![]() What it’s telling us is that these sessions have relatively little value by themselves, and what matters more is what you do the rest of the week. Let’s be clear: This evidence isn’t telling us it’s “bad” to do long runs over 20 miles. In a 2011 study, Giovanna Tanda reported that recreational runners who ran more weekly miles produced better marathon times than runners who covered more average distance per run in training. More recent research has yielded similar conclusions. A 1982 study by Ron Maughan of Scotland’s Aberdeen University, for example, found that average weekly training mileage was a much better predictor of performance in a marathon than the longest distance of a single training run. The typical runner in marathon training focuses more on long-run mileage than on weekly mileage, but it’s better to do the opposite-and science proves it. Although I covered less distance in my longest individual runs before Chicago than I had before prior marathons, I ran more total miles, and that’s why I ran my best at age 46 in my 41 st attempt at the distance. ![]() The lesson of this story is not that running less leads to better marathon outcomes-quite the opposite, in fact. ![]() When race day came I cruised my way to a finish time of 2:39:30, breaking a personal best that had stood for eight years. In the lead-up to the 2017 Chicago Marathon, I completed fewer runs of 20 or more miles (just one) than I had before any of my preceding 40 marathons. ![]()
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