Are long runs overrated?

The Sunday morning long run is a weekly ritual deeply ingrained in running culture. For decades, no runner in their right mind would dare toe the line of their goal race without dutifully logging those extra Sunday morning miles every week leading up to race day. But is the weekly long run all it’s cracked up to be? A growing body of evidence is questioning whether this near-sacred ritual is a necessary part of training.

The bare bones of it: running long is hard on your body

Physical activity, including running, is supposed to be good for building strong bones. Something, then, is going wrong with distance runners – anyone who’s ever experienced a stress fracture is intimately aware of just how hard hours of pavement-pounding can be on your bones. 

According to research, bones are similar to muscles in the way they grow and shrink. If you load your bones, they’ll gain mass (i.e. get bigger and stronger) to handle the load, and if you stop loading them, over time they’ll lose mass (this can happen if you’re too sedentary, or if you’re an astronaut who’s spent too much time in zero gravity). 

The tricky part is that too much consistent stress on your bones appears to de-sensitize them to the load. Research shows that your bones reach their maximum ability to adapt to stress relatively quickly. Once they’ve reached that point, any amount of running on top of that is no longer building bone mass (and could be having the opposite effect). 

The good news is that studies have also shown that after you let your bones rest for four to eight hours, they are re-sensitized to the stress again. This is where skepticism for the long run gets its roots.

The case against the long run

When you look at all of this evidence together, it starts to become clear that one long long run is going to be pretty hard on your bones. (This is why it’s so important to rest and recover after a long race, such as a marathon.) So should you ditch your weekly long run? 

Some runners have started splitting their long runs into two shorter runs, with a four to eight-hour recovery period in between (one run in the morning, one in the late afternoon or evening). This gives your bones time to bounce back, so you can ultimately log the same number of miles with less stress on your body.

If this sounds insane to you, there is some research to back it up. A 2012 study in mice found that when the animals did three 10-minute runs throughout the day, they saw the same adaptations as mice who did one 30-minute long run.

But if a lab study done in mice isn’t enough to sway you, consider multi-world record-holding ultrarunning champion, Camille Herron, who shocked the world in a post on X (formerly Twitter) at the beginning of this year when she revealed that she only does one or two long runs per month.

So what does this mean for runners?

OK – Camille Herron still does an enormous amount of mileage, so does it apply to an average runner? Right now, the science seems to say it does, and it may help you get stronger and prevent injuries. 

This doesn’t mean you should never do a long run. As you’ll notice in Herron’s post, she still includes long runs in her training, just never back-to-back (or even two weeks in a row). Long runs are great for practicing fuelling and race-day prep, so including a few of them in your training plan is definitely a good idea, but you just may not have to do one every week.

It’s also important to note that if you’re like most of us, a recreational runner who’s trying to fit training in around your other commitments. Depending on your schedule, breaking up your long run into two shorter runs may either work well or be completely unfeasible. Ultimately, you have to run when it’s convenient for you, and following a solid training program and getting enough recovery is what’s most important for success. 

Running can be highly individual, and what works for one runner may not work for another, but if you’re struggling with fatigue, burnout or injuries, it might be time to (mostly) ditch the long run for a new strategy.