Ready, set, go!
This is episode 436 with certified running coach and the host of the Running Explained podcast, Elizabeth Scott.
Welcome to the Strength Running Podcast.
I'm Coach Jason Fitzgerald, and I want to help you become a better runner.
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All right.
Joining me today is Elizabeth Scott, host of the Running Explained podcast, which is one of the most popular podcasts in the United States in the running category.
And this episode is so good that it's a replay from an episode about three and a half years ago.
Elizabeth is a magnetic host and loves going deep on the science of training.
She has coaching certifications from USA Track and Field Roadrunners Club of America and the United Endurance Sports Coaching Academy.
And a big thanks to my Instagram community.
These questions were all taken from my Insta page.
So this is truly an episode that you helped shape.
Elizabeth and I are going to answer questions about the optimal ratio of hard to easy mileage, the physiological benefits of moderate paced running, helpful cues to ensure you're truly running easy, how you figure out all of your training paces and more.
If you'd like this opportunity in the future, give me a follow on Instagram at Jason Fitz one.
Without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Elizabeth Scott.
Hey, Elizabeth, welcome to the Strength Running Podcast.
I'm excited to be here.
Thanks for having me, Jason.
Well, I'm excited.
I'm always excited to chat with another podcaster, but I'm especially excited today because you're a giant in the running podcasting space.
And I want to acknowledge how good you are at what you do, how relevant and impactful all your advice is, and how amazing it is for you to be helping so many runners.
And I know that today is going to be no different.
So thank you for making the time.
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
And as a podcaster, you understand that sometimes when you're by yourself in your office talking into a microphone, it feels like you're shouting into the void.
And it's nice to hear that somebody is listening.
Someone is listening.
So what we are going to do today is answer listener questions.
And I sort of hope that we disagree on some of these so that we can explore some different perspectives.
And I think it'll be really fun to discuss some of the nuances of these issues.
So I want to get started with some questions about easy running and pacing and how we should think about intensity within our training.
So our first question is, what ratio of easy to hard mileage is recommended?
What do you think?
Oh, man.
Right off the bat, I'm going to say this answer is the ultimate it depends answer.
The Distribution of your training intensity, which is the ratio of hard to moderate, hard, moderate, easy running in your training, is going to depend on a multitude of factors, including what you're currently training for, the experience you have at training for that distance, your overall experience, right?
If you have been putting in, you know, 90 to 95 to 100 easy effort running because you're training for an ultra and now you're dropping down to a 5k.
Right, you have probably more of a speed focus right, you need to work up to your speed, being able to handle that much intensity in your training versus somebody who's been doing more intensity in the overall training for the past 5-10 years.
And also like what you personally respond best to.
I think that's something that is one of the real nuances that comes to coaching.
We have all this research that says well, in general, we know roughly how most people should be training for X Y, Z event based on all these characteristics.
But each individual athlete responds best to certain distributions of their training intensity.
You know from a cellular level, from what they enjoy to do right.
The best kind of training is the training you actually do.
So if an athlete really hates a certain kind of training and they're less likely to do that, maybe we don't do as much of it.
Even if it would be the more effective way to train, if they're not going to do it, it's not effective at all.
So all of these things kind of boil down to, it depends.
That's not a really good answer though, is it?
The general research behind training.
Intensity distribution points to having the bulk of your training in your aerobic easy effort zone.
And how different researchers define that lower intensity slash easy kind of depends on the researcher.
Is it sub lactate threshold?
Is it sub aerobic threshold?
Generally speaking though, as an endurance athlete, the bulk of your training when I say the bulk, I mean the majority over 50 of your training is usually going to be in that lower intensity zone, with then different proportions of your training intensity in moderate to higher intensity zones.
Again, those distributions are going to change depending on what you're currently training for.
Talk about 80-20 running, 80% easy, 20% hard.
That's a guideline.
It's a good place to start if you are coming from a place where most of your training has been higher intensity.
Is it the hard and fast rule for all runners?
No, but if we're boiling down to the simplest training distribution, that's not a bad one to follow.
Yeah, I think the 80-20 rule popularized by Matt Fitzgerald, my brother from another mother as we like to joke about, I think that's a good sort of framework to start from and then from there we can sort of look at all the different factors that could impact whether or not maybe we run a little bit more, although i'm very hesitant about having more than 20 of your mileage be quote unquote, hard.
Um, i think also the type of race that you're training for is a really interesting component to this, because if you're training for a 5k, it's probably a good idea to do two workouts a week, unless you're a beginner runner.
And at that point you might start approaching a higher percentage of your weekly volume, being done at a high intensity.
Now, if you're training for a marathon, you might really only be doing one workout a week.
If that workout is a tempo run, that is probably not going to be 20% of your weekly mileage.
Then any work that you're doing at marathon pace is actually technically in that 80%.
That's probably what a moderate effort is going to be.
I think the way that Matt defines that 80-20 ratio is...
80% needs to be under your lactate threshold.
So it really only starts to count as high intensity.
Running at that tempo slash lactate threshold level or faster.
So I think this is a really interesting case study of how the type of race that you're training for, and also your level and competency as a runner, can impact how high that percentage can be.
You know I typically like to see 85 to 90 for most runners.
You probably are only getting to 80 easy running and 20 hard running.
If you're a fairly competitive runner, you're pushing the envelope.
You're doing two, maybe three harder workouts a week.
Once you're doing three hard workouts a week, you're definitely in that very advanced category of runner, you know, because that training is stressful.
And most runners who, especially when they start as adults, have a hard time running three hard workouts a week.
Frankly, when I was running in college, 22 years old, awash in testosterone, I didn't have a lot of the life stress that I do today.
Three workouts a week was still really hard for me then.
And so it's not something that I think most runners should jump into.
So I think those are all some really good ways of thinking about this question of how do we figure out this ratio of easy to hard mileage.
Because after all, how do you define hard?
Is it lactate threshold?
Is it marathon pace?
And so I hope the listeners now have a better understanding of how they should really think about this.
And I think another good rule here Elizabeth is, when in doubt, run less intensity, because you're probably going to stay healthier that way.
