![]() ![]() It didn’t matter what I ran on my easy days they were supposed to be easy." I just needed to grow into the sport and know that it was okay to back off on those easy days and not be so stuck on the watch and always running 6:30 pace. “By 2004, I was having my best year, and that’s when I made my Olympic team. “Slowly but surely, running slower helped me,” Tollefson says. “Pace is the most important thing to keep easy on an easy day.”īarker’s solution was to mandate that Tollefson wear a heart rate monitor and keep her easy and long runs within appropriate ranges. I was always pushing the envelope, but I just couldn’t run a ton plus go really hard in all my workouts, my easy days and my long runs.” “And then I came to Dennis, and we were trying to hit 85 or 90 miles a week, and I couldn’t do it all. “At ‘Nova, we were very low-mileage, but we ran hard all the time,” Tollefson says. The transition to working with Barker was initially rocky, because Tollefson wouldn’t back down on her easy runs. More than 20 years ago, Barker began working with Carrie Tollefson, a then five-time national champion at Villanova who later went on to qualify for the 2004 Olympic Games. So a long run, even completed 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. The question, then, is 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. 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.” It’s during recovery that adaptations from the hard training take place. “A runner should achieve a training effect every day,” says Dennis Barker, former head coach at Augsburg College who has lead many runners to podium finishes, “and to me, recovery is a training effect, maybe the most important one. More important, recovery runs do just that: Allow you to recover from the hard days. But even slow running allows for modest gains in efficiency of movement. 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. ![]() Seasoned runners also need easy days in order to maintain hard-earned aerobic fitness and make continual gains in running economy. The base fitness a runner puts down through a preponderance of easy runs enables the athlete to safely progress to other types of training. “Easy running-even very slow easy running-provides fundamental adaptations.”Īll runners, and especially beginners and those coming back from injury, benefit from the cardiovascular and muscular-structural development easy running promotes. “Without that, you can’t do the intense runs.” On easy days, “you increase mitochondria and capillaries and blood flow to those muscles, so they’re better able to utilize oxygen,” he says. They have a higher density of mitochondria, high levels of aerobic enzymes, and greater capillary density than fast-twitch fibers, which are more involved in higher-intensity training, says Dan Bergland, principal sport physiologist at Hypo2, a sport management organization in Flagstaff, Arizona. ![]() On recovery run days, you’re mostly using slow-twitch muscle fibers. Why do we do them? Because easy running-even very slow easy running-provides fundamental adaptations. Some hardliners might even use the term “junk miles” for Kipyego’s easy-day running, despite her international successes. The easy day run is the Rodney Dangerfield of distance training: It receives precious little respect. They’re the entries in your training log that make up a large percentage of your weekly mileage total, but with which you don’t bother to record much data: Simply an “8” or a “6” or a “park loop” would suffice to remind you what you did that day.
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