Sometimes You Gotta Slow Down to Go Fast

I ran across this article in the online version of Running Times. It’s maybe not the best article I’ve ever read on the subject, but it does make a very good point, one that’s all too easy to forget but one that I feel might be the most important aspect of a good training program. The point of a recovery day is simple: maintain basic aerobic fitness while adequately preparing you for the next hard day. There’s nothing more to it. You won’t gain any additional fitness from running your easy day 10-20 sec faster than what truly feels easy to your body. In other words, if 7:20 pace feels easy, you won’t get any fitness gains from pushing yourself just a little so you can get the pace down to 7:00. In fact you might even get less benefit. Remember, one of the points of a recovery day is to maintain basic aerobic fitness. With that in mind, up to a certain point, the longer you run the better, so if it takes you 52 min to run 7 miles instead of 48, not only are you sparing your body but you’re also getting in a little more aerobic benefit.

I recently read another article that I think was a blog or maybe some sort of interview with Kara Goucher. In that article, she said that she always ran her easy days on effort, and that some days that meant going as slow as 8 min pace or even slower. Countless other elite runners have expressed the same philosophy, so I figure if it’s good enough for them then it’s good enough for me. My old college coach, Finn Pincus, used to have a saying that went “good runners have the confidence to run slowly.” We made all sorts of fun of him for that and I still get a laugh out of it from time to time. However, now that I’m older and at least a little wiser, I realize that he was right.

Anyway, I’m not sure what prompted to post this after reading that article (possibly the fact that it hit home because I’ve gotten away from this some lately), but I can sum it up by saying that if someone asked me for one piece of training advice and one piece only, I would say this, “Be consistent, and make your hard days hard and your easy days easy.” Ok, maybe that’s three pieces of advice, but you get the point. Sometimes you gotta slow down to go fast.