Run Slower To Get Faster: The Truth About Recovery Days

WHY YOUR HARD SESSIONS KEEP FALLING APART

Easy runs are not easy, and that is the reason your hard sessions keep falling apart. You think running your recovery day a little quicker is a little more training. It is not. It is a withdrawal from the exact account that Thursday’s session was going to be paid out of. Protect your easy days and the hard sessions you keep failing at start landing.

Run your recovery and easy days too hard and your marathon build does not collapse in a week. It erodes over months, and you will blame everything except the runs that actually caused it. You will add sessions, change plans, buy shoes, and none of it works, because the problem was never the training you were adding. It was the training you refused to slow down.

So think about your last recovery run honestly. Did you finish it feeling like you could have gone again, or did you finish it feeling like you had done something significant? If it was the second one, you did not recover. You paid for a hard session you had already done, and you borrowed against the one still to come.

THE THREE WAYS RUNNERS RUIN THEIR RECOVERY DAYS

There are three places your recovery days fall apart, and you are almost certainly doing all three.

You run one pace. You have one speed you call easy and you use it for everything: your recovery day, your easy day, your long run. But a recovery run and an easy run are two different workouts with two different jobs, and running them at the same pace means you are only ever doing one of them.

You run it too long. Nobody argues about this one because nobody talks about it. You stretch your recovery run out to an hour because an hour feels like a proper run. The prescription is 15 to 45 minutes, and shorter is better. A 75 minute recovery run is not a recovery run no matter how slowly you ran it.

You run it too hard. This is the one that costs you the most. Your recovery pace should sit below 65 percent of your maximum heart rate, and yours almost certainly does not. As Greg McMillan puts it in YOU (Only Faster): if your recovery jog is anywhere near your normal easy pace, it is not a recovery jog. It is just a slow easy run, and you are stealing recovery from your hard sessions.

THE EVIDENCE THAT SLOWING DOWN MAKES YOU FASTER

Is there actually evidence that slowing your easy days down makes you faster, or is it just something coaches say? There is, and it is one of the cleanest studies in distance running.

A 2007 study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research followed 12 trained distance runners for five months. Both groups did exactly the same amount of hard training. Identical. The only thing that changed was how easy the easy running was. One group kept 80 percent of their training genuinely easy. The other managed 67 percent. Both groups then raced 10.4km. The group who kept their easy days easy improved considerably more, and it came from nothing except how fast they ran on the days they were supposed to be slow.

I coached a mid pack marathoner who could not work out why his Thursday threshold sessions kept unravelling in the last two reps, week after week. His Thursday was fine. His Tuesday recovery run was 28 seconds a kilometre too fast, and he had been running it that way for months without once thinking of it as an actual session. I slowed one run down. Nothing else changed. Three weeks later he finished every rep.

Here is the cliff most runners never see. Run genuinely easy and your nervous system is back to baseline within about an hour of finishing. Cross the line into the grey middle and it takes 24 to 48 hours, the same recovery cost as a full interval session. You paid for intervals. You do not get intervals.

HOW TO RUN THE PERFECT RECOVERY RUN

Run two paces. Stop having one speed called easy. Your recovery day should be materially slower than your easy day, and if you cannot feel the difference between them, there is no difference between them. You know you have it right when the recovery run feels almost embarrassing to run.

Run it short. Take the length out of it. The job is blood flow, and blood flow does not need an hour. You know you have it right when you finish wanting more, rather than feeling like you got a run in.

Run it easy, and let your breathing be the gauge, not your watch and not your heart rate strap. You should be able to talk in full sentences the whole way. The second your breathing becomes something you notice, you are running too fast. Breathing is honest in a way pace never is, because it already knows about your bad sleep, your stressful week and the heat of the day. Run the effort in front of you, not the pace you ran last Tuesday.

So your next recovery run is not an hour. Start slower than feels reasonable and hold your heart rate under 65 percent of maximum for the whole run. If you want a picture of the pace, it is the speed you could hold if somebody made you race for seven hours straight. That is slow. No warm up, no cool down, no strides. If you need to walk in the middle of it, walk. There is no shame in that at all. Progress it by adding five minutes a fortnight, never by adding speed, and run it alone this week. Your training partner is the single most common reason a recovery run turns into an easy run.

Your recovery run is not a small piece of training. It is the thing that makes the rest of your training possible.

Getting easy actually easy is the hardest discipline in training, and it is far simpler when someone else sets the numbers for you. Personalised coaching gives you a pace range for every run in your week, reviewed every 6 weeks as your fitness moves.