What pace should I run my easy runs?
Training Paces
Easy running is the biggest single lever most runners have, and it is the one almost everybody gets wrong in the same direction.
The short answer
Run your easy runs at a pace where you could hold a conversation in full sentences — for most runners that is roughly 60 to 90 seconds per kilometre slower than your current 10km race pace. If you are not sure, go slower. Easy running should feel almost disappointingly comfortable, and it should stay that way to the end of the run.
Why easy pace matters more than the hard sessions
Most of the runners who come to me are not undertrained. They are under-recovered. They run their easy days at a pace that is quick enough to cost them something, but not quick enough to give them anything back, and then they wonder why Tuesday's session felt flat.
The point of an easy run is to accumulate time on your feet while your body is still able to adapt to it. Blood volume, capillary density, mitochondria, tendon and bone loading, running economy — those all improve from volume you can repeat. They do not improve any faster because you ran the recovery day at 5:10/km instead of 5:50/km. All that does is push the cost up.
The runners I coach who make the biggest jumps in a season are almost always the ones who agreed, early on, to slow their easy days down.
How to find your easy pace
There are three checks. Use whichever you trust most, but they should broadly agree.
The talk test. Can you speak a full sentence without gasping mid-way? Not three words, a full sentence. If you can, you are in the right place. This is the most reliable test there is and it does not need a watch.
Off your race pace. Take a recent, honest 10km race or time trial pace and add 60 to 90 seconds per kilometre. A runner racing 10km at 4:30/km is running easy somewhere around 5:30 to 6:00/km. A runner racing 10km at 6:00/km is running easy at 7:00 to 7:30/km. Both of those are correct.
Effort out of ten. On the RPE scale I give every athlete, easy running sits at 3 to 4 out of 10. It is not a 5. A 5 is steady, and steady is a different session with a different purpose.
What easy pace is not
It is not a fixed number you carry around for a year. It moves with the day. Easy pace on a still Sunday morning along the waterfront is not the same number as easy pace into a Wellington northerly on Cobham Drive, and it is not the same number the morning after a hard session or a bad night's sleep.
This is the single most common mistake I see: treating easy pace as a target to hit rather than a ceiling not to cross. Run the effort, and let the pace be whatever it is that day.
Coach's note
Wellington makes this genuinely hard, because almost nothing here is flat. If you run from town up through Aro Valley, or out to Karori, or up the Ngaio Gorge, your easy pace will drop by a minute a kilometre or more on the climbs and you have done nothing wrong. Watch your effort on the hills and your pace on the flat, not the other way around. If you want a route where the number on the watch actually means something, use the waterfront out to Oriental Bay and back, or the Petone Esplanade — they are the two flattest honest stretches in the region.
How much of your week should be easy?
For most runners on three to six runs a week, somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of weekly volume should be genuinely easy. That is not a rule I invented — it is what almost every successful distance programme in the world has converged on, at every level.
What that looks like in practice on five runs a week is three easy runs, one quality session, and a long run that is mostly easy with the option of some work in it. Two hard days. Not three, and not "two hard days plus a hilly easy run that turned into a race against yourself".
The hardest part: running slow in company
Easy running is where #NoAudienceRequired earns its keep. Nobody is impressed by your easy run. Nobody is going to comment on it. It is the least glamorous thing in the whole programme, and it is the part that decides whether you are still improving in March.
If you find yourself unable to hold back on easy days, a few things help. Run with someone slower than you. Leave the watch on time-of-day only. Run a route that forces you to be honest — a trail, a hill, somewhere the pace is nonsense anyway. Or run with a group where the easy pace is set for you.
Try this
For the next two weeks, run every easy run without looking at your watch. Cover it with your sleeve if you have to. At the end of the two weeks, look back at the data and see what your body chose. Almost everyone finds their easy pace settled into a narrower, slower band than the one they were forcing — and that their quality sessions got better.
Common questions
My easy pace feels embarrassingly slow. Am I doing something wrong? No. Almost every runner's true easy pace is slower than their ego would like. It gets quicker over months, on its own, as fitness improves. Chasing it does not speed that up.
Should I use heart rate instead? You can, and for easy running heart rate is quite useful — roughly 65 to 75 percent of maximum. But it lags at the start of a run, it drifts upwards in heat and on long runs, and it goes strange when you are tired or under the weather. Use it as one input, not the boss.
What if I only run three times a week? Then easy running matters even more, because you have fewer chances to recover from anything you overcook. Three runs a week works well as one easy, one session, one long.
If in doubt, slower. That has never once been the thing that ruined someone's season.
