Understanding the Long Run

It's Friday and it's the day where we take athletes for a long endurance run. Distances varies depending on the training phase or upcoming races but it's usually about 12 to 20km for most people here.

Every week I see same mistake been made by athletes that do not understand pacing and the objective of the run.

For most athletes, that run 3 times per week, one of the runs should focus on developing aerobic capacity or aka "endurance". So to develop endurance, the effort needs to be mostly aerobic - Easy !!!but instead, athletes run at the effort well known as "Grey Zone" , meaning in between the aerobic and anaerobic.

By doing so you're mostly "confusing" your body as you're not sending the proper stimulus, basically too fast to be 100% aerobic but too slow to be anaerobic either !
As a result you will not progress on your running and will only cause fatigue as the "Grey Zone" effort for long period of time is very tiring !

To understand how you should pace yourself, as a rule of thumb and I find it is well applied to most athletes, you have to run your long aerobic effort at least 1,5 minutes per km slower then your anaerobic pace.

Anaerobic Pace - I tell athletes to do 6 to 8 X 1,000m on the track with 1 min. Easy recovery and get the average pace of the session.
Then you add 1,5 min/km to the pace. So for example you can run the repeats at 4:00min/km then your long endurance runs should NOT be faster then 5:30min/km.

Try to adjust your paces and you will see your running times improving !