Should You Measure Your Running in Minutes or Miles?
What do you need: 30 minutes of jogging or 3 miles? If you’re training for a marathon, are you training for a 26-mile race or a certain number of hours? You can schedule your workouts by time or distance, but each has its own benefits. Here’s how to solve.
The case in Miles’s favor
Distance measurements are standard for serious runners, but by no means universal. Here are some reasons for miles.
Other runners talk in miles
When you think about mileage, you can communicate with other runners, as most – but certainly not all – think about the mileage per run, or their mileage per week, or how many miles they’ve put on their shoes.
Mileage per week is a key metric when you read about what other runners are doing. Professionals can advance up to 100 miles in a week, while the average mortal can hover around 10 or 20 with periodic push up to 30 if they choose to prepare for a marathon. The weekly run has become a shorthand for judging how serious you are at running, how athletic you are, and how much time you can devote to training.
For example, a training plan might say that it is suitable for someone who runs 20 miles a week consistently. If you are tracking your mileage, you can take a quick look at your calendar to see if you meet the criteria. You can also track your consistency and your progress with your weekly run. For example, if you work 20 miles a week before you sprained your ankle, you can count on weekly miles to check the reality of your recovery: if you barely drove 10 a week, you really didn’t get back where you need to be.
As for the training plan, it will most likely determine your runs in miles. This isn’t always the case, and you can find plans based on minutes if you like, but in most running laps, miles are the norm.
Miles is better at measuring the load on your body and shoes.
Can’t you just keep track of your weekly minutes (or hours)? Yes, but there is a difference. If you walk and jog slowly on your painful ankle, you can still be there for an hour, but not nearly as long as you did the hour before your injury.
Running not only puts stress on our muscles and lungs: we also hit the ground with our feet thousands of times an hour, which puts stress on our tendons, ligaments and bones. They tend to adapt more slowly than muscles. This means jumping from five to 20 miles a week is a massive increase in the load you put on those tissues, even if your legs and lungs could handle it just fine.
Tracking your weekly mileage helps prevent injury, although there is some controversy over whether you should keep your weekly increase to 10% or less (the classic rule) or follow a more flexible system .
Your shoes are subjected to a similar strain: most manufacturers recommend taking your shoes off your run after 300-500 miles . If you know your mileage (or if you track it using an app that lets you specify which shoe you’ve worn on which run), it’s easy to know when a shoe is due for replacement.
Miles help you plan your outdoor runs
If you are preparing to race a known distance, you need to know what it is like. When I run 5 km, I understand very well how much road and how much effort lies between that point and the 1.6 mile finish. Likewise, when I was preparing for a marathon, I set my GPS watch to beep every time I ran a mile. Let’s find out how long a mile seems – at different steps from “Wow, I’m flying!” to “Wow, I’m going to die” – helped me interpret milestones and set the pace correctly on race day.
Once you choose your favorite running routes, you will find that due to physics, they cover the same distance every day. If your workout plan says you want a 5 mile run today and you know a loop in the park that covers five miles, you can forget your watch or tracking app and just go those miles. When you’re done, you’re done.
Another advantage of running at a set distance, if it is a day to run from moderate to fast , then go the distance, but not at the time, means that the faster you run, the faster you finish the workout. For runners who hate running – which, ironically, most of us are – this is a great opportunity.
A matter of minutes
When I asked my fellow runners if they use time or distance to measure their runs, everyone who prefers time chose it for mental health reasons: mainly to give their brains a break from the tempo obsession. It also has several other benefits.
Minutes will save your mind
On the other hand, measuring your runs by time will help you keep a slow pace on days when you schedule an easy run . You can of course tell yourself that you’re going to run three miles easily, and this time it really means easy, but not all of us have the discipline to run as slowly as we should.
When you run through the minutes (especially on a route you don’t know the distance to), you just walk away until the stopwatch says it’s time to turn around and come back. Whether you’re a beginner or returning from a break (ankle sprained?), You don’t have to watch your pace and feel sorry for yourself every time: you can just log into your calendar when you’ve run 45 minutes as planned, mission complete.
Time-based runs also work well in unpredictable terrain, such as if you are driving on trails (which will always be slower than the same road mileage) or if your city route includes traffic lights and rail crossings that could ruin your ideal. step.
Minutes are better at measuring effort
Take, for a moment, Olympic marathon runner Shalene Flanagan , who ran an impressive distance in two hours and 25 minutes in London. That’s 26 miles on her shoes, but if her lungs and legs could speak, they would describe it as “two and a half hours at top speed.” If it takes me twice as long to run the same distance, I may be doing twice as much work. My body would have to spend twice as long dissipating heat and finding ways to fuel my muscles. This is partly why the slowest distance runners are more likely to get heat sickness or other medical problems: they may not run faster, but they run more .
Think about this when you look at a training program that plans to run miles: if a slow and fast person run 5 miles with the same level of effort, this is a more serious workout for the slow runner. If you’re both aiming for the same goal, this run may be necessary, but it’s important to be aware of the difference.
In fact, if you are training for a long distance, such as a marathon or triathlon, it is often better to focus on the time you need rather than the distance. To do this, you need to learn how to figure out your probable pace (there are calculators that can help), and then make sure that you hit the correct length during your workout: for example, for a four hour triathlon, it is more important to know that four hours can be worked hard than counting miles …
On the other hand, people starting a running program face a similar problem: they just need to move for, say, 20 minutes, and not worry about how many miles they will cover. This is why so many programs for beginners are written in minutes. Just don’t be surprised when you decide to upgrade to a more advanced program and have to calibrate yourself to miles.
Combine with care
With benefits for everyone, it can be tempting to waste minutes on some runs and miles on others, but there are a few caveats. Remember tracking your weekly mileage? You cannot do this if you do not know the total number of miles per week. I deal with this by calculating my mileage after a run by time (not before or during time, because that’s crazy) and add it to my calendar or tracker app.
If you’re working with an app that tracks both speed and distance – which they pretty much do – it’s hard to avoid getting both numbers. Consider turning off any intermediate alerts that tell you how fast you are walking, and promise yourself not to take your phone out of your pocket to take a look.
Once you feel your pace on a given route or terrain, time and distance become linked: if your pace is 10 minutes per mile, then a 20-minute pace run and a 2-mile pace are the same thing. Likewise, if you are running a new route without a tracking app but want to track miles in your training log, you can multiply your time by the approximate speed you would normally be on that trail.
Bottom line: Since time and distance have their benefits, you’ll have to choose based on your running type, your training goals, and which mindset helps you train best.
Illustration by Sam Woolley
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