Most marathon training plans prioritize two or three quality sessions each week: some combination of an interval workout, a tempo effort, and a weekend long run. But between ordinary easy efforts and the aforementioned weekend long run, there’s a valuable space for aerobic development most runners don’t take advantage of to improve performance. This is where the medium-long run comes into play.
Coaches explain how this overlooked training tool can help you build more aerobic endurance, add mileage without making every day harder, and arrive at your goal race stronger and more resilient. Run coach and author Matt Fitzgerald, cofounder of 80/20 Endurance, defines a medium-long run as a run longer than your standard easy run, but shorter than your long run. For example, if you typically run five or six miles on easy days and top out at 14 or 15 miles for your long run, a medium-long run might be eight to 11 miles.
However, if your longest run is only 10 miles, your medium-long run should be shorter. In other words, the medium-long run occupies a middle ground. It does not have a universal mileage prescription.
The important part is its role in the week: It gives runners another opportunity for aerobic work between their standard easy runs and their longest session, says ultramarathon runner and USA Triathlon-certified coach Nick Farr. When you first introduce these runs into your training, Fitzgerald recommends keeping them easy. A medium-long run describes the session’s duration and purpose, rather than a pace target.
It can include race-specific work later in a training block (more on this later), but it begins as a way to spend a little more time building aerobic fitness. Fitzgerald’s central argument in favor of the medium-long run is that runners can gain more from building weekly mileage than from fixating on the distance of one long run. For marathoners and ultrarunners, “your average running mileage for the week as a whole is more predictive of how you'll do in a race than the distance of your longest run,” he says.
This does not mean the long run is unimportant. But when it is dramatically longer than every other session in the week, it can take on an outsized recovery cost. Consider a runner who logs four five-mile efforts during the week and then runs 15 to 20 miles on Sunday.
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