How important is "moderate" pace in HM and Marathon training?

He can afford to go real easy because he is doing intense workouts on hard days. We can all do this if we can push the intensity to the max on hard days. For myself, too late as I get injured if I push too hard on workout days. So I have to do semi semi hard runs followed by not so easy runs. Not the best way to train but that is all I got at this point.

I am in the same boat too, despite being much slower.

I have found Daniel's E pace to be way too fast for recovery purpose, it may have its place for base training, even though.

Once I got out of college moderate runs were nearly all I ever did and I got my marathon from 4:34 to 2:35, 10,000 from 49 something to 32:20, etc. We had a couple sub 2:20 marathoners in our club who did almost nothing but moderate runs and another friend who got into two Olympic Trials doing the same. Marathons were really all that we focused on, there wasn't much else for post college runners in those days, so it would be hard to evaluate how effective that sort of thing would be for say, the 10,000 and down.

How fast are your moderate runs?

It depends greatly from your marathon pace. Around 3 hours marathon pace was moderate for me when was in shape. I believe it was used a lot by runners of Lydiard, being a repeatable, steady-state pace. When training for a marathon I did a couple of moderate pace 20 milers which helped a lot in the marathon. I don't see it as beneficial if done more often but running shorter, but if training like Hanson's then why not, or if you're the type of a runner that can tolerate it almost every day. I did it more frequently, up to 40-60min, in the start of a base phase, when started the sub-LT runs.

Read Daniels easy paces to be speed limits on easy days, not guidelines for pacing.

Success with moderate training depends on your level of fitness, how hard and how often you run your hard days, all of the non running stress factors in your life, sleep, nutrition, total volume of training, etc.

Most importantly, success using moderate paces depends on your personal muscle fiber predominance and the event for which you are training. Those two factors override everything else.

JD gives "easy" as 60% of max HR-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veAQ73OJdwY

Then he goes to threshhold pace 82-85%, so 70-80% is "black hole" or chronic cardio which is non-optimal. It is also where most hobbyjoggers tend to dwell.

slow recoverer wrote:

Uhm. Then please define your zones. Nobody knows what you exactly mean with zone 1 and 2. Moderate in a sense of Canova for sure is defined. It's roughly (MP x 1,1 - 1,2), so if your MP is 6'/mile it is like 6:36 - 7:12 pace. And most important: How relevant is this zone?

Zones are nothing to do with pace...that's why I mentioned heart rate training. Sheesh. Look it up, it's not like it's clouded in mystery. Sorry but I'm not going to rewrite the book on HR zones for you here when it's been conveyed 1000's of times before. Don't be lazy.

sss

The thing is... Everyone how says that MP is "moderate" has an MP that sucks or he seriously underachives. I know, you don't wanna hear this, but it's true. You will never ever hear someone who runs 4:50 pace for a maratho who goes out for a nice 90 minute moderate run at 4:50 pace ;-)

Live to run wrote: Zones are nothing to do with pace...

Oh. And zones have to do with pace. Pace and heart rate correlate. When you're a fast marathoner your MP in a normal case scenario will be at least 85 % of max heart rate for example.

Pikachu wrote:

The thing is... Everyone how says that MP is "moderate" has an MP that sucks or he seriously underachives.

Yup, as I said, my marathon pace was 3 hour pace which was clearly sub-LT, and feeling was moderate. I basically sucked at every event, but because 800m was the event that I sucked least, it's not that difficult to figure out that I sucked most at the marathon.

For faster runners, who do the whole marathon closer to the LT, moderate pace is, surprise surprise, slower than marathon pace.

I don't think Daniels' E pace is actually easy. I think if you follow his pace prescription it's definitely closer to moderate.

I don't think you need to be doing workouts year-round. You can reach peak fitness after 6 weeks of anaerobic work.

The rest of the year log big mileage. Strength. Strength. Strength. Pick up the pace when you feel good and go really easy when you feel worn down. You get really fit doing this and you don't risk OVERTRAINING. Add 100m sprints and hill work and no speed will be lost during this extended type of base phase.

