Learning to Run Slower for my Long Runs

5 a.m. is DARK

Went for my first 10 mile long run!  Got up on Wednesday at 5 a.m. and headed out.  After my last long run experience where I wanted water so much I was relating my thirst to vampires, I decided to wear Greg’s fuel belt that has spots for water.  IT WAS AMAZING.  I didn’t even feel self conscious when I saw other runners out there on the road who looked more fashionable, because I’m figuring they just felt thirsty and jealous.

The weather was fantastic, I actually felt a brief chill when I left the house, which was such a relief after all this summer running in the heat.

My two previous long runs had both been 9 miles each, and had included a frustrating number of walking breaks.  My goal this time was to run slower rather than pushing my pace, and reduce my breaks.

It was SO much better.  The weather was a big help, but it was also amazing just to slow down, not pay attention to my watch, and just run a comfortable pace that I felt like I could maintain indefinitely.  “Settle in, settle in!” as my father-in-law likes to say.  He has two sons, one a marathon runner (my husband) and the other a professional triathlete, and he’s a former runner, so he really knows his stuff.  He used to shout encouragements like that to his sons during their races, and it’s fun now that his advice is starting to make sense to me in my own running 🙂

I knew mentally that my long run was supposed to be like this, a pace that I could maintain, that was slower than my shorter runs.  That’s easier said than done, though, when you realize how far you have to go and how much longer it’ll take you if you don’t pick up the speed.  I want to get home and have breakfast, darn it!

On my previous long runs I was pushing too hard, and taking walking breaks every half mile or mile to recover.  That’s A LOT of walking breaks when you’re running for 9 miles, and it made me feel like a failure.

I found that my average pace actually improved when I ran slower and took fewer walking breaks.  I went from an 11:30 average pace with breaks to an 11:09 average pace with breaks, and this was including adding a mile to make it a 10 mile run.  I stopped to drink water from the fuel belt, to take a gu, and at one point when I thought there was something in my shoe.  Other than that I just kept on going, and it felt like a much greater accomplishment than when I was running a faster pace and then giving up, over and over again.

My 9 mile run a 2 weeks ago

My ten mile run on Weds

There’s a lot of running books out there that have nifty charts for taking your 5k pace and using that to determine your half marathon or marathon pace.  It’s important to remember that the longer you’re running, the slower your pace is so that the challenge can be the distance.  I was forgetting that, and trying to run faster than I could maintain and getting really frustrated on my runs.  It’s an accomplishment to run 10 miles on a single run, that’s enough success without trying to do it FAST, also.  That’s a great way to get discouraged or get injured when you’re a beginner like I am and doing that distance for the first time.

Why are there such obvious running lessons out there that I still seem to have to learn by making the mistake on my own rather than just paying attention and doing it right the first time?! If you read ANYTHING about long runs online, it’ll tell you to run significantly slower than your 5k pace!  My husband knows this.  The internet knows this.  My body knows this.  Only took me like six long runs to figure it out.

The great news, though, is that I’m figuring this out during my training so I won’t end up pushing too hard on race day and walking half of it and feeling like a failure.  I’d rather run the whole thing at an 11:10 pace than run 70% of it at 9:40s and walk the rest.  My mistake was in thinking that I could run the whole thing at the pace I maintain for shorter runs, just adding on a mile at a time at the same pace.  Nope.  That’s not how it works.

Hey, now I know.

The best part of the whole run was when I stopped looking at the watch, started just running a comfortable pace, and looked down at mile 7 to see that I was doing a 10:19 pace, which I maintained for almost three miles towards the end of the run.  That felt great, and made up for some walking water breaks and a slow warm up mile in the beginning.