You're not going to be getting those overuse injuries that I think you know.
If we look at a runner's training program intensity the hard, fast work is probably the biggest injury risk that there is within the training week.
So if we can be really smart about that, be a little bit more conservative with that, I think that's really going to optimize for longevity and health ultimately.
You know, Matt's book, 80-20 Running, like changed my life.
It put me on the career trajectory that I am on now.
It was.
If anybody who hasn't read it you know, it's a great place to start if you want to learn anything about this topic in general.
Of course, there's always more research coming out.
Yeah.
And again...
I agree about erring on the side of caution, because and I tell this to my runners a lot it's so much better to be a little undercooked or a little undertrained compared to the.
Basically, as soon as you tip over into too much overtraining, you are in big trouble.
There's no gentle slope on the other side.
It's a cliff. you know?
So it's not like, Oh, I'm just on the other side.
No, like you've fallen off the cliff, right?
So I would much rather personally.
And with athletes, I coach see them to be a little cautious.
Maybe don't go, go a little less hard on some of those reps, right?
Don't hammer that last one.
Don't try to get the extra ones in.
Don't try to push your pace, but I can run faster on that.
Well, you're not supposed to run faster on it.
I asked you 10 K pace, not five K pace.
Just because you can run 5K pace doesn't mean that you executed the workout correctly.
So all of these things, I think, are really hard for the average everyday runner, you know, like me, to internalize, because we're so conditioned to think that harder must be more effective.
And this is not the case when it comes to training properly.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
And I think a lot of people who get into running as adults are surprised by the fact that most of your running is really easy.
And it's this very counterintuitive idea because you want to get better.
You When your goal is speed, but what you're doing most of the time is easy, slower running.
That creates this big disconnect in a lot of runners' brains.
And I think it takes a lot of confidence to slow down, to trust the process and just really be patient and go for those long-term fitness gains.
And it was funny.
I was just reading an article by another coach who was talking about how he'll tell his runners they're doing a workout and maybe they're doing six repetitions, and he'll cut them at five.
And often it drives them crazy because they wanted to do the last one as hard as they could.
He could tell that they were chomping at the bit to go harder than that last rep.
But he knows that that is not the point and he doesn't wanna overcook his athletes.
So he has them do a little bit less, But physiologically the difference is so negligible that it's so much better for the athlete.
The injury risk is lower.
And I think it really allows runners to be more mentally engaged with their training because they're not so beat up and tired all the time.
They're actually excited for the workout.
They feel good most days.
Of course you're not going to feel good every day, but it just creates an environment where improvement is much easier to have.
And so this leads me to the next question Elizabeth, which is how do you actually determine your training paces?
And I think this is a really hard one for runners because you know your training paces is the entire intensity side of your training.
And I think that's just as important as the mileage, the long run.
You know what the structure of your workout is.
Because if you get the pacing all wrong, it doesn't really matter if you're following the best training plan in the world.
You know, you're getting the intensity all off.
So what's your preferred method for calculating?
You know what runners different paces are.
That would be included in a plan.
This depends on the runner and their experience.
And when I say that I mean that learning how to pace oneself and how to connect pacing with perceived effort, and then to connect that back with what you're supposed to be doing on any given day, is a skill that comes with experience.
You're not going to understand exactly what it means to to go out and run.
You know mile repeats at a specific effort zone or pace range on day five right.
It's going to take maybe a couple years for you to go through the experience of training and oh, I understand now.
This workout is supposed to feel this way.
Oh, and my pace range is in this range.
Oh, and my heart rate's in the right place, or my power, or whatever metric, quantitative metric you also might be using is also in that range, right?
So this illustrates an example of.
I like to use a combination of different things, starting with an athlete's understanding where their baseline fitness is right.
Usually we're looking at recent race results or just getting a basic understanding of roughly where are you?
How fast are you?
How much have you been currently running?
And then making a rough estimate of what their paces are.
There are a variety of pace calculators out there to say oh, if you ran a 45-minute 10K, it spits out what all your current equivalent paces are for different race distances and workouts.
And that's a good place to start.
But I always bring that back to when working with an athlete, what the effort feels like.
And I have different ways of describing different paces and efforts and how I say.
This should be Tough, because it's a little about perceived effort, right?
How they perceive it versus I perceive it about.
You know what it feels like in different situations.
And then bringing in one of those quantitative metrics as kind of a backup or a guide.
If we're really like, if the pacing and everything is all brand new.
Using heart rate specifically is a pretty approachable guide.
Some people also use power, power meters like stride, fancy stuff.
You can use lactate meters.
You can get as fancy as you want to.
But for most runners, having a heart rate strap which is more accurate than your heart rate wrist monitor.
If you're training by heart rate, go buy a heart rate strap.
That's a really good place to start.
For those runners.
I generally don't care what their heart rate is in their higher intensities, as long as it feels like what they're doing was sustainable at the effort.
They're supposed to be running at higher intensities and their pace and effort was also in line.
I might do some lactate threshold training with some specific runners.
But mostly I don't talk about heart rate with my runners.
I was talking about staying below your aerobic threshold, that easy effort zone.
That's when heart rate comes most into play, because most runners are so disconnected as you just said previously, from what easy effort is actually supposed to feel like that they need that heart rate to tell them hey, you're actually in the right place.
And by the way, it is way easier than you thought it would be.
So with that, I use the standard, you know, 75% of your maximum heart rate.
You can use heart rate reserve. the carbonin formula between 60 and 70% of that.
There are different ways to calculate those zones as well, but that's really where I start.
And then, as I work with an athlete one-on-one, we refine how they're specifically responding to and how I'm understanding how their training is going.
That's a really great overview.
I love that.
And I would say I take a very similar approach, where the first thing I look at is recent race performances.
Because any race performance is theoretically a maximum effort over a given distance.
And from there you can work backwards and reverse engineer different percentages of that maximum to get certain paces.
I think...
Where I think runners can be really specific is when they're running certain race paces.
So if your training plan calls you to run mile race pace, 5K race pace, 10K race pace, half marathon race pace, these are very specific numbers.
You can look at your most recent race performance or maybe, if you didn't have a good race, you can err on the faster side and use your actual PR if it's somewhat recent.
