Taking it Easy

From GRP Biathlete Jake Brown.

Runners are an interesting breed. Most of us, in one way or another, actually like the physical pain associated with exercise. Maybe it’s because of the endorphins, or maybe it’s because we feel accomplished afterward, like we’ve overcome something or discovered a new limit- whatever the exact reason is, I’m not quite sure. Certainly, we have a desire to push, push until we at least experience some fulfilling level of pain that makes us feel like we’ve put in a good day’s work. No matter how hard yesterday was, we urge to achieve that feeling of fulfillment on today’s run. It’s an itch we feel we must scratch.

Yet somehow this itch, born of feeling, has extrapolated itself beyond running philosophy and into training theory. There is an entire school of thought pervasive in the running community at all levels of competition that discourages running done slower than a certain pace. I remember a high school coach berating “junk miles”, encouraging us as mid-tier high school harriers not to run slower than a seven- minute mile on our “easy” days. I’ve heard coaches stress “quality training” on easy days, implying that running too easy on such runs results in a lack of quality to the session. Even through my early college running years, my teammates and I held ourselves in high esteem when we were able to taper the pace on a “slam”- a prescribed easy run during which we’d finished the last several miles much closer to tempo pace than recovery pace. Honestly, those runs left me feeling great, with muscles tingling and confidence through the roof (hey, I kept up with Don today). Anyone else guilty? It feels great to push the pace. For me, it takes me back to the liberating feeling I got during track practice in middle and early high school. Escaping discipline, exploring limits. The irony is that, if a runner is most interested in improving his or her racing ability, then going too hard on easy days can be destructive.

Jake running the steeple chase as a student athlete at St. Olaf College.

OK, so you’ve probably heard this before in some form or another. But perhaps I’m one of the most radical believers (at least in the running world) in keeping “easy” days truly easy. As a disclosure, today I’m no longer training specifically for running (I train as a biathlete for the US Biathlon Team and the Craftsbury Green Racing Project). However, I’m still interested in performing my best when I toe the line of any race I’m entered in, whether on skis or on foot, and a significant percentage of my training consists of both easy days and hard days running on the gravel roads, Class 4 roads, or dirt trails here in Craftsbury, Vermont.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years of pursuing excellence in endurance sport is that the hard days must be your ultimate focus. A core principle of training is specificity- the idea that you only get better at what you specifically work on. If you want to race 10km in 40 minutes but only train by running moderately hard distance runs at 7- or 8-minute per mile pace, your improvement will plateau quickly. You must prioritize your hard training, and your hard training must address the core components of running fast: speed at lactate threshold and VO 2 max, aerobic capacity, stride efficiency, specific strength, power application, to name a few (the list goes on). Now while I won’t get into breaking down the foot-race performance model further, I will point out that many of these core components are interconnected, and, in accordance with the principle of specificity, you address them best by running races or intervals at paces close to your goal race pace and at distances close to your race distance. The days that you address these aspects of running most specifically are your “hard” days - these are the workouts that must be planned in detail and dialed in, and these are the workouts that you must execute to your best ability.

Easy days and distance days, therefore, serve a three-fold purpose: (1) they provide active recovery from your hard days, (2) they address some core components of running, albeit less specifically than on hard days, and (3) they allow you to train for a long period of time. Let’s dive just a bit deeper into these beneficial aspects of easy training to illustrate why it’s so important that these sessions are truly kept easy.

Re: easy running’s first purpose – recovery. Running easy allows for the body to flush the muscle with a lot of blood, yet avoid taxing or breaking down the muscle. If you run at a “good clip” on your easy days, you pump more blood through the muscle, sure, but you also break down the muscle more and produce more lactic acid. The easier you run, the less acid your muscles produce, which means less acid for your blood to flush and liver to process. If you’re hoping to get the biggest benefit from your latest hard day, you’re going to want to pump a lot of blood through the muscle for a while, but avoid as much breakdown, nervous system fatigue, and lactate production as possible. You must be ready for your next hard day, this is most important! In regard to the second purpose of running easy: even though easy running is less specific than hard running, it isn’t entirely nonspecific. As long as you run with good form, you engrain good technique habits. And easy running, if done for a long time, improves aerobic capacity, since the heart must move all that blood through the body. This bleeds into the third purpose of easy running (pun intended), and perhaps the most important. Since you can run easy for quite a while and still recover effectively from a previous hard session, you can spend more time simply running, and improving your running, if you take it easy.

In some ways, one could make an argument that easy days, collectively, are more important than hard days, if the runner runs easy enough! The easy volume is what enables a runner to consistently complete the most grueling and drawn out hard sessions. With better recovery, an athlete is able to schedule hard sessions more regularly. Also, since a training plan should have more easy days than hard days, while any single hard day will have a greater effect on your race result than a single easy day, the cumulative effect of all easy days is certainly substantial.

In extension of this final point, I want to offer a thought on “quality training.” While I’ve heard the phrase “quality training” used to describe training at a faster pace on easy days, I do believe that you can perform easy days at a very slow pace and have them either be quality or junk. Again, training is specific. So, if you choose to “run” on challenging terrain and actually end up walking so much that your training turns into a more of hike than a run, I don’t believe your run-turned-hike will improve your running as much as if you had chosen less difficult terrain and were able to continue running at an equally pedestrian effort (now don’t get me wrong, your hike will certainly improve your aerobic capacity to some degree, and sometimes the running legs do need a break). Similarly, it’s important to be intentional about running with good form when you run easy. At a slow pace, it’s easy to get sloppy with your technique- so give extra focus when you start running easy to ensure that, despite your low heart rate, you still execute proper running form (a topic for another blog, I am sure).

So how slow should you go? And how long? I don’t think I can answer those questions directly, as a lot of it depends on your current mileage volume, training years, and the race distance that you’re training for. One test I’ve heard of is that you should be able to run while breathing through only your nose (which is pretty uncomfortable, I wouldn’t recommend doing that the whole time…). When I run for my ski training, I’m not super focused on pacing since our races are quite hilly, and in my opinion hills throw pacing out the window. I use a heart rate monitor and aim to keep my heart rate at the low end of my “Level 1” zone, which is 60-72% of my max heart rate. The truth is that any athlete must learn to listen to their body, however cliché it sounds, and recognize what is easy and what isn’t. We all learn from mistakes. I’m lucky to have made a lot of them, so maybe learn from mine and go a little easier than you think you need to.

If you follow these tips, I am confident that you will find that keeping the easy days reeeeaaaally easy will give you the ability to properly execute a higher percentage of your hard sessions and ensure that all of your training is high quality. Get after it, then have the discipline to chill out and shuffle!

Jake taking it easy on a sunset cruise in Craftsbury.