Knowing what pace to do certain training runs is a common question or wondering of many runners. Whether you are a recreational runner or training for any distance race, your pace is important.
So, what pace should you be running in your workouts?
The McMillan Running Calculator is one source you can use. According to the website, the McMillan Calculator, “estimates your equivalent race performances using a current race time at any distance as well as giving the appropriate pace range for all the different types of workouts that you perform”.
Competitive Runner has a great article on the different points of view from guys like Jack Daniels, Peter Pfitzinger, Arthur Lydiard, Tim Noakes, and Hal Higdon. However, the article basically leaves it up to you to determine the pace of your long runs.
What do we do?
We used to run our long runs and every other run with a lot of effort believing that the better our pace the better off we were. However, we have recently adapted a new mentality. We are slowing down for long runs, recovery runs, and easy runs. There are certain days of the week dedicated to intervals, pace runs, tempos, and hill workouts. We have found that running all of our runs at a hard effort results in burn out and decreased performance.
We are both following Hal Higdon’s Marathon Training Plans. Right there on his training plan he states, “Please note that we do not recommend doing your long runs at marathon pace. That adds too much stress, particularly when coupled with the speed sessions. If you overtrain, your performance will suffer”.
Hal also states right on the same page of his website…
“Run Slow: I know this is tough for you. You want to go out on those long runs and BLAST! Don’t! Normally I recommend that runners do their long runs anywhere from 45 to 90 seconds per mile or more slower than their marathon pace. This is very important, particularly for Advanced runners who do speedwork during the week. Listen to what the Coach is about to tell you! The physiological benefits kick in around 90-120 minutes, no matter how fast you run. You’ll burn a few calories and trigger glycogen regenesis, teaching your muscles to conserve fuel. Running too fast defeats this purpose and may unnecessarily tear down your muscles, compromising not only your midweek workouts, but the following week’s long run. Save your fast running for the marathon itself. There are plenty of days during the rest of the week, when you can run fast. So simply do your long runs at a comfortable pace, one that allows you to converse with your training partners, at least during the beginning of the run”.
Question: how do YOU determine your pace? Do you slow down for your long runs? Do you just run the pace that you feel like without much thought? Do you have a different running “theory” than what we just talked about?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
for my runs when i’m in training i use mcmillian as a base but tend to speed things up a bit. for non-training runs i just go. start slow and then progress naturally through the run
I’ve been using the mcmillian running calc that I originally found from you guys : ) It’s so hard for me to run my long runs slow (I naturally want to go all out all the time), but I just ran my first long run of training last Sunday and forced myself to run at a slow pace, yay!