And those are those kinds of paces, they are tied to a race performance.
And sort of like you said earlier, with higher intensities you don't really care what the heart rate is, because you know your 5k pace is a vo two max effort.
It's way beyond your lactate threshold.
So your heart rate is just going to be very high.
And if we were to sort of trying to tease out the differences between your one mile race pace, your two mile race pace and your 5k race pace, and what the heart rate differences are?
It's just going to be really hard.
They're all going to be very similar.
And you know, for for a more advanced athlete, it's just going to be very close to your.
You know, quote unquote redlining heart rate, the max that you could maintain for a couple minutes uh, during a race.
And then I think, some other paces are much more physiological.
It's more about what's going on inside your body your heart rate, levels of lactate production, all those different things.
So a tempo run, for example, if you're using the what I'll call the classic definition of tempo run, the lactate threshold workout, you know that's about 85 to 90 of your max heart rate.
And so if you do know your max heart rate you can get a pretty good zone of effort for that lactate threshold.
And same thing with, you know, an aerobic threshold.
I actually really think that the best workout to use a heart rate monitor for is your easy run, because you know I have actually been pushing back against this whole notion of easy pace because I don't think your easy running is a pace.
It's an effort because what is easy?
I don't know.
It's easy.
Whatever feels easy today, which is dependent upon whether or not you had your morning coffee and you're all jazzed up and excited, or maybe you didn't and you're feeling a little lethargic and sleepy.
Maybe you didn't get great sleep last night.
You didn't work out the day before.
So many things can impact how you're feeling on a given day.
And that might mean your easy pace is 830 a mile one day, but then the next day it's nine minutes a mile.
And holding yourself to this artificial pace that should be your easy pace.
A lot of runners think you know a certain pace should be their easy pace, but it is very much dependent on so many other things.
So my thinking is to start with your race paces early, kind of massage them a little bit, based on whether or not you're a very experienced runner.
Maybe you can be a little bit more aggressive and maybe you really know your body.
And, like you were saying Elizabeth, what those paces should feel like in a workout, so that you can actually complete the workout at the desired effort level.
And that is something that is really difficult to explain.
It's really difficult to talk through.
I wish we were on the track right now with a bunch of runners and kind of going through a workout and talking about the specific details of okay, this is your first rep.
You should feel kind of invigorated afterward, but you're not tired.
You're not sore or anything, excited for the next rep.
Now you're on your second to last rep.
You should be feeling fatigued and really go through all of those different things that impact how you feel during a workout.
But unfortunately, we're just in your ears right now.
We're not with you on the track.
So this is the next best thing.
So I'm really interested in hearing a little bit more about this perceived effort for beginners.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Because I feel like perceived effort with beginners is a minefield, because doesn't everything feel sort of hard when you're just getting started with running?
How does a beginner runner navigate that?
This is a great question.
We have yet to disagree on anything.
I'm waiting for our point of disagreement.
Yeah, this is a really tough one because perceived effort is right there.
It's all about what your perception is.
So again I bring it back to.
That's why I like to use heart rate to guide you in the right direction, especially for new runners or runners who are completely unaccustomed to actually spending time in their easy zone, because it helps them make the connection of well, I know I'm in the right heart rate zone and oh, this is the effort zone I'm supposed to feel, and then making that connection over the course of time.
Sometimes I like to equate it to gears on a bike, right?
When you're a new runner, and I started running as an adult, so this is very much my experience.
When you're a new runner, it kind of feels like you're riding a fixed gear bike, right?
You have two speeds.
You're going and it's hard or you're stopped, right?
That's it.
And then as you gain fitness, you become more fit.
You start to add gears to your bike.
So instead of kind of basically being an on-off switch, if I'm moving forward, it's hard.
You have this middle gear.
Oh, I have a moderate gear.
And then you add a moderate easy gear.
And then you have a moderate hard gear.
And then you have so all of these.
As you gain fitness and go through the the spectrum of your efforts at different paces, you realize you actually have a bit more finesse in how fast you can run at different effort zones than you thought.
Now, if you are truly a new runner, if you are an off the couch runner, if you're a person who's building up their fitness for the very first time, you may not have much of a difference between your effort two and your effort 10 on a scale of one to 10.
Those might be right next to each other.
Those are, again, adding gears to your bike.
Over time, you will be able to get more color in your rainbow.
This is why the heart rate is so important.
And I often hear this from new runners who are saying but if I run in my easy effort zone, I'll be walking.
And if that's where you currently are for your easy effort runs, you should stay there.
You know run run walk, because it's not about a pace.
It's about the effort zone.
And certain very specific physiological things happen when you're in your aerobic sub-aerobic threshold zone, which is that zone one, zone two and a five zone heart rate model.
That don't happen in higher zones or that happen most effectively in lower zones, even if that's at a walk.
Now the goal is to get to running 100 running eventually for most runners, but you have to go through the process that may include some walking to stay in your easy effort zone to begin with so that you can start to add those gears to your bike in an efficient way.
Um, And this is also one of those things you have to do
Like there's really no shortcut.
Doing it properly is the shortcut.
Doing it improperly is the long way around.
And there's nothing more heartbreaking for me when I see a runner say well, you know, I just didn't want to walk.
So I just ran, you know, harder than I should have.
And they spent 6, 12, 18 months training at a too high of an intensity zone.
They've plateaued.
They've burned out.
Or if they just slowed down to begin with, they would be much farther along in their fitness journey and to where they wanted to be today.
Yeah, for sure.
And I think it's often difficult for adult runners to really grasp that, especially if they are coming off the couch, like you said.
And you know, I do think that I was.
I had advantages starting to run as a freshman in high school because I was already in pretty good shape.
I was 14 years old.
I was a basketball player.
I was an active kid.
And I experienced very viscerally the benefits of just doing a lot of easy running.
And if you can get to a point where you're doing, you know, an hour a day of that zone to easy conversational, comfortable running.
It does enormous benefits to your fitness.
And that can be done with cross training.
If you can't get in that kind of volume, it can be done with, you know, some brisk walking, if you're just starting.
