Long Runs: Here’s Your Perfect Pace

I’ve been getting Runner’s World magazine for about two years. Each time my subscription nears the end, I decide to let it expire because I’m no longer learning anything new from the magazine. Then I get an issue that really addresses something that’s on my mind.

What’s on my mind lately? I’ve been bothered by the fact that my long runs are still at a very slow pace. I thought doing track workouts would make my long slow distance pace automatically improve, but I haven’t seen that. I feel like I just slog thru them and I might as well be walking.

The September 2006 issue of Runner’s World has an article entitled “Long Runs: Here’s Your Perfect Pace”. Here are some interesting points of the article:

• running slow trains your body to do just that: run slow!
• runners who qualified for the us olympic marthon ran roughly 28% of their weekly miles at marathon pace or faster. This means that they did some part of their long runs at marathlon pace or faster.
• Paces:
• EZ Pace is one minute per mile slower than marathon pace.
• MP is your marathon goal pace.
• LT is lactate threshold pace ~ 30-50 seconds faster than MP
• RTYP is Run till you Puke pace – in other words, as fast as you can as long as you can.
• New Strategies for pacing a long run:
• One week do your long run at EZ, and the next week do it at MP.
• Work on doing progressively longer segments of your long runs at MP until approximately 15 of the 20 miles are at MP
• Start with 2 miles at EZ pace; then do 4×2 miles at LT, joggine easy for 2 minutes between. End with 10 miles at EZ.
• Do the last 3 or 4 miles of the long run at LT pace.
• Khalid Khannouchi* does this for his long runs: Negative Split the long run. Warm up for several miles. Then run at 15-20 seconds slower than MP. The last three miles, go all out.

*Khalid Khannouchi is a Kenyan runner who is the only marathoner to break 2:06 three times. He must be doing something right!