It's hedonistic exercise, but I rarely miss a day and I always look forward to it because there's flexibility in it and I drive when I have it in me and drift when I don't.

Flexercise is how I made it happily through the half marathon, the bridge run and the City to Surf.

I can't really call myself a real runner though, can I?

Real runners don't take walking breaks, do they? They certainly don't skip.

Or do they?

Jen A. Miller, the author of Running: A Love Story, reckons they do.

Like me, she initially thought the idea was ridiculous.

"When a runner friend suggested I run my first distance race by adding walk breaks, the idea startled me," she writes in The New York Times. "I didn't think you were allowed to walk in races, not if you wanted to be a real runner."

She felt like a failure after racing in five marathons and walking for periods in four of them.

"I should have been charging the finish line in a blaze of glory with my hands thrown triumphantly over my head. Instead I dragged myself across the final timing mats," she says. 

"A shroud of failure hung over me during those races and for weeks after, a sense that I wasn't a real runner, that I had given up."

Then she did her research.

She discovered a study in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport that found those taking regular walking breaks during a race can finish at the same time as those who run the whole way. 

And the ones who didn't flog themselves the whole way suffered far less wear and tear of their bodies.

The study followed 42 runners as they trained for three months for their first marathons. 

The runners were divided into two groups: those who would run the whole way and those who would take 60-second walking breaks every 2.5 kilometres.

Despite the different paces, both groups finished the marathon in similar times with the walk breakers reporting less fatigue and muscle pain after the event.

"Most people think that if you walk in a marathon race, you will need much more time to finish," said Kuno Hottenrott, a professor of sports science at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany and lead author of the study. 

But, as Hottenrott was surprised to find, this is not necessarily the case.

"Since running a marathon is as much of a physical as well as a mental challenge, it is for a runner mentally easier to break the marathon distance down into smaller parts and focus on one segment at a time, instead of looking at the whole marathon distance."

Interestingly, it's even possible to drop your time by incorporating regular walk breaks. Former Olympic runner Jeff Galloway says you can finish as much as seven minutes faster in a half marathon if you add in walk breaks to rejuvenate.

Miller no longer stresses about whether or not she's a 'real' runner.

In her coming races, which will accumulate to more kms than a marathon over the course of one weekend, her game plan is simple. 

"I've returned to that proven strategy: nine minutes of running, followed by one minute of walking," she says. "Repeat. Repeat. Repeat."

For me, I've got the 55km Coastrek walk next. There might not be any sprinting involved, but it's still a decent distance to get through. I think I'll take a flexercise approach; you can expect to see skipping.

And when I next race or pop out for a canter, I might be a counterfeit 'real' runner for not flogging it the whole way, but if going the distance and enjoying it counts, it'll be the real deal.