Pick your pacing;

The hardest part of run training for me is running fast enough on my workouts and slow enough on my easy runs. It’s easy to fall into a pattern of running hard every workout; it seems that running harder on easy runs should lead to even more progress than if you ran them easy. But the results for most people are quite the contrary. Athletes who run at one intensity rarely get faster over time, they get very very efficient at that one speed, but no faster.

I’ve been doing a lot of run training while coming back from a clavicle fracture. Starting out after four weeks of not training was brutal. Everything was slow, and slow things felt difficult. I spent a couple weeks training one intensity, but my paces were multiple minutes away from my goals on race day. In order to run faster on race day, I had to run faster on training days. In order to run faster on training days, I had to run slower on easy days.

But how do you do that? Where do you look to figure out the right pacing? In general, there are five paces most runners keep track of, in order from slowest to fastest:

1. Easy run; this is the pace of your recovery runs and should be thoroughly sustainable. You should be able to maintain a conversation while running your long run pace. This pace is well below your capability.
2. Long run; this is the run pacing you can sustain without breathing heavily, but it should be work. This pace could be sustained for a marathon race effort. Some people call this tempo pace, others don’t.
3. Threshold; this is the pace where your legs produce lactic acid as quickly as they clear it. This is hard pace, typically sustained no longer than 10 miles.
4. VO2; this is pace for short repeats, essentially 5k pace, or a bit faster.
5. Interval; this is unsustainable and is a reference pace for workouts which include 95-100% effort intervals.

There’s the apocryphal saying about Eskimo’s words for snow, well runners have as many names for running.

There are a few different calculators available online for training pace calculation. Any an all are fine. They may be tweaked a little around the edges, but for the most part, they’ll report similar paces:

1. Jack Daniel’s VDOT Calculator
2. Hanson Coaching Calculator
3. Runner’s World’s Training Pace Calculator

So go figure out your pacing, and start running faster and slower. You’ll have better races if you do.