Saturday > Sunday Long Run

When a few running pals asked me to join them for a Saturday long run, I was confused.

I’d seen them logging Saturday long runs on Strava for a while, but I didn’t understand the hype.

But after their invitation, I was a convert.

We covered 20 miles and wrapped it up with a decent Parkrun effort. One of the lads grinned as he headed off: “now you’ve got the whole weekend free.”

He was right. And that’s a pretty fucking nice feeling.

Why you should run your long runs on Saturdays

• Mental freedom for the rest of the weekend: you can have a chill, lazy Sunday morning without guilt. You don’t have to spend all of Saturday with a 20-miler looming over you. You eat the frog.

• More social opportunities (maybe): you can include a Parkrun (or some other Saturday social run) in the

  middle, or at the end, of your long run. This makes the whole thing more social and makes it easier to attend Parkrun/events that are further afield.

• Improved recovery: you can spend all of Saturday and Sunday recovering if you want. You can get more sleep on Saturday to recover from the hard effort without having to get up for work the next day. (Assuming, of course, you’re working a Mon-Fri 9-5 job. To the chef-runners out there, a Monday long run probably makes more sense).

• Buffer: you have more buffer in case you can’t do the long run on Saturday. You can do it on Sunday, instead.

Why you shouldn’t run your long runs on Saturday

• It may inhibit performance at the Parkrun: you probably can’t smash the Parkrun flat-out with all those miles in your legs (though you probably shouldn’t race it every week, anyway).

• You may miss out on social running opportunities: lots of running clubs set things up in the traditional quality workouts on Tue/Thur/Sun pattern — if you’re joining club long runs, etc, you’ll have to factor in that you may not be able to attend sessions.

How to make Saturday long runs work

• Restructure your week: do quality sessions on Mon/Wed/Sat instead of Tue/Thur/Sun so you have adequate rest between sessions.

• Find others doing a Saturday long run: if possible. Or, convince your friends. Either way, throwing a Parkrun in the middle or at the end makes it more social. If you do the Parkrun in the middle, you can probably find people to run with straight after.

• Be flexible: For me, I’ll do a Saturday long run as a rule, but Sunday is always there as a fallback.