Newbie. How long should my long slow run be?

Two ways I would go about it:

1. Slow down the pace just a little from your regular day pace and try to run 6 or 7 miles. After a couple weeks of that, increase it again.

2. Block out 75 minutes for your run and do something like 10 minutes running/5 minutes walking. You’ll cover 50 minutes of running doing this (about 7 miles at your regular pace) but it should be much more comfortable with the breaks. Over time, just reduce the walking bits or increase the jogging segments.

Option 2 is better for development and gets your body accustomed to being on its feet for that amount of time. It also helps you structure your workout time for when you will be running for 75+ minutes was once a week.

Since you just started running I would recommend that you should gear towards a slower "bread and butter" run for an hour to 75 minutes, 2-3 times a week.

That should be the goal. Don't just try it next week.

At this point it's more important that you get your body more accustomed to running than anything. Getting faster will be happening anyway.

First of all: get a coach. Don't go online if you can avoid it. Find a local running group, a lot of the coaches won't even charge you and you can stay motivated with like minded people (at least in my experience in UK/Australia, I think the US might be different).

If there are no running groups around that fit your lifestyle, at your level, any online free online template program would be as good as any online coach that you'll pay a fortune for.

If all else fails, I'd suggest this:

4 runs per week:

- 1 long run (start at 7 miles. Increase SLOWLY over time to 10 miles)

- 1 shorter, slower, recovery run. Anywhere from 3 - 5 miles is plenty

- 1 tempo. Mix this up - around 2 - 4 miles would be enough for you. Do a 1-2 mile warm up and warm down

- 1 speed/interval session. Something like hill reps, 1km reps, 400 reps. People on here can give ideas for sessions if you need it.

Newbie runner 2020 wrote:

I've been running since autumn and have been doing a 5 mile run three times a week. I try to keep my runs at a "tempo" pace.

I recently did parkrun (5k) in 20:27.

However, I feel like I getting tired by trying to run fast all the time, so I was thinking of adding a longer and slower run. I was thinking of making it 10 miles, but would this be too long? What kind of pace should I be aiming for? I have been doing my 5 mile runs around 6:55 to 7:15 minute miles.

First of all, you should stop trying to run fast all the time. When you're new, you can get fitter by doing just about anything, but tempo pace all the time is not a good approach for the long term. Usually the first goal is to work up to running 5-6 days per week at a pace slow enough and a distance short enough that you can keep at it. It's at that point that people usually add one somewhat longer run and one tempo run - not at the same time, and not necessarily in that order.

But you are where you are. The question is how to get to where you want to be, and the answer is: gradually. The obvious first step is to keep one of your tempo runs each week. Start adding in 3-mile easy pace runs 2-3 days per week. Slow down your other two tempo runs. Start gradually increasing the length of one of them by adding a bit of distance each week. If you feel like the remaining 5-mile run is too slow, shift it to a hillier route.

I’ve always had great success having my long run be 20% of my total weekly miles. I don’t start out with that long, but once I get to a certain weekly volume I then start stretching my long run longer each week until it makes up the 20%.

Yaz ya wrote:

I’ve always had great success having my long run be 20% of my total weekly miles. I don’t start out with that long, but once I get to a certain weekly volume I then start stretching my long run longer each week until it makes up the 20%.

Okay, this is really nonsense. The original poster wrote he is running three times each week, so just about every single run is around 33% of his weekly mileage then. I know there are rules like 20-25% of weekly mileage for long runs, advised by top coaches like Jack Daniels and the like. However, these rules do just apply if are running at least daily or even more often (doubling and up to 10 and more runs per week). I think for a recreational runner it is much better to say if your normal everyday length of a single run is about 5 miles or whatever, then you should not run much more than twice as long for your long run, in this case 10 miles.

Best thing is to learn the basics of running training. I suggest looking up Jack Daniels on youtube - there's a series of his workshops on there which summarise his famous book - and use the training paces he suggests for a 20:30 5K runner, which you can get here:

runsmartproject.com/calculator/