Easy days easy - a dangerous mindset?

I think you are conflating two things (possibly accidentally), which means it's not too clear what you are meaning...

easy runs easy all the time (implying there are workouts that are hard)

vs

running easy all the time

then there's the level of easiness, so may be worth just clarifying a bit.

On a simplistic level, I would figure out how one was feeling when it came to their workouts as a basis of how good their easy runs were for them.

Over time you should see a progression of your easy runs getting faster as you get more fit.

People who reference the Kenyan shuffle need to realize they are doing 13-14 runs a week and maybe 1-2 of those is a full on shuffle. They aren’t shuffling every single easy run. And often the shuffles progress into much faster.

You're conflating "easy" with "slow." For the guy sub-9 guy cranking out 100 miles/week, maybe 7:30+ is just what he has to run in order to get the miles in without getting injured, and it is still hard for him.

What are your PR's and average mileage?

Get rid of the watch and switch to a heart rate monitor based approach. Just as you shouldn't weight lift hard every single day, you shouldn't try to run hard every single day. You'll tear muscle and take on lactic acid, which will be detrimental to your progression. Hard days should be hard, recovery days should be recovery. Run out the lactic acid and let your muscles repair themselves on your recovery days. As you get fitter, the recovery runs will go faster using the same effort.

Do you want to be a workout Olympian and have impressive sounding training or have your greatest efforts on race day?

The people who hammer daily often don’t have it on race day or peak mid season and are also-rans come goal race.

You don’t get more fitness by not taking easy days and recovering.

“I’m not sure what happened. I run 6:XX pace everyday. I was ready for 5:00 pace marathon.”

“I did my tempo run at 5:00 pace on Downhill Street and finished with 200s at sub 4 min pace. I was ready to PR in my big race but I had an off day. My coach doesn’t know how to peak me.”

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying, but I think my experience is almost the exact opposite of yours. Meaning, what I have observed is that the good runners typically run their easy days easy relative to their capability, but I see a lot of mediocre runners who appear to hammer their easy days, e.g. a 60 minute 10 mile runner doing the bulk of their mileage in the 6:00 to 7:00 minute/mile range.

Forcing yourself to run 7 minute miles instead of 8 minute miles is pointless. It achieves nothing.

joed|rt wrote:

Get rid of the watch and switch to a heart rate monitor based approach. Just as you shouldn't weight lift hard every single day, you shouldn't try to run hard every single day. You'll tear muscle and take on lactic acid, which will be detrimental to your progression. Hard days should be hard, recovery days should be recovery. Run out the lactic acid and let your muscles repair themselves on your recovery days. As you get fitter, the recovery runs will go faster using the same effort.

I agree. People make this much harder than it is. With all things in life, not just running, you are either stressing, or you are recovering. Its that simple.

Pace on an easy/recovery run is irrelevant, the goal is to recover. If you don't recover, then you screwed up the run. If you feel you recover better running an easy day faster, then run faster. If you feel better running them slower, then run slower. If you feel better not running at all, then do something else.

Workout Olympian wrote:

Do you want to be a workout Olympian and have impressive sounding training or have your greatest efforts on race day?

The people who hammer daily often don’t have it on race day or peak mid season and are also-rans come goal race.

You don’t get more fitness by not taking easy days and recovering.

“I’m not sure what happened. I run 6:XX pace everyday. I was ready for 5:00 pace marathon.”

“I did my tempo run at 5:00 pace on Downhill Street and finished with 200s at sub 4 min pace. I was ready to PR in my big race but I had an off day. My coach doesn’t know how to peak me.”

That last workout sounds a lot like Sarker Ptinson

OP = Parker Stinson

Yeah, boy. Let's let her rip! And just watch how much I can move my arms. I'm awesome!

I see the opposite. Everyone I follow on strava goes 6:30-7:15 “easy” yet they’re all slower than me on race day. I’m not afraid nor do I care if my easy days are anywhere near 8-9 minute pace.

+1 to this.

Fan of elite runners wrote:

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying, but I think my experience is almost the exact opposite of yours. Meaning, what I have observed is that the good runners typically run their easy days easy relative to their capability, but I see a lot of mediocre runners who appear to hammer their easy days, e.g. a 60 minute 10 mile runner doing the bulk of their mileage in the 6:00 to 7:00 minute/mile range.

meant to quote +1 to this.

Im capable of 14:50ish rn and my easy runs usually come out to 7:10-7:20 pace. I have a teammate that placed pretty well at pre-nats and has a solid shot at being a sub 3:45/4:00 and 14:00 guy this track season. Me and him run a good chunk of our easy miles together. He rarely goes faster than 6:5x pace on non-workout days.

I do see a lot of high schoolers that run their “easy miles” at 6:30-7:00 pace that can’t break 18:00 in a 5k though.

If you look at the physiological side of running, you’ll see that it’s not the pace of easy runs that determines gains in fitness, it’s the length of time staying above and below a certain heart rate threshold. For someone with a max HR of 200 or so, 135 is going to feel easy, so is 160-165. You’ll be making the same capillary gains at either heart rate zone, but if you are in good shape you can run 10-12 miles if not even more in that 135-145 zone and still feel very fresh the next day. In my personal experience, I’ll be pretty stiff the next day if I hover around 160 for 10+ miles (which comes out to about 6:30-6:40 pace for me)

I’m fully capable of running 6:30 pace every day, but that’d make me stale, and 6:30 pace helps me run 4:50 pace and faster just as much as 7:00 pace does.

The people you follow on Strava aren’t fast or slow because of their easy pace, it’s because of their other training.

The thing is to do YOUR best paces! Bu tof course you got to know what those paces are.

I remember reading some article here by a 28 minute 10000m runner. It was titled something like why I sucked in college. It was about running slow on easy days. Wonder what happened to the author. Was a great article.

You get the same aerobic benefit going 8:30/mi as you would 7:30/mi. The lack of variation in easy runs/hard runs (1 min within 10k race pace) will make it a lot harder to gain fitness and stave off breakdown. Of course you don’t have be shuffling everyday but the best athletes I’ve seen have a distinct variation from one day to the next in their pacing.

If you focus on increasing the pace of your easy runs, mileage and workouts will suffer resulting in either underperforming, over training and/or injuries. Like we all know someone in high school who did all their easy runs at a 6:30 pace but when it came to workouts and races they did not race nor did workouts that suggest they should be doing easy runs at that pace. And often what's happening is they're doing all their easy runs in terms of heart rate in zone 3. Which physiologically speaking has no real benefits like doing it in zone 1-2 or doing workouts in zone 4-5 in terms of heart rate(now wait for some boomer to be triggered I'm talking about heart rate because he did all his easy runs in the 70s at his marathon pace).