Responsible summer long runs

You may be familiar with the saying, “Variety is the spice of life.” It’s wisdom based on the sound idea that mixing up your day-to-day experiences helps keep life interesting. For example, don’t be like me and listen to the same six songs on your MP3 player for about 2,000 consecutive miles’ worth of running. (Hey, they’re great songs.)

Runners like variety because running itself — or so it’s often said — is not all that exciting. Doing runs, especially long runs, in new territory is a fine way to make the miles roll by faster (or seem to) while seeing neighborhoods and environments you don’t get to see often.

The problem with the “variety” theme is that it doesn’t often fit the needs of summer marathon training. If you have a 20-miler on your schedule, which you expect will take close to three hours, and the forecast calls for 85 degrees with 90 percent humidity by 9 a.m., then the last thing you really want to do is meet a group of people to run a single long loop with no assurance you’ll be able to get anything into your body along the way besides a few gulps of H2O from a park water fountain and whatever gels you can carry.

When I got serious about marathon training in the mid- to late 1990s, I became a strong believer in the power of marathon-pace long runs, which at the time were curiously underutilized among faster runners, at least in the U.S. I wound up writing an article for Running Times about these. Back then, GPS watches were a few years into the future, so finding accurately measured road routes was a far greater challenge than it is today, when you literally invent an accurate course on the go.

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