How Easy Should an Easy Run Be?

Audio Transcript

Coach Jeff: Hey fellow runners. Welcome back to the Runners Connect podcast. Today’s question is from Sue.

Sue: I know we should take our easy days easy to facilitate recovery, but how slow do we really need to go, and what if running too slow affects our running form?

Coach Jeff: That’s a great question, Sue. I would say that easy day pace is probably one of the things that the runners we work with, struggle with the most.

Whether it be running too fast, because they think it’s beneficial, or like you asked, struggling to find the balance between running easy enough to recover, and not to slow, where you feel you’re not getting any benefits, or that it’s impacting your form.

I’m going to start out by tackling this question. For those that don’t know, I want to talk about why we might want to run slower.

Why it’s important to run slow for our recovery runs. After a hard workout, when you do a harder run, when you run faster, your muscles are going to have little micro tears from all their forceful contractions that happen with each step or at faster speeds.

These micro tears in the muscles are what cause the soreness and what makes you sore from the training, the day after a hard workout.

Now the cool thing is that this is how you get fitter. This is how your body heals itself; heals these micro tears through the circulatory system by delivering nutrients, oxygen, the food that you eat, protein, carbohydrate those types of things back into the muscles.

So, during that recovery period when the muscles break down, they build back up stronger with the nutrients that you give them, and that’s how you’re able to get fitter and stronger.

When you’re running easy enough, the stress of these micro tears are basically nonexistent. You tear it down, and then if you run easy enough, you’re just delivering nutrients, delivering oxygen, building back up and it’s outweighing the slight muscle damage that you’re doing. In that way, you’re getting stronger.

If you run too hard, what you’re not doing is on your easy days, instead of facilitating that recovery, you’re adding more stress to the muscle breaking it down further and providing more micro tears.

I think the tough thing that runners struggle with is the connection between running too hard and getting injured; the connection isn’t direct.

In the sense that, going a little too hard on one of your easy days or a little too fast on one easy days, doesn’t immediately result in you getting injured the next day.

What ends up happening is that the stress and fatigue of these micro tears, of doing it constantly, and not giving yourself the recovery time, adds up.

Then a week, two weeks, or three weeks after you’ve put together a string of running a little too fast, or even just a couple of days of running too fast and not recovering, that’s when the fatigue and stress builds up and get you injured.

It’s very difficult to directly correlate it to a specific run that you ran too fast and so that’s why it can be difficult sometimes.

That’s why we want to run our recovery days in our easy days, slow and easy and not take them too fast.

Now the struggle with that is that most runners will ask, “If I’m doing all of my running slow and easy, how am I possibly going to get fitter?

I think the best way to address this is to look at some of the science about what we’re doing with the aerobic system because when we talk about running, that is the fitness builder that we’re going after.

When we do our easy runs we’re trying to build the aerobics system.

If you look at some studies, and I’m just going to basically run off some numbers here, but we know that from studies of capillary development, it peaks at about 60-75% of 5k pace and we know that maximum stimulation of mild myoglobin in type one muscle fibers, occurs at about 63-67% of the O2 max.

Maximal mitochondrial development comes when you’re running about 50-75% of the O2 Max.

Therefore, with those three numbers looking at those particular aspects of aerobic development, three components of aerobic development, we can see that our optimal easy run pace is going to be between 55-75% of your 5K pace.

The average is going to be about 65%. So just to be safe, let’s say 65% of your 5K pace is what your optimal easy run pace is going to be.

That’s obviously a little bit difficult to go off in the sense, so what I’m going to do is just use an example of a 25-minute 5K runner and I’m not saying twenty minutes is fast and neither am I saying that it is slow. It’s just a round number that I’m using.

Obviously, whatever your 5K pace is what you would want to adjust. Let me give you an example using 65% of 5K pace for a 20-minute 5K runner, between 55-75%.

55% would be about 9.40 pace and 75% is going to be about 8-minute pace. So, the beauty of that range is that it gives you a range of like what your easy pace should be.

So 9.40 pace is going to feel pretty slow and that’s not to say that that’s the pace that you should run.

It could be you’re feeling extra sore or fatigued. If so, you can go as slow as 940 pace and still get almost optimal benefits aerobically.

On the same token, if you’re feeling good and you want to push your easy day, or you’re just feeling really whippy in that day, you can go as fast as an 8-minute pace and run, and still be in the aerobic zone that is going to optimally develop your aerobic system.

It kind of gives you a range. I think that answers the question of how slow do you really need to go.

You can certainly go slower than that. I would say that when we look at a run, we can look two different outcomes that we’re looking for.

And that’s how I try to approach every workout and every run that I do. I ask myself, “What is the purpose of this session and what can I do to maximize the purpose of that session?”

If I look at a run and it’s maybe the day after a really hard workout, let’s say I did a hard workout on the track on Tuesday, and I’m sore and tired – it was a brutal workout, and I know that I’ll do another workout on Saturday, the purpose of Wednesday and Thursday would be to recover.

When you’re running four to six days a week, months at a time, the aerobics system is going to get a bit stimulated. I know that that day recovery is paramount.

So I am going to run as slow as I possibly can to ensure a recovery, because I’m not concerned about building up aerobics fitness on those days.

What I’m concerned about is recovering so that I can be ready for Saturday session. So, if I’m a 20-minute 5K runner, I’m going to start maybe parameter wise, around 940 pace.

And if I start and I’m feeling really sluggish, or 940 pace is a struggle, I will slow down. I will run 10-minute 10,30 pace and make sure that instead of pushing it, I am recovering.

I will not try to get to 8-minute pace. There’s no benefit to that because I don’t need the development.

What I need that day is the recovery. Let me address the latter part of the question which is, what if running too slow affects your running form?

I would say that if that happens, this can definitely happen for runners that are in the 30-minute 5K range, where running at 65% or 55% percent of your 5K pace could be very close to walking.

Then I would say again, let’s take a look at what is the purpose of the session. I would say then that’s where the range really helps, so you don’t have to be 55%.

You can go as fast as 75% and if you’re at 75%, I would say that is probably not impacting your form because that’s on the quicker side of easy pace.

So, I would say that it’s probably not going to affect your form. So, you can go up to that speed if you feel like you really need a recovery day and you’re really sore, then there’s no harm in actually walking bits and pieces.

Target around 65% of your 5K pace and then as you start to feel fatigued, because I’m assuming here that 65% of 5K pace in this particular case is going to feel strenuous to you.

I have had times when running 55-65 of 5K pace has felt strenuous, even though it should be easy. If that’s the case and you can’t slow down because it’s going to impact your form, then you can walk.

You don’t have to walk a lot. You could do 30 seconds or a minute and what that’s going to do is it’s going to reduce the strain of whatever is causing your fatigue.

It could be muscle soreness, or muscle fatigue. It could be you’re not just having a good day and you’re just feeling crappy. That will help you recover a little bit.

After that you can get back to running and still make sure that you’re recovering.

I hope that makes sense in terms of what we’re looking at, in terms of the paces.

I hope that answers your question, and gave you a background about why we’re running easy, looking at the purpose of work outs, and how to find the correct pace, based on what you’re looking to do.

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I hope you stay tuned for tomorrow’s episode. I’ll be back with you to end out the week thank you so much for listening and I hope you have a great day.