To say that moderate pace running does not produce specific, desirable adaptations is simply not true. Our thinking has become dominated by this idea of zone training but in reality aerobic benefits apply across a spectrum of paces.

Marathon pace is among the tougjest things for me to do in marathon training. I do think different fitness levels experience this differently though. My marathon pace is in the 5:40-5:45 range. Very close to my high 5:20s tempo pace and. It particularly close to my 6:45-7:10 easy pace. My wife's marathon pace of 8:00 feels much easier to her because it's as close or closer to her easy distance pace (which is usually in the 8:40s, but drops to the 8:10s at times) as it is to her 7:20 tempo pace.

ScriptedConnection wrote:

How fast are your moderate runs?

That varied quite a lot over the years but generally at around whatever pace I could manage for the marathon or faster at that particular stage of my career. At one time it would have been 7:30-8:00. Later it was generally 10 or seconds on either side of 6:00, assuming reasonable weather, a not mountainous course or a day when I was really crapped out. I never paid much attention other than out of occasional curiosity and really just used Lydiard's idea of making myself "pleasantly tired."

Pikachu wrote:

Live to run wrote: Zones are nothing to do with pace...

Oh. And zones have to do with pace. Pace and heart rate correlate. When you're a fast marathoner your MP in a normal case scenario will be at least 85 % of max heart rate for example.

Everyone has a different lactate threshold. 85% of max heart rate is not a great metric.

Part of the problem of looking so closely at elite schedules is that they know their paces. They can do a bunch of speed type work then apply it pretty easily to a distance. Normal people can't do that.

Normal people need the moderate paces for a variety of reasons. However, it's very important to distinguish between running slowly 'moderate' and effective moderate runs that end in discomfort and over time, improve pace. Not an easy distinction.

Dgbkotdc wrote:

To say that moderate pace running does not produce specific, desirable adaptations is simply not true. Our thinking has become dominated by this idea of zone training but in reality aerobic benefits apply across a spectrum of paces.

I appreciate the thoughtful responses from everyone.

So let me focus on this thought for a second. There are undoubtedly benefits across the whole spectrum of paces, and Daniels says as much in his books. But he advocates for focusing on particular points in the spectrum in order to maximize the benefits you get from training, then he goes into the physiology of each key training pace.

Easy pace develops stroke volume, mitochondrial density, etc.

Threshold pace teaches your body to manage lactate.

Although he doesn't give a good reason for marathon pace, other than "I've seen good results from using it." This is in the 2nd edition. But obviously it's important for specificity in marathon training, so we'll assume it's a key pace considering the topic of the thread.

So since some have rightly pointed out that this question depends a bit on the runner in question, let's reframe the it for a runner who does 5:10 threshold pace, 5:30 marathon pace, and 7:00 easy pace. That would peg moderate pace somewhere between 5:30 and 7:00 (since it's not really well defined).

What are the specific benefits achieved by running 5:40-6:20 pace that aren't achieved by the other paces?

It sounds like some are suggesting there are gains to be made that aren't achieved by focusing on the key training paces.

An intensity around 70% of VO2max, or ~80-82% of MHR depending from the LT, is moderate pace that'll recruit effectively (not maximally) the ST muscle fibers, without recruiting the intermediate fibers substantially, so you recover much more quickly than if you go closer to the LT, so is tolerable almost on daily basis.

pop_pop!_v2.2.1 wrote:

Pikachu wrote:

Oh. And zones have to do with pace. Pace and heart rate correlate. When you're a fast marathoner your MP in a normal case scenario will be at least 85 % of max heart rate for example.

Everyone has a different lactate threshold. 85% of max heart rate is not a great metric.

Part of the problem of looking so closely at elite schedules is that they know their paces. They can do a bunch of speed type work then apply it pretty easily to a distance. Normal people can't do that.

Normal people need the moderate paces for a variety of reasons. However, it's very important to distinguish between running slowly 'moderate' and effective moderate runs that end in discomfort and over time, improve pace. Not an easy distinction.

Yeah, I'll admit I didn't think that way. For a very fit athlete there is not that strong adaption with slowish paces as it is for a beginner.