But the benefits there are really substantial.
Now what if a runner is using one of these pace calculators Elizabeth, and they plug in their 5K time?
This, I think, has happened to everyone, including me.
They plug in their 5K time and it indicates a marathon performance that they know is wildly out of reach.
So maybe they run a four hour marathon and they've run a 24 minute 5K.
But you know, they put in the 24 minute 5K and then all of a sudden it says you can run a 330 marathon marathon.
You know what?
What should runners think about when those pace calculators are so off like that?
Ah, yes.
According to various pace calculators, my 5k time indicates I'm about a like a two or sorry, not a two like a three 10 marathoner, which is 20 minutes off my actual marathon PR.
So it is rare for a runner to have perfectly linearly plotted paces at equivalent distances according to the pace calculator.
Because one of the things that most pace calculators do and, like I said, there are a couple out there kind of based on roughly the same math is that they assume a couple things.
One, they assume equivalent fitness at every distance.
So if you plug in your 5K time in the pace calculator, it spits out a marathon time.
The calculator assumes that you are as equally trained for that marathon as you were for your 5K.
Now, 5Ks are hard, but training for a 5K is a heck of a lot easier than training for a marathon, is right.
So just we have to take that with a grain of salt and say, okay, well, that's one big assumption.
The other one is that not everybody can handle training to the degree that they will be able to fulfill their full potential at longer distances, just because training for those longer distances is so demanding.
Even if you have all the time and resources in the world, it's really hard to train for a marathon full stop.
I don't care who you are.
Marathon training is really hard.
So every runner I know runs a 5K, 10K half marathon, puts it in there, gets really excited about their marathon perspective, marathon pace
And then they go and they train their training cycle at that goal pace.
And they say, well, oh, I'm training to run a sub four because that's what the calculator said.
So I'm going to do everything at nine minute pace and train all my paces.
And all you're doing is just training at too high of an effort level.
And it's not going to get you to where you want to go on race day.
So how do you solve this if you're using a pacing calculator to estimate what your fitness might be at a higher level?
That's when dialing into effort.
Again, the experience of effort also comes into play.
One of the best things you can do, especially if you are running your first marathon, is don't pay attention to the calculator like put your know roughly where your pace would be right are you going to be a six-hour marathon or a five-hour marathon, or four-hour, three-hour marathon?
Or know roughly the time you're aiming for and add like 10, 20 minutes right as a nice buffer, maybe more.
Your first goal should always be to finish your first marathon.
Your first goal for any marathon should be to finish the marathon.
Give yourself a pace, a time buffer um, So both can be true.
Okay.
The pace calculator is a guide.
It is not God.
It is supposed to point you in the nearest direction and is not supposed to tell you exactly where you're supposed to go.
That's great.
I want to talk about three additional things.
Why these pace calculators might be a little bit off.
That i have experienced myself.
Because it's funny if i put in like my 800 meter race time, like i'm all of a sudden like a 227 marathoner, which is only 12 minutes off my pr, but that 12 minutes is an eternity at that level and there's no way on god's green earth that i am ever approaching a 227 marathon, although i i, i love the.
You know the, the confidence that these calculators have in me.
I think one of the reasons is because it takes a long time to build really good endurance.
You know, the endurance gains that you get from running compound month after month, year after year.
And like you said, it's harder to train for a marathon because it requires higher volume.
It requires long runs that take years to build up to.
You know, if you're training for a marathon and you're only been running for eight or nine months like it's going to be very hard for you to all of a sudden be comfortable running 20 miles at a go.
So it does take all this time to build up these aerobic adaptations and you can sort of cheat your way through a 5k on some decent fitness and run a decent time.
But there is no cheating your way through a marathon.
It will expose every fitness flaw that you have, any flaw in your training program.
You know if you're trying to cut corners you will be exposed on the marathon race course.
So i think we have to recognize that it takes a long time to properly train for a long race like a marathon.
The other thing about the marathon is maybe you've run 10 5Ks but you've only run two marathons.
And that speaks to the challenge of racing marathons.
We can really build our skill in racing short events fairly quickly, because if we race a 5K this weekend and it doesn't go well Well, we can run another one the next weekend.
We can recover enough in time, still run a workout that week and then have another go at the 31 mile distance.
Whereas if we run a marathon and it doesn't go well, or if we just think we have more potential, you can't just run another one the next weekend.
You sort of have to wait four five, six months later, because with the marathon you're putting all your eggs in one basket.
And I do think it takes some time to understand the marathon, to know how to race the marathon, And if your marathon time does not correlate with your 5K time, it's probably because the marathon is a tricky distance to race, whereas the 5K is a relatively easy distance to race.
So the complexity of the distance, coupled with how long it takes to build the fitness required to run the distance well, makes this a very challenging comparison.
And then my final point is that it is much more accurate and effective to compare similar distances.
So if I want to know you know what kind of 5k time I might be able to run, I might plug in my mile or my two mile race performances.
Whereas if I want to know what kind of marathon I want to run or I might be able to run, I might plug in my half marathon race time or some similar off distance race like a 20k or 25k.
Whereas if I put in my 800 meter race time and try to figure out what I can do in a marathon and you know, the math sort of breaks down at these very wide.
You know distances when they're very far apart.
So I would definitely encourage runners to try to input their longer race distances if they're looking for a marathon time.
And then the opposite is true.
You going to be a little bit more accurate.
So there's there's a lot of factors going into this.
But I think the general rule here is it's a guide and it's probably a little bit more optimistic than what you could actually do in a race.
I know that's, the case for me and usually the case with almost every single runner that I've met.
I have rarely met a runner whose marathon time is a better equivalent performance than say, their 5K or their 10K.
It's almost never happened.
I don't know if it's happened in your coaching experience.
Well, I'm going to go ahead and just say Garmin race predictor feature also falls under this category.
Yes.
Right?
So if anybody's looked at their Garmin and said my Garmin says I can run a 305 marathon, but my PR is 325, whatever it is,
Like, that's not, first of all, don't use that.
Right?
If it inspires you, let it inspire you, right?
But that falls under the same category of like, it's not something you should take as gospel.
