Long run, 25% of your weekly mileage?

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malmo would say that is way too high. 20% is probably a better number. But you've got to be running doubles and doing big miles to get away with a small % weekly run if training for a marathon.

It's never made sense to me to have an across he board per centage figure. If I was running 140 mile weeks I was supposed to do a 35 mile run each week? Even 25 miles for a 100 mpw runner seems too long AS A RULE. Therer may be times when a 25 or even 35 makes sense but not as a regular long run.

On the other hand, a 12-13 mile run for someone doing 50 miles a week seems reasonable and maybe even a tad short. I've always thought that a long run that lasts somewhere between 90 and 150 minutes is usually about right most of the time.

I mentioned running approximately 25 miles a week in training at marathon pace when running 100 miles a week, not to be confused with a long run. That was just a loose guideline that I used personally. I think it varied from 17 to 35 or so.

My long runs were usually 15 to 19 miles, with the most common ones being 17 miles. Also my long runs were a relatively moderate 7 minute pace, not at marathon pace.

I rarely ran 20 miles in training, though I did an experiment once of running seven 22 milers in five weeks. In the marathon race I had a really hard time getting going, it felt like I was full out all the way, then bonked at 23 miles. Conversely, I was usually quite fresh with 17 milers, even two or three times a week, including racing 31km and 50 mile races.

For all intents and purposes, that's probably too high. FWIW, when I train for 100 milers, my longest weekend runs were about 40 miles (30-35 miles was more routine), and my weekly mileage topped out at about 125 miles. So, my long run was approximately 25-33% of my weekly mileage. I know I was playing with fire, but I felt the long run was key for the 100-miler. In reality, it's probably not the best thing to do.

I think a better rule of thumb to follow rather than 25% of weekly mileage is to not run longer than double your average daily run. The only time I deviate from this is if coaching a marathoner who normally can't handle higher mileage.

So using the rule of no longer than twice the daily run, lets say someone was averaging 15 miles a day in the six days a week he or she was running, but was doing doubles every day with most days doing 5 in the am and 10 in the pm. I would use the longest run of the day average for thos days, or 10 miles. In this instance, the long run might be just 20 miles. (110 miles for the week) Another runner might be doing all singles with 10 miles as the average over 6 days. He would also get 20, but would only be doing 80 for the week. Another runner could only be doing 5 miles a day during the 3 days they are running, and would have a 10 miler for the 4th day for the long run.

Obviously not every runner is the same, so these are just guildlines and not a hard and fast rule.

not an expert on the subject wrote:

I heard this some where, does that number sound about right?

Grasshopper. Not worry about what kind of frosting to put on top of cake. Worry about how to make your cake.

25% is way to high.

malmo wrote:

25% is way to high.

The OP didn't specify at what period in the training cycle the question applies, or how the long run is managed.

It seems odd to just throw out percentages or warnings without context. I would think 25% is too high as well, if it is during a sharpening period and run at MP. However, I don't see a problem if its during base (for one example).

I've read anywhere from 20-30% of weekly milage, in general, depending upon the cycle and focus of the training. Look at the schedules in Pfitz's marathon books. If I remember correctly, he and Scott have folks doing 24 miles in a 80+ mile week. Same with Beck's plan. He calls for 26 milers in what amounts to a 70 mile week.

I'd dee it in reverse terms if we're thinking about training phases. Using the original Lydaird cycle as an example, if you were doing a long run of 20 miles or so within a 120-130 mile weeks (counting the legendary "supplementary jogging) you're covering less than 20% of your weekly miles in that run.

If you move on to your interval phase or your coordination phase your overall mileage will come down dramatically. But his guys generally kept a long run in the mix during those later phases. So at that stage the long run's percentage of the weekly volume would likely move up a tad.

I've been experimenting with no long runs recently. Just 1 hr a day, sometimes at recovery pace, sometimes steady, sometimes replaced with a track workout. I'm still gaining fitness, just as I did on traditional plans that had long runs.

What am I missing here? I feel sort of foolish because I've NEVER seen a marathon training plan that didn't include at least 2-3 long runs of 20ish miles -- most of them called for 4-5. NONE of these plans were for much more than 75 miles per week. Are you all saying (and I don't mean just you dotato) that if you are going to do 4-5 20ish mile long runs, you should be doing at least 80+ miles a week for your marathon training? Hmmmm.....I guess I've been messing things up over the past 23 marathons (and so have most of the people I run with.) Again, I apologize if I've totally missed something in this thread.

