Finally posted enough comments that I'm allowed to start a thread now.
I've got a marathon at the end of October, then 23 weeks until the Paris marathon. Going to try and have a more structured training schedule this time, but I was wondering what people recommend about long runs between 2 marathons. My long runs tire me, especially the few fast finish ones I've done, but not excessively so - I can do a recovery run the next day ok, or a harder session 2 days later without significant problems.
Is it better to drop the long run down a fair bit, then build it up again later in the training schedule, or do people find it easier to do a few easy long runs the whole way through, and never really lose their long run ability?
If it helps, I'm hoping to do my marathon next week in about 3:30-3:40, then hopefully aim for 3:20-3:30 in Paris. I've been doing about 40 miles a week recently, and will probably increase this slightly during my next training period. I'm fairly injury free, though my itb gets a bit achey if I increase mileage too abruptly.
Thanks
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I had started doing a longer mid week run, but I didn't always get it as many miles as I'd like. I went up to about 52 miles for a week during the summer and felt I'd overdone it, and needed to take a week or two fairly easy afterwards. I'm hoping I might get up to about 50 miles a week during the next training period if I work up a bit more gradually - it would mean my long run was a maximum of about 40% of the weekly mileage, which I know is still above the recommended amount, but my experience has been that I'm more likely to hurt myself by increasing weekly mileage too much, rather than my long run being longer than my weekly amount would allow.
Last few weekends I tried 6-8 miles Saturday at about 8/mile, then had half marathons on the Sunday - easy mile or two to warm up, half at 8/mile, then 3-5 easy miles afterwards.
For comparison, my half pb was Belfast in September, ran 1:36:47 (7:22/mile).
I know it's all a bit higgledy piggledy. My training for London on April was basically "run regularly" and I averaged 20 miles a wee. My training for this marathon has been "run more" and I've averaged almost 40 miles a week. For Paris, I'm hoping to train better /smarter.
DT19 - that's pretty much what I was thinking, don't want to lose the the long run ability.
I have been involved with the training of a number of marathoners over the years; three stick out in particular (2 @2:16, 1@ 2:20). Their training was very different, coming from different backgrounds, work patterns etc: the only common feature was the weekly long run plus the weekly medium long run. Between marathons they would cut down to 15 and 10/12; the progressive consistent consistency in marathon training progressed them over the months to 20+ and 14/15, with the rule being that the MLR is two-thirds to three quarters of the LSR. Cut back every four to five weeks.
The other key thing is that one needs to keep in mind that one needs to be fit enough to start a marathon training block, so as others have said, it makes sense to keep a slightly shorter long run (and MLR) going. Easier said than done in the winter months because of the light and weather; helpful if you can get out during the day.
I'll aim to keep the long run at no shorter than 13-15 miles and have a mid week run of about 9 or 10 maybe, then can start to increase. Means I'll probably start the training at 30-35 miles per week, and I'll get back to 40 fairly quickly, then try to gradually get up to 50.