Can you run too slow on easy/recovery days?

Well, yes, if it was 15 minute miling for example.

"You can never run too slowly. But you can run too fast." Arthur Lydiard. But there would be a point where you might not actually be running.

You could get injured by altering your biomechanics so drastically maybe.

No, I cannot run too slow on easy/recovery days.

You probably can’t either.

I used to lie to myself about what my easy pace was. As I got more fit, I always would have said my easy pace was about the same thing, but that’s only really become true recently.

As a result, I plateaued for a while, but now my workouts have been great and I’m starting to PR again. I wonder if I would have improved faster and not plateaued if I ran slower easy runs in the past year or so. It certainly couldn’t have hurt since I didn’t improve much in that time.

If you're deliberately slowing down, yes. You're probably doing fine though.

I find that if I deliberately run slow all the way through my runs (I do take a while to get going), I get really inefficient and the effort actually ends up feeling harder than striding out properly. Maybe it's psychological.

There's a difference between easy days and recovery days. You could walk on recovery days and still get some benefit, and if you are actually running there's little chance that anything you're doing is 'too slow'.

you are far more likely to run too fast on recovery days than you are to run too slow

Don’t check the pace.

HRE wrote:

"You can never run too slowly. But you can run too fast." Arthur Lydiard. But there would be a point where you might not actually be running.

So when you are going to slow you give it a different name?. Lydiard also talked about how running slow would take much longer to get the adaptations.

Realistically if you easy run pace should be like 7 mins( for say around 1600 runner), running at 730 isn't a bit deal. Neither is 8 or an occasional 9. Start running 10/11 min miles for more than like a warm up, and we can talk about running too slow.

And no I don't care about the kenyans/japanese doing their 3rd run of the day like a slugs. If have already done 15 miles of training, do whatever you want for the next hour of training.

What is" recovery days"? When I was in my prime years in the mid-90s and running 32-low for 10k, and running around 150k every week it didn´t matter what I had been doing the day before. I was always ready to put in a good effort the day after. Today, when I´m 50+, it´s a very different story..

If you need to run your non workout days at a crawling pace then either your mileage is too high or your workouts are too hard for your current level.

Maybe you would've broken 32 if you slowed down and had more energy for quality workouts

Yes, Lydiard said that you can get as fit by running slowly as you can by running faster but it will take longer "so what the LSD runner does in two years maybe we can do in one." So if you want or need to run slowly and are willing to wait longer, it would seem that you cannot run too slowly on easy days. But Arthur said that in an age when you had a really hard time finding anyone running slower than 8:00 miles. Now there are loads of people, even decent competitive runners, who spend a lot of time running even slower, sometimes quite a bit slower. In thinking about Arthur's comment I wondered if there is a point at which you are moving so slowly that he wouldn't have considered it running.

Maybe not. Another of his quotes was "if you become overtrained go for a 20 mile run at a pace so slow that grandmothers pushing their grandchildren in carriages are passing you." Van Aaken believed that you got fitter no matter how slowly you ran as long as you "maintained running form."

If you're running by feel then it almost by definition isn't too slow.

HRE wrote:

Maybe not. Another of his quotes was "if you become overtrained go for a 20 mile run at a pace so slow that grandmothers pushing their grandchildren in carriages are passing you." Van Aaken believed that you got fitter no matter how slowly you ran as long as you "maintained running form."

At a certain point I think you have to consider he was exaggerating to get his point across. I am willing to bet none of his runners every did 15-20 min miles(grandma pace.)

Realistically at some point you are going to slow and for too long. But few come close to that. A lot more people would benefit by backing off 30-60s than by speeding up but just because 30s is good doesn't mean 2 mins is better.

Sham 69 wrote:

If you're deliberately slowing down, yes. You're probably doing fine though.

This coming from the idiot that recommends all runs should be faster than 7min/mi and blowing your wad in the first lap of a mile. You gotta keep your troll consistent. You’re all over the place.

Tooslow21 wrote:

Whenever someone says to run by feel, I tend to run too slow when I check it back after I finish.

Can you run too slow on easy/recovery days?

You took a slow day. You ran by feel without looking at your watch during the run. You did everything right, that is, until you checked your watch at the end and started questioning yourself.

The whole point of not checking the watch, is not checking the watch. Otherwise, we have the tendency to question our pace and try to talk ourselves into running faster on our recovery days, which is what you're trying to do right now.

Keep in mind that the goals of your recovery days are truly to recover while maintaining some aerobic function, and that not only does pushing the pace on those days not help those goals, it actually harms them.

You might be someone that on your recovery days has to run a route of known mileage and leave your watch at home.

Star wrote:

Don’t check the pace.

^

Agreed. Arthur once wrote that good runners rarely run slower than 7:00 per mile. When he wrote that it was generally true. Anything much slower lead to questions about whether you were really running. Now 7:00 pace is fast by a lot of people's standards and I don't really know when, if ever, someone is going so slowly that it's not really running. To the OP's question, I'd say he's not running too slowly but he might get fitter faster if he ran a bit faster.