For a 17:30 runner, is a run at 6:30 pace too slow to be a workout?

That’s like easy long tempo pace….

No that’s a good solid run for a 17:30 runner. I have two athletes right under 17:00 and that would be pretty focused tough for them.

That’s crazy to me. When I was right at 17:00 for the 5k I could do 15 mile long runs at 6:30 pace no problem. Admittedly I’m a much more endurance based runner…

Same here at 17:30

The only way to know is to try it and see how you feel afterwards. Though for me, I'd see it as a bit of a waste of a workout day, I'd rather do 3x2 miles at threshold pace but I don't do tempos unless I'm marathon training anyway.

A minute off 5k pace is a good "steady state run" for a longer tempo or endurance run

Too slow for tempo, too fast for anything else.

And that's why it's a good pace for a workout.

That's fine for high school kids. All the older posters are talking about how its slow and they do it for 15 milers in their marathon training are missing the point.

Except I was in high school when I was a 17:00 runner and doing those long runs…

Seems like more a semantic question than anything else. ~52 seconds off 5k PR pace is harder than most people do their easy runs and gives a different benefit than running 2 minutes off 5k PR pace.

Whether it’s a workout depends on if you want to call it a workout. For me (15:30ish 5k), I might do an occasional 6-8 mile ‘workout’ around 5:50-6:00 pace that I’ll write on the schedule as a workout and warm up/cool down for. If I’m in good aerobic shape and not doing too much quality, I might also occasionally have runs where I feel good and end up working down to ~5:50-6:00 pace impromptu. I typically wouldn’t call that a workout, but that’s just because I think of workouts as planned efforts with clear segments of the run (e.g. warm-up, ‘workout’, cool down).

My point is, the run OP described will fit a number of ways that a workout could reasonably be defined, but it could also fail to fit some reasonable definitions of a “workout.” If you have an easy/workout binary, you’d probably call it a workout most of the time. If you characterize your runs as easy/medium/hard and only consider “hard” runs to be workouts, then you might not call it a workout. If you shape your definition of a workout around how a run is planned and executed along with the effort itself, then it depends on those definitions, too.

From a training perspective, none of this really matters. It’s a run that has a training benefit and will make you fitter as long as it fits into a training period appropriately.

that's a great base workout. If anything, you're encouraged to do more of that.

That might start easy but no way would it stay easy

This post summed it up perfectly.

I was a 4:30 / 17:00 runner in HS (obviously underdeveloped on the endurance side) and 6:30 didn't feel easy. What helped me improve going into college was a lot of steady 10 mile runs (starting anywhere from 6:10s working down to 5:50) during base training.

So for many HS 17:30 types I would expect 6-8 miles at this pace to still be a good effort to incorporate in the pre and early competition phases, especially if it's on a route with hills and terrain

I'm a 17:00 runner and that would be a decent LT1 run for me. I wouldn't sacrifice a workout for it though as it wouldn't be particularly taxing.

In college for XC we would do “steady state” runs that were a tad slower than true tempo pace, so somewhere in the half marathon to marathon pace range for 6-12 miles, I think those are the workouts that helped me the most in the 3k-5k-8k range. So I think that should be a great workout for you!

Canova would say that is the perfect pace for a general endurance workout. It's almost exactly
85% of your 5k pace, in the 5–9 mi range. It's also close to Daniels' "M pace" which is prescribed every 2-3 weeks in the buildup to a goal 5k race in his training plans.

Well sure, I could do 15 miles at 6:30 easily in a race but I'd never do that in training as it's hard work and unsustainable to do it every week / every other week.

I just wanted to know if consistent runs around this pace are fast enough to raise my fitness significantly and if not, what would? Already do thresholds.

And that's why you're a hobbyjogger, you think you've got it all figured out.