How much time does your long run take? (Read 1335 times)

 

Not exactly what I meant.  I meant that the difficulty of the long run has to be proportional to your fitness.  However if you're taking 10 days to recover you are negating whatever you accomplished in that long run by negatively impacting your ability to continue a decent level of training throughout the week.

I really do not like the misconceptions that long runs must be easy.  Unless you plan on running your marathon easy doing them all that way will leave you disappointed come race day.  I almost always put some form of quality in a long run, I just don't destroy myself.  You would be surprised what progressing over the last 4-6 miles of an 18-20 miler will do for your fitness (I tended to alternate these with moderately paced long runs every other week).

Long runs are a great place to get in some quality....if you are in shape for it.  If you need more than one easy day afterward before returning to a normal training schedule, your long run is either too hard or too long.  If you're still taking multiple days off after one as the marathon approaches it's a decent sign you're not really adequately prepared for the race.

I'm not coming from the standpoint of marathon training, I only run ultras, so you could very well be right.  My long runs are 30-50 miles... so they pretty much have to be very slow our you'll never be recovered. 30-50 mile runs are to get time on feet... very critical in 100 mile trail ultras.  Not that useful for getting fast though.

Something in the 18-20 range for me would have quality... but for the person not recovering... maybe they are putting in too much quality. 

 Dude, you're not even in the same sport as us.

 

no truer words have been spoken. 

My main running friend is an ultra-guy. He talks about 24+ mile training runs, like it's a casual thing.  

...I've heard (from my Father-In-Law who has run several marathons, BQ'd a couple of times and trains runners in Chicago) that you really need about 10 days to recover from a true long run, but most people do the "weekly long run" because their work schedules permit it.

I'm wondering if there might not be some truth to this: whether looking at training 10 days at a time might not be preferable to a week-by-week approach.

Look at Hanson's pgms, for example. They're based on 10-day microcycles, with 2 days between each SOS (Something of Substance / quality) days. Yes, for many people, work days and fixed schedules (take kids to soccer practice, meetings, whatever) force a 7-day fixed type of schedule. Nothing about physiology in it, just fitting in with life.

It's not clear what your FIL may have meant by "10 days to recover" - or whether that was an adaptation period. Like with any other system, you can work on another system while that one is recovering, assuming there's little or no overlap. Some people's long runs may have lots of hills (mountains for trail ultras), but flat, easy or somewhat fast is easily doable within a couple days (easy is doable day after). I have heard something like 10-day adaptation periods for the multi-hour long runs that ultra runners use, but that obviously varies a lot with different folks. One women ultra runner is trying to run 30 100-mi races this year and did 23 back in 2001. She's doing races rather than long runs this year.

I've varied from 9 to 15 days (triplets of 2 days on, 1 off or really easy) in a microcycle (retirement is good) so I can get the diversity of workouts I like - usually long; flat, sorta fast; big hills; rolling hills.  When peaking for some races, I may do hill repeats.

Poisonivy - you say it took you years to drop below 1 hour for a 10K, but your times now are great. What did you do? I want to do that too

Well, it's mostly in my log July through October, I started logging here in July, my times were dropping all of 2009.  Marathon was my focus but they dropped everywhere.

It was a few things.  I did 35-55 miles a week my first 9 years of running (mainly, there were a few time periods there where I went up to 65) and was spotty about speedwork at best, mostly running at a pace faster than easy should have been really, though I thought it was easy then, but not fast enough to derive benefit.  I spent most of 2008 pregnant, and kept it to 25-45 miles per week, all easy, with a couple weeks off in the first trimester, mileage dropping as the pregnancy went on to 25 by the time I delivered, 5 weeks off post c-section, and building back up to where I was by the end of the year when I got the Daniels book and a Garmin 305 for Christmas.  I kept the miles at 45-55 at the first part of 2009, but started using the Daniels VDOT system for easy runs and faster runs (only marathon pace runs for the first half, and quality in my long runs, no track work or anything) and I started eating clean and lost weight (this helps if you have excess weight, for sure, and I think that eating clean helps too - before that if I tried to diet I'd feel icky and runs would suffer... and even now, if I eat processed foods I see the impact in my training even before my weight).  Then I jumped the miles more (65-80 for the second half until my marathon) and added speed work beyond the marathon pace runs as Daniels has in his book.. Examples of exactly are in my log, but they were done on that base I talked about before.   2009 I shaved an hour and a half off my marathon PR, 30 minutes off my half PR, 14 minutes off my 10K PR, and almost 6 minutes off my 5K PR.  My first 10K was like 1:14 too, despite the fact that it was not a very long run for me at that point and I'd been running for almost a year.  So just running without much a thought of training does help a lot in the first few years of running, too, time on the feet.

Course, everyone is different.  I do find, for me, the tempo type runs provide the most bang for the buck.  And the Daniels allowed me to start doing speed training without being injured by doing it too fast.  And running consistently provides more benefit than any workout... which is why I kind of like the tempo type runs to ease into speedwork.

I think 90-120 minutes is sufficient for a long run, unless you're running  a marathon+

Also a long run shouldn't be a hard effort. Of course, you can make it hard. But you're just trying to get that dead feeling in your legs. It sounds sort of funny, but it's supposed to be more of a restorative run.