Easy running hasn't worked for me.

Weekly mileage is 35.

8:00 pace is fine.

Sounds like you raced your tempo. Don't do that.

Your training paces were already fine. If you weren’t having issues with recovery or injury then there wasn’t any reason to run any slower. You were already running slow.

I’m a good bit faster than you but typically run my easy days 8-9min pace, often in the center. I find it necessary to stay in this area to recover from workouts. If I was doing nothing but easy running (which it sounds like you are)I’m guessing my legs would be in the mid to upper 7’s at idle.

Body responds to stress.

Otherwise, atrophy.

A number of years ago, an experiment was done with college students, who agreed for a small fee to be almost inactive for several weeks, so as to simulate old people trying to recover from illness. The atrophy was so extreme that these young people endured a significant loss of muscle tone.

A reporter was looking into the training of African runners and observed an 18 mile run, complete with a truck that followed along with bottles with liquid for the runners. The reporter estimated the pace around 6:30-6:40 per mile. Not 8 min miles, and this was 18 miles and not a fast run.

When Henry Rono ran 13:08 for a 5K WR in 1978, he started with 63s and kept it going. Do you believe 8 min miles got him there?

When some elite runners do high intensity workouts, the workouts are so thorough and so exhaustive that there may be some running at slow paces, but that is more like what someone might do during racing seasons.

You don't work hard when you do it requires you to go slow some days to recover.

I agree with the other poster who said you were running your paces just fine. Easy running is needed more when you are doing big mileage...like 75 MPW and up.

pretty much everyone above got it right...

the easy running dogmatists on this website often fail to mention that easy running only works when accompanied with higher mileage than whatever you were doing "too fast" and more intense workouts.

anyone telling you that running slower makes you faster, all other factors equal has clearly been reading too much letsrun and not been doing enough running.

08022021 wrote:

Weekly mileage is 35.

Ding ding ding! This is the key.

You won’t find a need for easy running if you’re only running 35 mpw. If you double that, then you’ll find the 7:20-8:20 easy miles useful.

That's what I thought. At the moment I'm content to increase the quality over quantity because I've only been running for 16 months.

The main factor of improvements are specific workouts and volume of running (massive gains up to ~1h/day which would be ~65 miles for most runners).

If you run 65 mpw with 2 hard workouts and a long run each week, you will need slow easy runs to absorb the hard sessions and benefit from them. If you still run your easy runs fast then, you are either an extremely talented runner like Solinsky, Rupp, Farah with very high VO2MAX or you are doing your workouts too easy.

Your overall training stimulus is so easy, that doing anything more makes you better - in your case, improving the pace of easy run. But running more mileage, or harder workouts and slowing down the easy runs again would probably make you even better (a 18 min 5k isn't really something to brag about for a male runner with average/above average talent).

LateRunnerPhil wrote:

(~1h/day which would be ~65 miles for most runners).

This is completely stupid ^^

rrlkuy wrote:

LateRunnerPhil wrote:

(~1h/day which would be ~65 miles for most runners).

This is completely stupid ^^

What? You don’t run all your 1hr easy runs just above 6min pace? I thought everyone did.

And finally, there’s a yin yang thing to easy/hard paces. You can’t have or know one without the other.

After HS and college, I stopped running for about 6 years, and recently got back into it. The posters ITT hit the nail on the head. When I was 1-2 years into my comeback and just running 3-4x a week, I pretty much ran every run hard. I was probably in 17:30 shape and ran my "easy" miles at like 7:00-15 shape. Tempos/intervals/LR all faster than that.

Once I bumped my mileage to 70mpw or so, that became a big problem. At 30-40mpw, it worked great. There are a lot of diminishing returns above like 50mpw to be honest. You can get like 95% the way there on 40mpw moderate -> hard. If you want to get to like 97-100% your potential, you have to bump the mileage and, consequently, slow your easy miles down a bit.

You a real dooosh Phil, he wasn't bragging just giving his current fitness as a metric. Also 2 hard workouts and a lr is rubbish advice, if you workout so hard you need to do 'recovery runs' (cringe) you have done too much (a situation you are likely very familiar with).

However people tell you easy running worked for them, the real reason is weight loss. If you weigh less, all else equal, you'll be faster over distance.

Running lower volume doesn't burn away the fat like higher volume does.

Yeah. That's why skinny people need to get more muscle which translates into better "push off" power. Muscles are needed to run a good 400, which translates into a good 800, 1600, etc.

the "deal" with easy running is to run at an easy effort, and don't worry about pace. Slow runs generally don't help, unless that's the pace that feels easy to you on a given day. If 7-7:20 was an easy effort, then there was no need to slow it down.

HITHEREYOU wrote:

You a real dooosh Phil, he wasn't bragging just giving his current fitness as a metric.

I wasn't referring to him personally, just meant to say that someone running a 18 min 5k on 35mpw probably hasn't maxed out his performance yet.

Many people tend to always look at easy runs and blame performances or breakthroughs on changes on their easy pace. OP tried running easy runs slower, at 35 mpw with some tempo workouts and wondered why he got slower. Then he started running them faster again, and got better.

It would be wrong to belief that the story here is faster easy runs = faster race times. It's just in his special scenario, with his mileage and his level of workouts, it might have turned out to be that way.

The other examples people bring for fast easy runs (say ~5:30/mi for 13:00 guys) is that Salazar successfully employed the strategy for Rupp and Farah, who did run high mileage and very hard workouts. But do you know what genetics these guys have? VO2MAX, tendon length, bone density, etc.? Do you know what recovery facilities they have access to? Do you know how many massages/PT sessions/supplements/drugs these guys are taking? Farah might have been able to reach the next level going from 7 min miles to 5:30-5:50 min miles on his easy days, but most runners would be absolutely fried by running an easy pace that fast.

A better example is the Kenyan's doing 9 min miles every morning to shake out their legs. Most of their runs are at conversational pace, but when they have a workout they make it a solid one.