Sorry for not specifying, i'm at the end of my cross country season and have been putting in low to relatively low, depending on how you look at it, 40 mile weeks; with a long run of ten and an averaged daily run of 5. So in my case 10 miles would be 25% my weekly mileage, but would also be double that of my daily run (suggestion from an above poster)

Lonn: What am I missing here? I feel sort of foolish because I've NEVER seen a marathon training plan that didn't include at least 2-3 long runs of 20ish miles -- most of them called for 4-5. NONE of these plans were for much more than 75 miles per week.

If you've NEVER seen a marathon training plan without 2-3+ 20 milers, you're overlooking metric plans which top out at an equally round figure of 30 km, and also the Hanson's "marathoning for the masses" plan of a few years back:

Here's what, IMO, most people miss: "percentage of weekly volume" is a stoopid measure of marathon long run length because:

(a) As HRE observes, the length of a reasonable marathon training long run is closer to a constant (for me, capped at around 2 hours) than a proportion of weekly mileage. It's certainly not 4x the time/distance for a 160 MPW guy vs. a 40 MPW guy.

(b) Running doubles for high weekly mileage, the long run becomes relatively less important. Sure, if you're training for a marathon you probably don't want to skip it or anything; but if you're training well at 120+ MPW you could skip or minimize your long run and still run a good one.

(c) But the majority of marathon participants, training at say 25 to 50 MPW, absolutely need the long-ass long runs just to finish the damn race. 35 MPW doesn't prepare you to run a marathon; the weekly 15-20 miler is what gets low mileage marathoners to the finish line. And that 15-20 is a third to a half the volume for this population.

So not only do low mileage marathoners need to run a much higher % of their weekly volume in the long run, arguably they need longer long runs, period. At least they have a stronger need to run a few 18-20+ versus higher mileage more serious runners. If these long runs are as malmo likes to say the icing on the cake for the serious runner... well, the 35-40 MPW crowd never makes much of a cake in the first place, they're racing on pure icing, so they'd better not skimp on the icing. To refine that analogy, the low mileage marathon builds just enough of a cake to stack the icing on: the paltry mileage the rest of the week is just to get him through Sunday's long run, which builds over the weeks to a peak of 20+ miles.

dotato wrote:

I've read anywhere from 20-30% of weekly milage, in general, depending upon the cycle and focus of the training. Look at the schedules in Pfitz's marathon books. If I remember correctly, he and Scott have folks doing 24 miles in a 80+ mile week. Same with Beck's plan. He calls for 26 milers in what amounts to a 70 mile week.

Pfitziger never trained like he proposes in his books. I've addressed this issue with him directly. He pointed out the obvious to me that what he writes is for those people who are not going to properly train for a marathon, so his schedules are more or less a patch. Since they aren't going to put in the event specific mileage, he has them put in thses disproportionate long runs becasue "they have to do something."

I don't make money selling books to people who are not going to train properly for a race, especially a marathon. All of my advice is geared to serious competitive runners. If you are not a serious runner you should skip over my posts.

For where you're at, 10-12 mile long runs are fine. If your weekly mileage is 40, it's not unreasonable at all to do a 10-mile long run (25% of your weekly mileage). If you were running 100mpw and training for a 5k or 3200, then 25% would be much too high.

i'm in high school goddammit. Why would i have any desire whatsoever to train for a effing marathon?

'So not only do low mileage marathoners need to run a much higher % of their weekly volume in the long run, arguably they need longer long runs, period'

I'm in high school goddammit.

I meant to contain that message in one clear and concise response, rather i have bumped this thread a totally of four times, once intentionally, with this post begin the fourth.

Sorry for the confusion. Thanks for the advice.

malmo wrote:

I don't make money selling books to people who are not going to train properly for a race, especially a marathon. All of my advice is geared to serious competitive runners. If you are not a serious runner you should skip over my posts.

hmmm...I've talked with Scott and he said no such thing. If anything, he spoke to changing up the "speed work" components of what's in those books.

Anyway, malmo, you've obviously had too much or too little coffee today as your panties seem to be in a bunch. I tried to put the OP's question in context, which he/she then did with their real world training and got their answer. Now, we're all the better for it.

Although, I am interested in this concept of "serious competitive runners," it sounds interesting.

On the other hand, if you'd like to explain why you think "25% is to [sic] much", that might be helpful.