you reached a K marker, which was normally in the wrong position anyway. Not knowing what pace you had just run or were running at the time and always leaving it late due to either bad maths or optimistic finishing pace. Happy days. Always made the last 10k of a marathon a surprise. These days you can set your watch for a certain pace and even ‘virtual partners’ to race against. No surprises, instant feedback. Sometimes I miss the challenge of that last 10k when you can finally work out what you need to run and still have no real idea if you are going to make it until you round the last corner and see the finish line…. maybe one day I’ll dust down the stop watch and go ‘old school’….. who am I kidding ?