Walk breaks: not just for Grandma

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Walk breaks.  Salvation of many new runners, who credit the brief reprieves from the pounding of running with their ability to complete a marathon, half marathon, or 5K.  Yet in many runners’ minds, getting caught in a walk break by your friends and family who came out to watch you run, not walk, is akin to showing up to high school in your underwear.

But walk breaks aren’t just for first-timers or those who are physically unable to run the whole way. In his book Marathon!, former U.S. Olympic marathoner Jeff Galloway prescribes walk breaks every mile, even for marathoners trying to break 2:50.  Somehow though, even with the backing of an Olympian, walk breaks have always managed to seem — well, soft.

When I was a younger, brasher, testosterone-charged new runner and I came across the idea of stopping every mile or so to walk, I vehemently denounced it. The point of running is to run, I said.  It shouldn’t count as a marathon if you don’t run the whole thing.  If you’re going to count that, then I run marathons every week; they’re just punctuated by 22-hour walk breaks.

I can understand that walk breaks might help avoid injury, but when you think about it, it’s a little bit counterintuitive that they should help you run faster.  If someone were to tell me my family was kidnapped and the only way to get them back was to run a 5:20 mile, it’s possible that I’d muster the strength to do it.  (Later, I’d wonder why the kidnapper took such an interest in my running a 5:20 mile.)  But I sure as hell wouldn’t do it by trying to run a pair of 2:30 half-miles with a twenty-second rest in the middle.  That’s just stupid, and if I tried it, I would never see my family again.  Anyone who has ever done interval training knows that the way to run fastest is to spread the effort out evenly over the allotted distance or time, because required effort increases exponentially with speed.  The same goes for hills: You try to maintain a constant level of exertion over them to avoid burning yourself out.

After I got a stress fracture while training for my first marathon — not entirely surprising, given my attitude — I started to rethink things and decided to try Galloway’s method in hopes of avoiding injury, doing six-and-one’s (six minutes running, one minute walking) for a few weeks.  It didn’t last; I got bored with it.  The inspiration of running long distances melted away when I knew that I’d have to stop to walk.  I was 22 years old, for god’s sake!

But finally, a singular experience changed the way I look at walk breaks — I injured my knee a month before my second marathon.  I was devastated, given that I had already planned the road trip out West in my dad’s camper.  As race day approached, I discovered that I could delay the onset of the pain by taking walk breaks every mile or so.  Against better judgment, I lined up at the start of the Rock n’ Roll Arizona marathon, and somehow, I made it through the entire race.  And by “somehow,” I mean “stopping to walk after every mile until about 18,” at which point adrenaline took over and I was able to run the rest of the way.  Someone even told me to slow down on the final hill because I was making him look bad!  To this day, that’s the best I’ve ever felt during the final miles of a marathon, and there’s no question that the walking was to thank.

I haven’t made walk breaks a habit (though I do walk through water stops now), but more and more I’m coming to understand that there’s something to the idea.  All that talk about effort increasing exponentially with speed really only applies to short distances where the cardiovascular system is the limiting factor; there’s tremendous value in giving your leg muscles occasional breaks over long distances.  In trail running, where hills are far steeper than those encountered on roads, it’s common knowledge that you walk the hills to run a faster race.  It’s about doing whatever it takes to get to the finish line as fast as possible, and sometimes, to finish at all.

This I know now: There’s no room for machismo when it comes to running far.  No, there is no shame in walking.