Went out last night for a long run (Longest ever for me) Ended up walking somewhere around the 26km point and it was almost impossible to get going again. So many hills and all those excuse sort of things. I just felt that I couldn't keep going and though a walk for a bit would help...
Should I have just stopped still for a bit or do I just keep on going and take it as being all part of the challenge? Ended up with a few more running parts with a total of 32km so i'm not kicking myself too much just at the moment
Congrats, that is still a great run.
Long runs are mainly a mental challenge, the feeling if exhaustion towards the end is pretty typical and very useful training stimuli both physically and mentally. running a marathon is roughly doing a 20 mile warmup before the hardest 10K f your life. It hurts like anything in those last miles if you are running close to realistic goal time. It is incredibly mentally tough, your whole body is screaming at you to stop. it is really not pleasant to be honest until you see that finish line, and then you will swear you will never do that again- for a few hours anyway. Managing that discomfort is key.
However, if you push too hard in training then you will suffer a very long recovery period and risk injury so there is some kind of balance between blocking the urge to walk and keeping things safe. With experience you learn when enough is enough. And at that point walking breaks are fine. in fact, ideally if you are going to go really far you should start walking breaks a long time before you are forced to do them. This is especially true for a beginner building up to longer distances, training for your first marathon or whatever. It is not cheating to walk a little, even the best pros will walk in a (long/mountainous) ultra race for example. At this stage it is more important to cover the distance and get the time on your feat than worry about specific paces or walking.Taking a walking break wont affect any training adaptions. As you get faster/more advanced then LR for a marathon often takes on a different kind of training goal, with long stretches at marathon pace, or progressively faster paces, or short bursts at 10K speed or whatever. But until you have run a couple then the LR is mostly about getting used to that feeling of fatigue and gauging the difference between sustainable fatigue ("this completely sucks and I wish I was at the finish"), vs the more physical limits.
On a long run pace/effort is pretty critical. For a beginner it is useful to start off even slower than easy pace and build up slowly. Even as an advanced runner I will start my LR relatively modest. If you don't have a high volume base then you will lack the endurance to keep at your regular pace for very long.
As marvt74 says, whatever you do don;t stop. Take walking breaks, keep the wlaking short, purposeful power hike. Take walking breaks early
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