I am a long distance runner, but those middle distance runs are so tough

I was asked recently by a few runners on my thoughts on why middle distances for long distance runners seem so tough compared to the short and long distance runs. So, I thought about this for a while, checked my personal running logs, and checked out running forums to see what other people were saying.

For the sake of this article, long distance is classified as half marathon (13.1 miles) distance or greater, mid distance is 5 miles to 10 miles, and short is anything under 5 miles. Personally, I lump 5 miles and under as short distance, and anything over 5 miles to 10 miles as mid, and anything over 10 as long. I found that many distance runners lump 10 miles and up as long distance.

There are two factors to analyze here; mental and physical. I will summarize each in the sections below from my personal logs and my research.

After consulting my logs, I noticed that I actually had a much better time with either short or long distances, and had more trouble with the mid distances. This was surprising because I thought my long distance runs were generally a lot tougher. Surprisingly, I found this to be a pretty consistent scenario for a lot of distance runners.

Short Distance Runs
The physical factor is very interesting topic to tackle. With the conditioning, my body barely gets fully warmed up on short runs. This means my heart rate stays a bit lower, even when I am going at a good pace (for myself). Even with my PR races for short distances, my heart rate never really climbed above the lower end of my average heart rate. For most people however, I found that race heart rate for their short distance races were much more elevated than their average heart rate. But across the board, everyone felt the same after the short distance race...not very tired and their bodies were saying "Hey, when does the race start?"

The mental factor is fun to analyze, because a person's training has a lot to do with this piece. For me, the distance is so short that it doesn't seem daunting to me in any way, and mentally seems more like an easy day run, so I have no issue focusing on the run and before I know it, the race is over. This is completely due to my training. I don't listen to music on short runs, and focus on my form and obstructions in the road. For other runners, I found a similar feeling with the short distances; it was over so quickly, there wasn't really enough time for the runner to get psyched out in any way.

Middle Distance Runs
The physical factor here depends a lot on how a person trains and conditions. If you are a seasoned distance runner, then middle distances are typically a little more taxing on your body, but not enough to really cause any real fatigue. For me, I find that I run my fastest times in my mid distances races. I am sure this is due to some flaw in my training...or maybe I am doing the wrong training. But when I finish a mid distance race, or even training run, I find myself tired but I still feel fine physically. This was the same feeling from most distance runners as well.

The mental factor is the key here. For some odd reason, I found from my logs that I had trouble focusing on my mid distance runs, mainly training runs. Basically, my mind was in the "short distance" mode and I was running without music, but when my mind thought I was supposed to be done, I still had a way to go. This kind of psyched me out and my performance at that point saw a huge slide in pace, as well as somewhat large fluctuations for my heart rate. I wouldn't regain my calm until about 85-90% of the run was completed. In researching this, I found that many runners have the same results I encounter, although it appears most of the runners are able to mentally recover a lot quicker than me.

Long Distance Runs
Physically, long distance runs are rough. You train your body to handle the beating it takes both from the impact of running, as well as the depletion of your energy stores. Therefore, a longer run should feel a lot tougher physically. What's interesting from my logs, is that I found that aside from days where I ran in the heat of the day in hottest part of the summer (oops), my body felt pretty good as long as I was staying hydrated and had proper nutrition before, during, and after my race or my run. I had expected that, even on the nicer weather days, my logs would show the runs were extremely tough; this was not the case. In my research, I found that this was pretty consistent for seasoned distance runners as well.

Mentally, this is a different beast. For me, I go into a distance run (not race) knowing I will be running a long time. I usually try and listen to music, or depending on where I am running, I'll take in the scenery and do lots of thinking about things non-related to running, food, or fitness. For races, I go in with a specific goal and focus on that goal the whole race (I also have a plan B in case something unexpectedly bad happens). Therefore, aside from making sure I keep properly hydrated and energized nutritionally, I don't mentally have any issues with long distances. However, my findings for seasoned distance runners was a little more split than I expected. I honestly expected the results to be similar to mine. Although the majority was similar to my experience, there was an overwhelming amount of people who said that the "middle miles" of their long runs or races they fell into a similar mental trap that they did for the mid distance runs. This would result in a lot of mental fatigue and a lot of people said it would take a long time to mentally recover from it.

Conclusion & Suggestions
So, it appears that most seasoned distance runners don't have any mental or physical issues with short distances. For mid distances, no physical issues, but mental issues are pretty common, but most people recover quickly from them. For long distances, there are always physical issues just because it's a high impact activity for a long period of time, and the mental issues are somewhat split between no problem at all and similar issues with the mid distance runs.

There were tons of comments on how people dealt with the mental aspects of mid and long distances runs and races. However, I will just list the top ones.

1. If you listen to music, have your music playlist have really upbeat, fun, or "whatever really motivates you" songs play during the period you usually would get psyched out
2. If you don't listen to music, keep your mind occupied with anything other than the race or the run
3. DO NOT set notifications, timers, or anything similar before you would usually hit that mental wall, as it will usually trigger that mental wall sooner and cause it to take longer to overcome
4. A good one, and one that I like using, is to take a race in blocks
1. This means 1 mile at a time, or for really long distances, maybe a few miles at a time
2. For each "block", mentally set goals and work to achieve them
5. The best method, however, is to improve the quality of your training runs
1. This could mean training you mind to look at mid distance runs like short distance runs
2. Or you could focus more on timed runs, where you are more focused on running for a certain period of time and not the worrying about the total distance (of course you will want to make sure you are getting certain distances, but that should not be the focus)

I do want to note that there are more technical aspects in regards to changes in the body during the course of longer durations of running, but without being able to interview the hundreds of people I read posts from, I figured trying to bring that in to this would not be very accurate.