Yeah, I don't see people who have faster marathon times than their equivalent 5K times.
What I do see sometimes is that runners who have spent years exclusively at longer distances – having shorter distance times, which are um, as in, like you know, their 5k time is slower than their equivalent half marathon time because they've been racing half and full marathons for like three or four years.
Basically, they haven't done any speed.
And you know one a short speed block you Because the fitness is there.
They just haven't sharpened for the specific distance of the 5K.
But that's really.
It's not that they did a best effort, fully trained, and their 5K PR was slower than their equivalent marathon.
It's more about they just haven't spent any time doing actual speed work.
So that's why their 5K PR wasn't living up to their full potential.
So if you have been spending a couple of years at longer distances and you want a nice easy win, go do some 5K training and run a PR.
Yeah.
I will second that.
That's going to be one of the easiest wins that you can have in your running career.
If you've spent a long time training for the longer stuff, spend a season training for 5Ks and 10Ks and 8Ks and 6Ks and whatever you can find in those distances and you are going to set a PR in every single one of those distances.
And that is going to make you feel good.
It's gonna make you feel confident, is probably going to inspire you to even train harder for those longer distances that you probably care a little bit more about.
And ultimately it's going to make you into a better runner at the marathon and half marathon distance.
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The journal helps you focus on the training metrics that matter while ignoring those that don't.
It also prioritizes a long-term outlook, so you don't take any shortcuts, and it maintains your motivation with strategic self-praise.
I've also included example training weeks from some of my personal best weeks during my career, tips on injury prevention and strength training and more.
Get your copy of the Performance Training Journal today on Amazon with the link in the show's description.
Now we have been putting this easy Zone 2 relative lower level of perceived effort running on a pedestal here.
But I did get an interesting question about more moderate running.
Is there any physiological benefits to running at a more moderate pace?
That might not be considered.
Zone 2
Maybe it's a little bit closer to Zone 3.
Yeah.
Deployed intentionally, it has great benefits.
Why we try to avoid colloquially, oh the gray zone, that zone three plateau, is because doing a lot of it is not going to be to your best benefit, compared to doing more easy effort running coupled with higher intensity running.
In certain situations, though.
Yeah, we talk about wanting to be good runners at all intensity levels, right?
We talk about training our full potential as athletes, and that means working every system that we have available to us, but in the right proportion. yes moderate running does have a place in most runners lives but in little amounts specifically though if you're training for a marathon this is when you do the bulk of that moderate intensity work because your marathon is run at a moderate intensity effort the closer and closer you get to race day the more and more of that marathon pace marathon effort work you're probably going to have in your training and that's probably going to be a lot of zone three stuff um But that's, again, very intentional.
And don't just go out and say, oh, well, I apparently zone three is good for you.
None of this is good or bad, right?
And I think that's where I get a lot of questions about like, is it bad if I or is it good if I?
This stuff doesn't have good or bad assignments.
Like there's very little in all of this that is black or white, good or bad.
It all depends on the context in which it happens.
Moderate effort is fine if you are deploying it in the proper way.
That's a really good point.
And I think what happens with a lot of runners is that they just tend to do most of their running at this moderate effort, this zone three.
You know I'm feeling like I'm getting a good workout in sort of effort.
And you know the way that we approach this in the college setting, which I always think is an interesting comparison because it's like it's a are, like dedicating most of their free time to training even though you know they're not good enough to be elite athletes.
You know we would do some of our easy runs at this moderate sort of zone three effort where you know you might have 40 of your run at a more moderate effort, just because you're feeling frisky and you want to go hard a little bit more.
But I think the big caveats there are number one, you can get away with it when you're younger.
You can get away with it when you have less stress in your life.
You know, if you don't have any kids and you're not going through any relationship drama and your job is really easy well, you probably have more space in your life for recovery and adaptation and working harder in your training.
So if you have the space in your life and you're young and It just gives you a little bit more flexibility to push the pace a little bit,
And so I think those are important things to remember.
And the other piece to this too is, It helps if you're in better shape.
You can also take more liberties with your training if you have more gears.
You used a wonderful bike analogy, which I'm completely stealing, by the way that as you get in better and better shape, you just have more gears available to you.
Whereas if you just started, you're coming off the couch, It's this binary off-on switch.
So you don't have a moderate gear.
Or maybe you've been running for a year.
You've only run one or two races.
You've never followed a formal plan.
You probably don't have too many gears still.
And that's okay.
We're still working on it.
But I think you're ability to handle the stress, your age and also your, your level of you know, ability with the sport really dictates how much you can get away with in your training.
You know, i used to do all kinds of things when i was 24 years old that i simply can't do now as a 38 year old guy and and i recognize that, and you know, we just have to be a little bit smarter with our training.
Um Now Elizabeth, I'm curious if we do want to keep things easier.
We're a little bit wary of this zone three.
You know, more moderate effort.
Are there any good cues to manage your heart rate that you use with your athletes?
Because I think this is one of the more difficult things to internalize as a runner.
As is okay if I don't have a heart rate monitor and I'm out there trying to run easy, truly easy.
How do I know if I'm running easy?
It's a great question.
I know a lot of runners don't care to track their heart rate.
That's just not what they're about in their training.
They're training, you know, seriously, but they don't want to wear a heart rate strap.
They don't really, they know the heart rate wrist monitor is inaccurate.
And they're like isn't there a different way, a better way?
How they used to train back in the day before everybody had a garment on their wrist.
So you've probably heard of easy pace described as, or easy effort.
I agree.
Easy pace is meaningless.
It's all about effort zones.
Easy effort is being a conversational effort, right?
So if you were to go on a run and be able to speak in full sentence, have a conversation with the person next to you or with yourself, without having to then gasp for breath at the end of every sentence, that is roughly a place to start, right.
Now this can break down a little bit, because I can speak in full sentences right near my lactate threshold
And if I were really really good at self-deception, I could convince myself that maybe, maybe that was actually my easy effort zone based on the conversational moniker.
So beyond that, we want to dial into your overall breathing.
Are you breathing easy?
Can you speak in full sentences?
Does it feel relaxed?
