By shaving kilometres and minutes from your long runs, you can get fitter – faster.

While training for a Marathon, Kirsti Baker could handle the grueling speedwork and 500 metre hills. It was the slow 32km runs she couldn’t endure.

‘The dread of the long run was huge. All week I would fret about how I would get it done,’ says Baker, who juggled nursing work, caring for two toddlers, and training – and finished her marathon 3:18. She worried about how she’d find the time to do her run, refuel, take an ice bath and how she’d handle three hours of running continuously in unfavorable weather. She had to hit the treadmill for 28 kays, but that was even worse. ‘I felt like a hamster by the time I got off,’ she says. ‘It was insane.’

Happily for Baker – and anyone trying to cram training into busy lives – many coaches are now finding that lots of long, slow distance isn’t the only key to marathon success. While long runs are critical to building endurance, efficiency and confidence, you don’t have to run 32km or more to reap those benefits. By replacing some of your longest runs with more frequent – and challenging – runs of 16 to 20km, you can build the same level of fitness with less risk of injury than you do with one exhausting effort.

A lot of marathoners put too much weekly training stress on one day. If you’re running 60km a week, a 28km long run becomes an event in itself, and requires rest beforehand and recovery afterwards that costs valuable training time.

When you spread your mileage more evenly throughout the week, you’re much less likely to get bogged down with fatigue. You recover more quickly, and if you recover faster, you can do more intense workouts and build fitness faster.

But don’t fluff the pillows on your couch just yet. If you cut out the 32 kays, you’ll have to log more each week overall and do more quality workouts, coaches say. Without an extra-long run on the weekend, you’ll have the time and energy for it.

Long runs build endurance by increasing your capacity to store and conserve muscle glycogen. Increasing your total weekly mileage achieves the same effect in a different way. Some marathoners do long runs that top out at 25km, though some do 32km runs, just to build confidence. Even more important than the length of the long run, is making sure it doesn’t consume too much of the total weekly mileage – no more than 25% on a peak week. Some runners build up total weekly mileage with mid-length fast-finish runs, 90-minute fast runs, and divided long runs.

Adding more intense workouts is just as critical. Runners likely get similar fuel-efficiency benefits from completing a 90-minute run at a fast pace as they do from running more slowly for two hours or more. By running at a moderate pace for 22km, instead of a slower pace for 32km, the runner is recruiting the fast-twitch fibers more, and causing a similar adaptation.

For the time-challenged runner, this is the way one can keep up with, or pass, those running longer distances.

Runners who don’t do 32km log more total mileage each week, and run fast at least twice a week to ensure that they build the strength and efficiency they will need for the marathon. In a peak training week three weeks before the race, for instance, the longest run is 25km instead of 32. Rather than completing one high-intensity workout, runners do long intervals one day, then they do a 16km near marathon goal pace two days later.

This method gives you an opportunity to not only run a good race, but also to embrace the overall idea of training consistency that will make all your training better.

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