Increasing Mileage

Running your standard 5k training run tends to be easy, normal and just what you do. What people usually forget though is that if you want to get fitter and run longer races, you need to increase your mileage in preparation for the race. The best way to increase your distance is to build on it once a week. This weekly run is called your long run, and can start at a 50% increase on your normal training run and build up to 3 times your standard training run. This means that if you would usually run 5k, you should increase it to around 7.5k. Once you’re comfortable with this, you should gradually increase it to 12-15k. How gradually is up to you and how you feel.

When you feel you want to run a longer run, you should increase your normal training runs length to around 7-10k. This then gives you the scope to train up to around 25 to 30k. This then gives you the chance to train for a marathon. The length of your training run is completely personal. It is obviously beneficial to run longer distances, but not if you can’t hack it at first. The best advice is to build it up slowly to help increase fitness even more and decrease the chances of injury.

Some runners say that you don’t have to have ran a marathon-length training run to run a marathon. However, it is recommended that you are running around 70-80k per week as a base for endurance, but every runner is different.

But the main and most important point to this guide is a recovery session; whether it is in the form of a rest day, a gentle run or a gentle bike ride. Without the recovery session, the long run can have detrimental effects to your training.