Are you feeling that as your run is progressing, the effort is increasing?
We all know what a progression run feels like.
We all know what a race feels like.
To hold the same pace, that effort starts to go up and up and up just to maintain that same pace.
Oh, our effort goes up and up.
Is that happening to you on your quote unquote easy runs?
When I start working with a lot of runners and we have them finally slow down to their easy effort zone for the first time, I always tell them at the end of your easy run you should just kind of stop running.
There's no like.
It's not like oh, I've reached my house and I'm here and my run's over.
And like oh, I've stopped running.
It's like you just show up at your house and you kind of just stop and the run is over.
It's very anticlimactic.
When an easy run is over, it should feel like, oh, I almost feel like I did nothing, right?
So conversational pace, is my breathing easy effort?
Am I relaxed?
Is my effort staying the same throughout the duration of my easy effort run?
Yeah.
And then also pay attention to how you're recovering from those runs and how you're executing your hard days, if you have them.
One of the things that running too hard on our easy days do is it robs us our ability to perform well on the days we should be running hard.
If you're spending currency on days you shouldn't be spending it, you have less to spend on the days where you do need to spend it more.
Are you executing your workout paces correctly?
Can you handle the training volume overall?
Are you sleeping well?
Are you more sore than usual?
Is your long run manageable for you?
All those things matter.
It's not just about any specific run.
It's about how that fits into your training week and how you're responding to the training.
And I'll say this.
I think that most people should err on the side of caution if they're wondering am I running easy enough?
Now I have had conversations with runners who have incorrectly calculated some zones and ended up with wildly low zones and say, but I'll be running if I stay under 120.
And I say, because that's not your easy effort zone.
That's like way too low.
So use some common sense, right?
If it feels easy when you're running and all those boxes are checked and yes, it's fully conversational and when you look at your heart rate, you see that it's roughly in maybe the 130s, 140s, 150s-ish where most people's heart rate is in the easy effort zone.
All those boxes are checked.
Just go with it.
Trust yourself.
Trust yourself.
And over time, you'll start to have more finesse on how those specific days feel.
Easy versus recovery.
But that's where I'd start.
I think that's a perfect overview.
I'll just add that you know I like to tell runners that they should follow the three C's of easy running.
Conversational is definitely probably the most important one.
The other ones are, let's make sure our run is controlled.
So a lot of times in workouts, you feel a little bit out of control.
You feel like you know, like you were saying, how the effort creeps up during a harder effort.
That shouldn't happen at all.
That, should you know.
That makes you a little bit nervous that you're not in control, that soon this effort is going to start becoming unsustainable.
That's an out of control feeling.
We should make sure our easy runs are definitely in control and also just comfortable a very subjective word that you should just feel comfortable.
I will never forget a run I went on in, it was maybe five years ago, but it was with Travis Macy.
He's a elite ultra runner.
Somehow he convinced me to go for like a eight mile run with him, up at altitude and And it was definitely a little bit too fast for me.
And I know he was going easy on me, but it was definitely this experience where okay, I'm going to do this today, but I might need a real recovery day or a day off the next day because, you know, I'm kind of just want to impress Travis.
I don't want to slow him down.
He's got training to do, but I couldn't speak as well as I normally could.
And I felt like you know, if he was like hey, let's go do a couple more miles at the?
This is becoming unsustainable for me.
And I think this is also one of those things that gets easier as you get more experience with running.
You'll very much be able to know the telltale signs.
It's heart rate.
It's respiration.
It's even, you know, how do my legs feel coming down on the ground?
You know, when I'm running seven minute pace, that feels different than when I'm running eight minute mile pace, if it feels like i'm hitting the ground too hard, like my legs are moving too quickly, like my cadence is up a little bit, that is another data point telling me that i might be running a little bit too quickly.
And i think the more experience you have, the better you are at deciphering all of those data points that you're getting, all those subjective data points that you know.
If you're just started, it's going to be really hard to speak the language of your body, Whereas if you're a more experienced runner, you've got more gears.
You understand that better.
It'll be much easier for you.
Now Elizabeth, we have been going hard on pacing for a while and I want to switch gears a little bit and get to our last couple questions.
This is a good one because a lot of runners just finished the Boston Marathon.
They're probably taking some time off.
Some runners might even be thinking about taking some extended time off from running.
So how quickly does an athlete start to lose fitness if you just stop running completely?
I will say that if you have just run a marathon, you need to recover from your marathon properly, irrespective of any fitness loss you may incur.
Losing and gaining fitness is a cyclical process.
After every hard training cycle where you gain fitness, you have to give some of it back because you have to recover from your effort, right?
I, a lot of runners you know whether they had a great race or a terrible race are trying to capitalize or get revenge on whatever they just did.
And they just all just plow right on through a cool big turnaround, do something.
Yeah.
Jump right into next training a week.
I'm fine.
I'm not sore anymore.
I can continue training again.
Um, That's not how you capitalize on your fitness, because recovery is part of the process of gaining and maintaining long-term fitness.
Now I would be remiss in pretending that post-race recovery does not result in some fitness loss, because it does.
Anytime that you take time off, whether it's post-race or in an off-season, or you're just taking time off because you feel like it or a life event has happened you are going to lose some fitness.
This is a slower process than you might think.
I know some runners who are terrified to take a week off when they go on vacation because they don't want to lose all their fitness.
It doesn't happen that quickly.
If you take about a week completely off, for most people we are talking about negligible changes in your fitness.
We're talking about points of a percentage point in terms of decreases in performance and efficiency.
And actually, for some people, you might benefit from the rest if you have been overtraining.
When we get to the two-week mark, we do start to see actual physiological changes.
But again, we're talking a couple percentage points.
We're talking about 2% to 3% loss of VO2 max.
You do start to lose your blood plasma volume.
That's actually something that starts to decrease pretty quickly after you stop running.
Why it's important that you have a large blood plasma volume.
Blood plasma is the clear stuff in your blood, so your blood is made of a bunch of different things red blood cells, white blood cells platelets, blood plasma, a bunch of other stuff is that having a greater volume of blood allows your heart to be able to not have to work as hard to pump the same volume of blood throughout your body, and it also gives a place where your sweat can come from.
