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Everything you need

to know about
running easy miles
They form the backbone of most training plans.

BY JOHN A KISSANE 25/02/2019

JOHNER IMAGES / GETTY IMAGES

#

Easy miles form the backbone of most

training schedules. But are you running those
miles too fast – or too slow?

What are easy miles?

They're all the other miles – not the tempos or
track repeats or long runs. They’re the entries
in your training log that make up a large
percentage of your weekly mileage total, but
for which you don’t bother to record much
data: simply an ‘8’ or a ‘6’ or a ‘park loop’
suffice to remind you what you did that day.
Some hardliners might even use the term
‘junk miles’ for easy-day running. So why do
we do them? Because easy running – even
very slow easy running – provides
fundamental adaptations.

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On easy days, you’re using mostly slow-twitch

muscle Jbres. They have a higher density of
mitochondria, high levels of aerobic enzymes
and greater capillary density than fast-twitch
Jbres, which are more involved in higher
intensity training, says Dan Bergland,
principal sport physiologist at Volt Sportlab in
Flagstaff, Arizona, US. On easy days, ‘You
increase mitochondria and capillaries and
blood Sow to those muscles, so they’re better
able to utilise oxygen,’ he says. ‘Without that,
you can’t do the intense runs.’

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THE BENEFITS OF SLOWING DOWN

How slowing down can help

you speed up

All runners, and especially beginners and

those coming back from injury, beneJt from
the cardio-vascular and muscular-structural
development easy running promotes. The
base Jtness a runner puts down through a
preponderance of easy runs enables the
athlete to safely progress to other types of
training.

Seasoned runners also need easy days to

maintain hard-earned aerobic Jtness and
make continual gains in economy. Of course,
competitive runners are interested in moving
efficiently at race paces – the primary reason
for training at a variety of intensities – in
addition to running easy. But even slow
running allows for gains in efficiency of
movement.

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More importantly, it allows for recovery from

hard days. ‘A runner should achieve a training
effect every day,’ says running coach Dennis
Barker, ‘and to me, recovery is a training
effect, maybe the most important one. It’s
during recovery that adaptations from hard
training take place. If a runner doesn’t
recover, the body is not going to adapt, and
you’ll either continue digging a hole for
yourself or get injured.’

What pace should you be

doing your easy runs at?

The questions, then, are what pace is right,

and what do you stand to lose if you go too
fast or too slow? In a general sense, an easy
run is a low-intensity effort of a short to
moderate duration. So a long run, even at a
relaxed pace, should not be considered ‘easy’,
because, despite the pace, there comes a point
where the duration raises the overall intensity
out of the comfort zone.

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Though Barker extols the virtues of keeping

the pace relaxed on easy days, that doesn’t
mean he sends his athletes out for short jogs.
In fact, he’s been known to assign runners
hilly routes on non-workout days, to give the
run a little extra beneJt. But pacing is almost
always reined in.

‘Pace is the most important thing to keep easy

on an easy day,’ says Barker. ‘Many runners
can still recover if they run a few more miles,
as long as it’s still at an easy pace. But from
my experience, they can’t recover if they run a
faster pace, even with fewer miles. So pace
really needs to be governed on easy days,
[but] mileage not quite as much.’

Bergland believes runners can’t really go too

slow on their easy days, unless their form
starts to suffer. At that point, slower becomes
counter-productive. In his opinion, as long as
your form holds up, lower intensity trumps
higher intensity for easy days.

While elite athletes have a Jnely tuned sense

of pace and effort, recreational runners often
struggle with it. Bergland advises runners to
use 10K race pace plus two minutes for easy-
day pace, wear a heart-rate monitor (aim for
65-70 per cent of max heart rate) or
occasionally use treadmill runs to monitor
your pace.

What happens if you run too

fast on easy days?
Running coach Ian Dobson, who works with
athletes of all ages and abilities, has found
many runners fail to back off on easy days. He
meets weekly with Team Run Eugene Flyers, a
group of recreational runners, to oversee
workouts. ‘I see some of them warm up and
then run mile pace and 5K pace and
marathon pace, and it’s indistinguishable;
they’re just running, you know?’ he says.
‘Those people are suffering from this stuck-in-
one-pace kind of thing. And it’s because they
don’t want to run 11-min/mile pace, or
whatever they really need to be running, on
their recovery runs.’

