Over the last few weeks, I could be spotted sitting on the ground in the middle of my long run, hydrating and refueling with a gel. Where I live on the East Coast, we’ve been experiencing heat wave after heat wave, and the humidity has been fluctuating between 90 percent in the morning and 50 percent in the afternoon most days—so for the few hours when the heat breaks, the great outdoors is a steam room.
A few other runners slowed down to ask if I was okay (I can only imagine what I looked like to them, with a pained expression, flushed cheeks, and sweat from my face dripping down my sports bra). Given the circumstances, I was as okay as could be. But! While I know that short stops are acceptable, I am also training to break a specific time in my upcoming half marathon race, so I started to wonder: how long a break is too long? Isn’t the whole point of a long run to build endurance and keep moving continuously?
The answer is one we all love and cherish: it depends. The important factor is the reason for the stop.
“The long run serves a physical purpose in that it is exposing you to that longer distance so your body has the opportunity to become more familiar with those longer distances,” says Emily Saul, MS, a licensed mental health counselor in Boston who works with athletes. “I would call taking a break, as in physically stopping your run, a tool—you can use that tool to be helpful for you, or you can use that tool in a way that is disruptive or not beneficial to you.”
And so for our collective peace of mind, let’s look at the breakdown.
Breaks as a Helpful Tool
To Make the Distance Feel Manageable
A long run can be scary, especially if its mileage swells to numbers you haven’t run in a long time or perhaps ever. So if you’re thinking about breaks as intervals, where you cover a specific distance before slowing down or shortly stopping to, for example, sip water, it could be a positive thing, Saul says. “It does help to break the work into smaller pieces, which then makes it easier for your brain to go, ‘Oh, that small chunk, that’s doable, that’s not scary, that’s not overwhelming—of course I can do that,” she adds.
The point is that these breaks should be structured. “Tell yourself, ‘Every 30 minutes, I’m just going to stop, let my heart rate come down, make sure I'm hydrating, and then I’m going to continue on,” Saul says. “Or I can even build in certain run/walk intervals, but do that in a predictable way, so it’s not whenever I get tired, I'll walk, and then if I feel like running again, I'll run.”
To Account for Running Conditions
Something to keep in mind is that training plans are not god. “What we forget is that whatever is written on that paper is written in total absence of the context of where you are and what temperature it is, what the humidity is,” Saul says, adding that you can use an online calculator if you prefer to run by pace so that you have an adjusted number you feel good about. “The other thing that I encourage people to do is to not be afraid, especially from a mental perspective, of simply slowing things down, focusing more on the effort—whatever the effort you would normally feel during this type of run, seek to feel that same feeling.” What’s most important in the end is time on feet.
At Runner’s World, we say that a good rule to follow is to slow down by 20 to 30 seconds per mile for every 5 degrees above 60 Fahrenheit. When we experience temperatures reaching triple digits, short breaks should absolutely become a part of the long-run strategy, a short reprieve when you let your body cool down and the heart rate decrease (heat forces the heart to pump faster to circulate blood to the skin so the body can cool itself).
Other Acceptable Breaks
Unless you’re training for a specific time goal and are prescribed to run at a specific pace, a long run is meant to be conversational and low-stress. It’s perfectly fine if you take a break to
While we cannot exactly state how long is too long or how many are too many, these breaks should be short enough not to interfere with your training.
Breaks as a Disruptor
Long runs are designed to build fatigue resistance and help you understand what race day will feel like. They’re also helping you build mental endurance and feel comfortable with the continuous time spent in motion, so you’re confident that you can keep going when the effort starts feeling hard. We’re creatures of habit, so getting used to stopping due to, say, minor aches and pains (or no reason at all) could lead to your mind stopping your body from performing at its best on race day.
“Unless you're planning to stop for 10 minutes in your race experience, it isn’t particularly helpful for you to practice something different than you’re trying to do in the race,” Saul says. “One way that people can sometimes use walking or stopping as a disruptor to their goal of completing their long run is if they’re basically stopping for longer than is helpful or necessary for their body to be able to return to that task—both from a physiological and from an emotional perspective, our heart rate drops enough that our body sort of gets the cue that we’re done running.”
If you’re stopping for
- extended periods
- excessive fatigue
- pain or dizziness
- no reason at all,
these breaks can hinder endurance adaptations and race-day performance—but also can be a cue that perhaps you’re trying to do too much too soon.
Bottom Line
As for me, I will keep breaking up my long run for as long as we’re experiencing this excessive heat. I know it’s important to practice drinking and eating on the move if interrupted running is my race-day strategy, so every so often, I make sure to test how much I need to slow down and in which pocket my gels are most accessible. For the rest, I slow down without worries.
Pavlína Černá, an RRCA-certified run coach and cycling enthusiast, has been with Runner’s World, Bicycling, and Popular Mechanics since August 2021. When she doesn’t edit, she writes; when she doesn’t write, she reads or translates. In whatever time she has left, you can find her outside running, riding, or roller-skating to the beat of one of the many audiobooks on her TBL list.