Basically, If you start losing blood plasma volume, your heart has to work harder to pump the same amount of blood, same cardiac output.
And so if you've taken maybe a week off and notice that well, my efforts feels the same, but my heart rate's higher than normal, that's mostly due to blood plasma reduction.
But again, we're talking about minimal losses. you'll lose some neuromuscular fitness.
But we're talking about two weeks is really that point where, if you took two full weeks completely off from any activity no running, no cross-training, nothing you sat on the couch for two full weeks.
Yeah, you're going to start to lose some fitness.
After four weeks, you're looking at about a 6% decrease in your VO2 max.
And if you're looking at race times, I forget what it is, but on a 5K, it's 6%.
You know, that's not nothing.
That's But you take significant time off like that, completely off, you usually have a reason.
And so one of the things I like to tell runners is that if you are taking significant time off, completely off from running or any activity, the worst thing you can do is worry about fitness loss, because you probably have a really good reason for taking that time off.
Any physical activity though, even if you're not running, will help maintain some of that fitness, so that decay will be slower than if you were completely sedentary.
Eight weeks is really the turning point.
After eight weeks of complete inactivity, you are looking at relatively significant fitness decline.
After 12 weeks it's not like you're starting from scratch, but you're going to have a much harder climb back to your previous level of fitness.
But this is all very different from normal post-race recovery, which is typically a couple days of rest, maybe a week to 10 days completely off from running, maybe then some short active recovery sessions, but you're back to running within two to four weeks of your race.
I was really hoping I was going to disagree with you here, but I guess not.
The one thing I will echo is a lot of the neuromuscular fitness starts to erode more quickly than your aerobic fitness declines.
So you know, if you take two weeks off, your aerobic fitness is gonna go down much less substantially than your neuromuscular fitness.
And so if you were to get on the track and maybe do a marathon pace workout after two weeks off, you're gonna be able to do that workout.
And it's probably not, it's gonna not feel as good.
You're gonna be not sharp.
You're gonna feel a little uncoordinated, although that might be a little bit of that neuromuscular fitness.
But if you got on the track and tried to do a series of 150 meter fly-ins or something that was more speed oriented,
Now we're talking about sort of the skill of running.
When we are talking about form drills and plyometrics and sprints and really short, fast reps.
That's the stuff that takes more coordination.
It, And that's the stuff that starts to decline much more quickly than your aerobic fitness, your endurance.
So, even though if you take a week or two off after a big race which is something I recommend and, just like you, don't even worry about your fitness level, gain a couple pounds, sit on the couch, eat some Cheetos like it doesn't matter,
And it's probably very good for you, both physically and from a psychological perspective, to have that time to get a little bit detrained.
And then you'll get it back very, very quickly as you start training again.
But don't get discouraged by the lack of neuromuscular fitness, because you know your first run back after some time off you might feel a little clunky, a little uncoordinated, especially if you maybe start to do a series of strides and your stride just feels a little choppy.
You don't have that normal graceful, smooth stride when you're running.
You know 800 meter or mile race pace like you normally do.
That's not necessarily a lack of fitness.
It's just a lack of your ability to express the fitness that you currently have.
And I think it's especially stark because a lot of times what happens is you know runners will run their goal race and what kind of shape is a runner in when they run their goal race?
They are in peak performance shape.
They are sharp.
They are ready to perform.
They're ready to maybe perform better than they ever have before and run a personal best.
And then you take some time off and now you're comparing yourself with how you just felt a couple of weeks ago, when you can get on the track and you have all those gears and you have access to those gears and it feels smooth.
And it can be a real knock to a runner's confidence.
And I experienced this very much with the normal kind of cross-country and indoor track, outdoor track, seasonality of running in high school and college.
And it's great because you feel so fit and fast at the end of outdoor track.
And then your first couple of weeks of base training over the summer, it's a slog.
You don't feel good at all.
You're trying to run more.
And it's just such a difference in how you feel.
But you've got to trust the process and know that this is how it's supposed to feel.
You're going to get back into it.
And as long as you're not taking, like you said, eight plus weeks off, you don't really have to worry too much about those fitness losses.
Now, I want to add a little wrinkle to this question.
What if you take eight weeks off, but you go running very short, easy, twice a week?
Is that really going to change the picture of how much fitness you're going to lose?
Yeah.
Any activity will slow the rate of decay and the total loss of fitness.
However...
You're still going to lose.
If you were running, you know, 60 miles a week five, six days a week, strength training, maybe a cross-training session in there, and then you're running twice a week.
You know?
Talk about how your body adapts to certain stressors.
You are – not completely sedentary but, according to what you were doing, your body is almost approaching it in that way.
You are doing so much less than you were.
It's not a stressor at all.
So it's better than nothing.
And if somebody is going through a period of their life where they, you know, for whatever reason, I know that personal events happen.
Sometimes we do take significant time off, but if you are able to do any sort of activity during that time and fitness loss is a big concern for you anything will help.
And maybe it's.
Maybe you can, you know, add some strides and maybe you're running twice a week and you do strides or some hill sprints afterwards, or you're, you know, keeping up with your plyo.
That I call neuromuscular rust.
Prevent the neuromuscular rust.
Cause yeah, my athletes are like, Why do I feel so awkward?
I'm like, it's just your neuromuscular rest.
You got to just, you know, shake it off.
But we do want to avoid large periods of time off if possible.
Now, of course, sometimes it's not possible to avoid those.
Whenever possible, though taking significant periods completely off is not in your best interest for the long term.
Right.
That reminds me of my college cross country coach telling us that we were not allowed to run cross country if we didn't also run track.
Because he said look, if you're going to take six months off, you're never going to be a good runner.
You're going to really struggle every single cross country season.
And you have to recognize that running is not just a sport that you do four months out of the year, eight months out of the year, even just 10 months out of the year.
It's a lifestyle.
And if you really want to achieve your potential in the sport, it has to be this lifestyle.
Now I want to wrap up with a very biased question to running coaches here talking about at what point should a runner start thinking about hiring a running coach?
