You are a 5K and 10K runner who likes challenges. Perhaps you are thinking about running a 10-mile race but are apprehensive about it. All sorts of thoughts pass through your head. You have not done enough training; your long run is not long enough; you are pretty tired after a 10K so how could you possibly race a longer distance. If you have successfully completed a number of 10K races, you can race a 10-miler by tweaking your training program. And it is not all that difficult to do.

Before beginning your 10-mile training, you need to understand the difference between racing a 10K and a 10-miler. Your level of effort will be different. There is good news and bad news about this. The good news is that the 10-mile distance should be run at your anaerobic threshold (AT) level unlike the 10K distance, which is run slightly above your AT. This means that you should not have excess lactic acid pouring into your legs, giving them that heavy feeling and stress that you encounter in the later stages of a 10K. Thus, you should be slightly more comfortable during the race. The bad news is that you have to run the AT pace for a long time. Should you begin the race too fast and run above your AT level in the early stages, you may find that an 800-pound gorilla has jumped on your back in the middle of the race. It is an ugly way to finish a race. You only need to make two changes to your 10K training program. First, you need to increase your long run. Ideally, you want to have been doing a long run of 10 to 12 miles for two to three months before the race. However, minimalists can get by with a six- to seven-mile long run. Obviously, the longer your long run, the more likely you will be able to sustain your AT pace for the entire race and you will recover more quickly from the effects of the race. My recommendation is that you should increase your weekly long run by only a mile at a time and run that distance until it is comfortable. Generally, that should happen in two to three weeks. Then you can increase your weekly long run by another mile and maintain that distance again until it is comfortable. Once you have hit eight or nine miles for your long run, you can increase the distance by two miles each time. Thus, in three months, a runner can go from running a long run of four miles to 10 miles. Make sure that the long runs are done at a conversational pace (sixty to seventy percent effort on your heart monitor) with no huffing and puffing.

The second change in your training is to increase your AT workouts. If you have not done them before, try running three times one mile at eighty to eighty-five percent effort with a 400 meter recovery between sets. If you don't have a monitor, it should feel like you are on the edge and that you are running pretty hard. However, you should be able to sustain this pace for the entire mile and finish without having to put your hands on your hips at the end (if you do, you ran it too hard). For those who are already doing one AT workout, I suggest adding a second one that would be a 20-minute non-stop AT run, again at eighty to eighty-five percent effort. The feeling you should have after either of these workouts is the same feeling you have after a 10K race--grateful that it is over but ten to fifteen minutes later you feel terrific. Make sure that you do a mile warm-up and mile cool-down after each workout.

One final caution should be noted. Your recovery period will be a bit longer than it is when racing a 10K. While you can safely race 10Ks week after week, you may want to take off the next weekend and not race for two weeks. This is especially true for beginning 10-mile racers and those whose weekly mileage is under 25.

Coach Kirt West writes the Ask the Coach column for the Washington Running Report and is a private coach for motivated adult runners. Questions can be sent to kirtwest@erols.com.