Running News Daily

Can’t Fit In Your Long Run? Here's What to Do

Coaches offer advice when you have to split up, cut short, or miss your long run.

Imagine you’re in the thick of marathon training and your 18-miler falls on the weekend you’re going to be on vacation with your family. You have a 9 a.m. tour planned so you figure you can get in a solid 10 miles beforehand, then log the remaining eight miles that afternoon when you get back to your hotel. 

Or, maybe you have a niggling injury that starts bugging you around 13 miles in, so you call it at 13, then log the remaining five later that day. 

Splitting up your long run within the same day is pretty much the same thing as logging continuous miles, right? Not so fast. 

“The whole point of a long run is to get your body used to being on your feet for hours at a time, and that’s something that your body has to adapt to,” says Kara Dudley, an RRCA-certified running coach and founder of Rerouted Running. The good news is this means that slowing to a walk for a few seconds or minutes during a long run is totally okay. But this also means that you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t finish the job in one go.

Meg Takacs, CPT, a UESCA-certified running coach and founder of the Movement and Miles app, agrees that conquering the long run in one continuous go is important. “It’s going to be different physiologically if you do the 18 miles straight than it would be if you did nine in the morning, nine in the afternoon,” she says. “With marathon training, what matters most is not so much pace or mileage, but more so time on your feet and that gives you an opportunity to practice nutrition and hydration,” she adds. 

These long-duration runs can also expose potential weaknesses, like an IT band issue that pops up two hours in, that wouldn’t be apparent in two shorter runs, Takacs says. Long runs allow you to “approach race day with a more knowledgeable idea of what your body’s going to be able to handle, or not,” she adds. 

What’s more, your muscles might stiffen up between runs, putting you at greater risk of injury on the second run, Dudley says.

All of this said, sometimes you might need a less conventional approach to the long run. Here, Dudley and Takacs share some alternatives to consider before splitting it up.

If there’s a week or two that it’s truly not possible to get in your long run in one go, Dudley believes you’d be better off just going as long as you can in one run, rather than trying to tack on additional potentially junky miles later in the day. Keep in mind that missing one long run isn’t going to derail your training cycle.

If you have aches and pains…finish on the bike.

As always, see your doctor or physical therapist if you’re dealing with pain or an injury for personalized advice. So long as you have the all-clear, and you’re dealing with something that comes and goes and tends to flare up only after you reach a certain mileage, Dudley has a suggested workaround for you: Log as many miles as you can, then jump on the bike to finish out the rest of the time that would have been in that run. 

For example, if you run 10-minute miles and were supposed to run an 18-miler, but start to feel achey at 13, you’d be on the bike for 50 minutes after your run. This strategy still gets you the aerobic benefit

One more thing: If you want to split up other easy runs within your week (say, a midweek easy eight-miler becomes two four-milers), that would likely have less of a negative effect than splitting up your weekly long run, Takacs says. That’s because you’ll still accumulate weekly mileage and time on your feet, without taking away the advantages you gain from your weekend long run when you want to practice going extra long like you will on race day.