Now I want to be aware of our bias here, because of course it's in our best interest to say anytime you know, it's great for any runner, hire us today.
But I don't think that... is the most helpful answer for runners?
Because I do think there are certain types of runners that they probably don't need a coach.
Of course they could benefit from one, but it might be negligible or the improvement is just on the margins.
So how do you think about at what point a runner should really start thinking about getting some outside help?
Yeah, that's a really great point is that, and I've said this too, not every runner needs a coach.
Honestly, there are some runners who do really well self-coaching or adapting training or whatever it is.
They are fine.
They've got it.
They're solid.
And I've worked with a variety of runners at different experience levels.
And the main reasons that I have had runners come to me and ask for coaching, or runners who I think would benefit most from coaching, is runners who are really just have kind of no idea what they're supposed to be doing, right.
And this can happen at any experience levels.
So maybe you've gotten to a certain point on your own.
You've cobbled together some training.
You know may or may not have been the right training for you, but you did it and you got a couple of PRs.
And now things aren't feeling so great and you're kind of plateaued, or maybe you keep getting injured.
You don't know why and you don't know what to do.
Wherever you are in your running journey, if you are at this kind of looking at what you want to accomplish and you're like I have no idea how to get there,
That's what a coach is for.
Whether your goal is to run your first 5K or qualify for Boston or the Olympic trials, like whatever it is, if you have these goals and you have seen no way to chart your own path forward, or you've tried everything and it hasn't worked, that's what a coach is for.
I also work with a lot of runners personally who have really complicated schedules and really busy lives.
Coaching yourself, even when you know how to coach is really hard to do properly and objectively.
So for runners who have a whole lot going on, They work.
They're parents.
They have weird schedules and lots of travel or whatever it is.
And they're thinking, yeah, I mean, I understand this.
And I've bought all the books.
And I've read all the plans.
And I just don't understand how to modify training to fit my life.
That's what a coach is for, right?
We understand how to navigate training for your life specifically.
That's somebody who could benefit from coaching.
And then...
If somebody I feel like tends to get in their own way a lot has struggles with really, as I said, objectively analyzing their performance.
If you are really I want to say an anxious type person, but if you tend to see more of the bad than the good in what you have been doing, even if what you have been doing is on paper, is successful.
Having a coach kind of bring you back to earth and refocus you and help you see what you're doing is correct and talk you off the ledge and, you know, put the correct spin on what's actually going on.
That perspective can be really helpful because, you know.
Running is so mental that if you're approaching the sport in a place where you're like never feel like it's good enough, or you're only seeing the bad, or you have a bad workout and it destroys the rest of your week from a mental standpoint.
That's not helpful for your performance or your or your health.
So having a coach be like actually that did go well, but maybe we'll work on these couple of things next time.
That's a much better place for you to be in rather than you just beating yourself up all day long.
So I think that's really what I think people could benefit most from if they're looking for a coach or curious about coaching.
I will say there is no, absolutely no minimum pace requirement, goal requirement.
You don't need to be a marathoner to have a coach.
You don't need to run a certain... miles per week or have very specific goals.
Literally any runner who wants to work with a coach could benefit from having a coach if that's where they are in their running journey.
Yeah, I think it More often than not.
My job as a coach is not to push the athlete, not to get them excited about training, not to get them to set enormous goals.
It's really to rein them in a little bit and to explain hey, any improvement over the best you've ever run ever is a day to celebrate.
You know, you just ran a marathon eight minutes faster than you ever have before.
I mean, that's probably like 16, 18 seconds faster per mile over 26.2 miles.
That is an achievement that we should be celebrating.
We should be having a party and really just being grateful for all of the great things that happened in our training that allowed us to perform at that level.
So I always think it's really interesting that sometimes the job we have is very different than the job that other people think we have.
The other thing I'll say is my perspective on this is that it's more of a psychographic.
It's the type of runner that you are, rather than on how long you've been running, what race you're training for, what your race times are.
You know, that's all well and good, but it's really about your mindset.
Are you the runner that really wants to improve?
Are you passionate about the sport?
You want to get better, whether or not you're running 35 minutes for 5K, 25 minutes or 15 minutes for 5K.
Do you want to get better?
And do you want outside help in that pursuit of yours?
And I think any runner who's in that boat is a good candidate for coaching, because it's After all, like you said, the coach is someone who can help you navigate the training in your own lifestyle.
And if you're the type of runner who's just hell-bent on improvement, I want to run PRs.
It doesn't matter the distance.
I just want to keep getting better and better and better.
A coach is going to be that really valuable partner in that journey, who's able to look at your training and your past history and race performance and say what's the next step that we can take, both with your mileage, your workouts, your long runs, your strength training, your cross training, your nutrition, all the kind of things that impact your performance.
We can make little tweaks here and there that will add up to better and better performances.
I'll also say what you said before about moderate pace and how you can get away with more moderate pace when you're younger is that, especially as you get older, your training needs to become really efficient, because you don't have the bandwidth to spend on junk miles or train is ineffective.
And so you, as an average runner, might be training a lot, but your training might not be very efficient from what your goals are.
But you don't know that, right.
But a coach might step in and say you don't need, you don't need this and you don't need that, but you do need more of this, right.
But how are you supposed to know?
As a runner like that, that is also what a coach for, because i coach adult runners.
Their time is valuable, right?
They do not have six hours every single day to do their run and go to the sauna and hit the weight room and like no, they're getting their runs and they're going to work by 8 30.
So if efficiency in when you are spending time running is really key,
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Well, Elizabeth, let's cut it here.
We have gone a little bit long, but this was such a great discussion and I really appreciate your expertise today.
Folks probably don't need to know where they can find you online.
The Running Explained podcast is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, running podcast in the United States, which probably makes it the most popular in the world.
So a big congratulations.
You and Allie Feller and me are typically battling it out on the rankings, and I absolutely love it.
So I really appreciate you taking the time being here and sharing all your knowledge with us.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
And I'm sorry we didn't disagree on a single thing.
I know.
We're going to have to have like a sparring episode where only we're going to talk about topics that we know we disagree on.
Yes.
All right.
Thank you, Elizabeth.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening and being part of our community here.
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