Thinking of picking up the pace but feeling tired all the time? Perhaps you are losing motivation due to the stresses and impact of speed training? This article is sure to make you smile as now you have the perfect excuse to run easy and have no guilt! David Roche explains how below.
How to use easy miles for aerobic breakthroughs. Article originally written by David Roche and appears on trailrunnermag.com
The key to reaching your potential is not running hard but learning to run easy.
In general, you will get 80 to 90 percent of the way to your genetic limitations by running a lot at an “easy” pace. Easy running causes almost every positive adaptation you want as a runner—stronger muscles, a bigger heart, more capillaries to let that big heart pump blood to those strong muscles.
Trail running is an aerobic activity, and to improve your aerobic system, you have to increase the volume of aerobic stress. People that run too hard will rarely be able to run enough to reach their aerobic potential, beset by burnout, injury and weak musculoskeletal and cardiovascular systems that cannot support intense efforts over time.
To put it another way, harder running is icing, easy running is the cake. You can serve a bowl of icing to some people, and they might respond well for a bit. But most people get burnt out by all icing, all the time, and even those who enjoy scooping fistfuls of icing into their mouth will probably end up in the hospital as a result.
However, one of the hardest things as a runner is finding out what “easy” actually means. So how can you enjoy lots of fun, healthy trail running while getting faster over time? If you apply a few tips, you can have your cake and eat it too.
1. Run by Heart Rate
In December, my wife Megan was coming off six months without much running, plagued by mononucleosis. For a kid, mono might not be a big deal, but for a runner in her 20s, it can have long-term health impacts. There is some evidence it might even be brought on by training too hard.
We needed to figure something out so Megan could keep training without risking burnout, and settled on heart-rate training. And now, just three months later, she is stronger and faster than ever. Immediately, we found out that what Megan thought was “easy” was actually bordering on lactate-threshold pace, resulting in too much hard running and not enough recovery. In other words, she was too tough for her own good.
After some experimentation, we found that the following formula works well for her: 180 – age. Megan is 25, so we set a hard heart-rate cap of 155 on every single run for more than a month. At first, some of the runs were slower than she had run in her entire life. Over time, as her aerobic system got stronger, the paces started getting faster. Then, we added in some short intervals (less than a minute) to work on running economy.
Now, she does four or five “easy” days per week, staying under that same heart-rate cap. On the other two or three days, she has structured workouts or long runs, and leaves the heart-rate monitor at home. By holding herself accountable to heart rate, Megan has had breakthroughs,winning the Way Too Cool 50K and running some of her best workouts ever.
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