How Long Should the Marathon Long Run Be?

Audio Transcript

Coach Hayley: Hey everyone. I am your community manager here at Runners Connect. I will be here with your daily podcast this week.

I hope you are having a great day and thanks for joining me for today’s episode. If you have a burning question that you would like one of our expert coaches to answer on the show, head over and submit it at runnersconnect.net/daily.

We’d love to help you improve so don’t hesitate to ask us what you need to know. Today we have a great question from Myra.

Myra: When training for a marathon of your total weekly mileage how much should the long run be ideally. Were in the week should you place the long run?

Hayley: Myra that’s a great question. The long run is a key part of marathon training so it’s important to make sure it’s implemented correctly.

I answer your question about what percentage of mileage it should make up first. First, in my opinion for the marathon distance, the actual distance covered in the long run is more important than how much percent of your weekly mileage this is.

There is a general guideline that the long run should be about 20% to 30% of you’re running mileage.

However, for the marathon I’d say that much more important that your long run builds to long enough to pay for the full distance than it is to stick to this rule.

The exact distance you should build it up to does depend on a few factors which are how far you run now, how long you have to build up until race day, how fast you going to complete marathon, and your training pace.

While spending a certain amount time on your feet in training is important, many runners overestimate how far they need to go in the long run.

Most marathoners don’t need to go farther than 20 miles in their marathon training. In general, most don’t need multiple long runs over 18 miles unless their goal is to complete the distance in less than three and a half hours.

Consider running who’s running it say 10 minutes per mile for their long run. If they do a 20-mile run, that’s going to take them around three and a half hours to complete. That’s a long time to spend running.

The total amount of time on your feet during a three-hour-plus run will cause a lot of muscle damage and leave you feeling pretty exhausted.

The time taken to recover from this means that your struggle to complete your work of the following week.

There’s also no significant training benefit to running for over three hours as mostly adaptations come from long runs cut between 90 minutes and two and a half.

The benefits that come from running for three and a half hours will be outweighed by an increased risk of injury.

I think that consistent mileage and naming the marathon specific blackouts are way more important.

Unless you are aiming to run under three and a half hours, I suggest that building up your long run to 16 to 18 miles is plenty.

You can increase the effectiveness of these 16 to 18 mile runs by including a shorter steady run the day before them.

That way you’ll be getting used to running long with slightly tired legs from the steady run workout but, the long run won’t take nearly as long to recover from, as it would if you’ve spent three and a half to four hours running.

The distance shouldn’t necessarily be a certain percentage of weekly mileage, at least not unless you’re aiming to run under three and a half hours and you’re super early.

If you need to go above 30% to get it up to 16 to 18 miles, then you should do. However, if 16 to 18 miles is less than 20% of your total mileage then it is probably okay for you to run a little longer unless it’s going to take a significantly more than three hours.

As you can see there are no set rules, but I hope that has given you some guidance. Build up to around 16 to 18 miles unless you aim to run under three and a half hours, in which case you say 20 to 22.

Personally, even running my best times, I’ve never gone above 22 miles in training, but I would suggest not going up to 16 to 18 miles because you need to do that to have the confidence and the time in your feet to help you to go the full distance.

Moving on to the second part of your question where to place the long run in your training week is up to you whatever fits in your schedule.

This is ideally a day where you can spend the rest of the day recovering a refueling hence why many people use Sundays to do the long run.

It should just be whichever day that works best for you maybe when you are off work, or you don’t have too many family commitments.

However, there are some critical points about where you place it. The main thing is that you shouldn’t do a long run the day before or after a hard workout in most cases.

Ideally, you’d have an easy day in between it and any tempo or interval workouts. The exception to this is when you include in the steady run as I mentioned previously.

This moderately hard effort should be placed a day before the long run.

However, before and after these two days of effort one of the other, you should ideally have one or two easy days. That’s super important to make sure that you get the right benefits and don’t enter the long run too fatigued.

I really hope that has given you some ideas about how to structure your training, how long the long run should be, and where to put it.

The long run is a key part of marathon training, but it’s not the only part and you should make sure that you’re including some shorter workouts, a goal marathon pace, some speed work, and tempo runs too.

Don’t overemphasize the long run, but make sure it’s in there and you’ve got a few runs of 16 to 18 miles on the about by the time the of the race.

Wherever you’re at now, start from that starting point and maybe add one to two miles per week until you reach that goal.

Thanks for asking that question Myra. I’m sure that something that many listeners will find helpful instruction there in training.

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