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Those who don’t run their workouts hard

enough are stuck in a middle ground, in third
gear. ‘The common denominator among most
really successful runners, people running at a
high level, is a really wide chasm between
training-run pace and where they work out,’
says Dobson. ‘It’s kind of counterintuitive, but
when total volume is high, your average
training-run pace is probably also a bit
higher.’ He explains that you see this with
marathoners – when an elite athlete is
running more than 100 miles a week, chances
are his or her average training-run pace is
faster than an 800m runner or miler running
only 30 miles a week. The miler is running
really fast when they’re on the track and
really slow when they’re not. US middle-
distance runner Brenda Martinez, who has
PBs of 1:57.91 for 800m and 4:00.94 for
1500m, is a perfect example of this. Under
the guidance of coach Joe Vigil, she’ll run 8 x
1,000m repeats at 2:55, but on her easy days,
she’ll run 9 min/mile pace.

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How to run at a much slower

pace
Some runners Jnd it hard to maintain the
slower paces. Jason Ryf, who ran the 2013
Boston Marathon in 2:23:06 at the age of 42,
rarely trains slower than six minutes per mile.
Most training calculators would suggest that
Ryf run his easy mileage in the 6:15-6:40
range, but he just can’t do it. ‘Believe me,’ he
says, ‘I go through the struggle quite a bit –
“Hey, I should be going slower’ – because all
the training books would have me going
easier. I do plan on it sometimes, but after a
couple of miles I’m back at six-minute pace.’

But Ryf’s training is solely focused on the

marathon. Any racing he does at shorter
distances is part of training for his next 26.2-
miler, and his PBs at 10K, 10 miles and the
half marathon pale in comparison to his
marathon performances. If he targeted
shorter distances, Ryf would modify his
approach. ‘I would probably try to back off a
little bit, so my legs would be fresher for
workouts,’ he says.

Track and Jeld coach Ray Treacy has his

athletes running towards the faster end of the
scale on most non-workout days and
expresses disdain for ‘jogging’. He schedules
workouts every fourth day, less often than is
typical, and tells his athletes to go truly easy
only immediately following hard training
sessions. ‘The day after the hard workout
might be easy,’ says Treacy, ‘but the other two
days you’re trying to get something out of it,
to improve your Jtness. Let’s put it this way: I
wouldn’t like to waste a day’s training on a
jog.’

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Some physiologists agree with the faster

approach. One of those is Bob Otto, professor
of health and sport sciences at Adelphi
University, US. The question, he asks, is what
does a slow run accomplish? He details the
downsides of going slow: it provides
orthopaedic trauma, allows athletes to
practise something they’d never use in a race
and provides insufficient cardiovascular or
metabolic stimulus to accrue improvement.

‘Conversely, the faster-paced run may provide

cardiovascular stimulus, may enhance
metabolic function, mimics the biomechanics
of race pace and, hopefully, provides less
orthopaedic trauma than the slow run,’ he
says. ‘Although the ideal scenario is to
decrease one’s stride frequency to run slower
and maintain a similar biomechanical foot
strike, we know most people change their
mechanics signiJcantly and their stride
frequency moderately. I am an advocate of
practising like you want to perform and Jnd
little value in a “slow run”.’

For some athletes, moving too slowly throws

them off. ‘I like to get athletes into a rhythm,
whether it’s a recovery day or a general day,
and not worry about pace so much. Make
sure you’re getting something out of it but not
killing yourself,’ says running coach Brad
Herbster.

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What's right for you?

Returning, then, to the easy six-miler you do a
few days a week: would you beneJt from
speeding up or slowing down? The answer, of
course, depends on your goals, your other
workouts, whether you’re hitting a variety of
speeds during the week, your total weekly
mileage, what your body is telling you each
morning – and what time you have to be at
work.

‘Runners have to pay attention and learn

about themselves, because an easy day will be
different based on how long you’ve been
running, what you’re training for, how much
mileage you have in your legs, all sorts of
things,’ says Barker.

While you never need to emulate the

programme of another runner, you might
experiment with varying the pace of easy
miles – and test the changes with a race.
Maybe you’ll Jnd it’s not the hard efforts – the
number of reps or the grade of the hill – that
will make the difference in your training.
Maybe it’s what you’re doing on the easy
days.

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