You’re STILL Doing Your Easy Runs Too Fast
Why the most common and costly bad habit in endurance sports is so hard to break
Last summer a college-age runner named Nick spent a month at Dream Run Camp. On his first Saturday here, I took him to a place called Hart Prairie for a ten-mile run. A little over an hour after he started, I received a text message from Nick saying he’d hit the wall at eight miles and was walking it in. Instead of waiting for him, I hopped in the van and went to pick up the poor kid.
On the drive back to camp I asked Nick what had happened. He told me he’d gotten dehydrated. Skeptical, I asked a series of follow-up questions, which revealed that dehydration had nothing to do with Nick’s bonk and he’d simply run too fast and failed to adjust for the altitude. Further questioning exposed the fact that Nick always ran too fast in “easy” runs, even back home at sea level. When I shared this observation, the nineteen-year-old pushed back, citing his improvement over the past year, and I knew I had my work cut out for me.
Determined to break Nick out of the moderate-intensity rut before he left Flagstaff, I pulled every persuasive lever available to me in an effort to overcome his resistance. I gave him books to read, delivered a relevant PowerPoint presentation, had him talk to a local coach of professional runners, and teed up a conversation between Nick and a past Dream Runner his age who had successfully broken out of the rut.
Eventually, Nick bought into the idea that he was doing his easy runs too fast. From there it took him a few more days to actually slow down. The upper limit of Nick’s low-intensity range, according to my calculations, was 150 beats per minute. I told him not to exceed this number in easy runs, and after his next easy run he proudly told me that his average heart rate for the sessions was exactly 150 BPM, which of course meant he’d spent half the run over the limit. Nick’s not dumb, but I had to explain to him that the body adapts not to averages but to moment-to-moment exposure to specific intensities. Nice try, buddy.
The breakthrough came about midway through Nick’s visit, when I pulled my last remaining unpulled lever and ran with him. Nick keep me apprised of his heart rate as we went, and when it crept over the limit at the base of a hill, I stopped running and walked to the top. Nick’s teenage pride would never have allowed him to do such a thing on his own, but by doing it first I made walking acceptable to him. At the end of the run he reported feeling better than he had at any point since his arrival in Flagstaff.
On his last day at Dream Run Camp, Nick ran twelve miles at Hart Prairie, site of his implosion one month earlier. Again I joined him, and I was almost as surprised as was when he reported that his heart rate was a full 20 BPM lower than it had been at the same pace in that first run. At long last Nick had broken out of the moderate-intensity rut, and he lived happily ever after, so to speak.
I don’t mean to single Nick out, for he is far from an exception to the norm. Of the more than 200 runners who have come to Dream Run Camp over the past three years, no more than a dozen were already doing their easy runs correctly when they arrived. Why is correct execution of easy runs so rare?
I’ve identified at least ten reasons why the overwhelming majority of runners do almost all of their easy runs too fast. At the top of this list, despite all the recent hype about Zone 2 training, is ignorance. Many runners simply do not know they’re sabotaging their own training by doing their low-intensity runs at moderate intensity. Buy-in is another big factor. Like Nick, most runners struggle to believe that slowing down can make them faster. Other reasons include arrogance (“I’m an exception”), vanity (aka the STRAVA factor, or the egomaniacal presumption that the rest of the world cares deeply about whether you ran eight minutes per mile or twelve minutes per mile in today’s “Lunch Run”), and self-deception (like Nick’s attempt to convince both himself and me that he’d complied with the heart rate cap I gave him by averaging that exact heart and not a beat less).
🔔 Want to dive deeper and get even more exclusive content like this? Upgrade to a paid subscription and experience all the benefits of Endurance Mastery be MarathonGuide.
➡️ For a limited time only, grab an exclusive 20% early-subscriber discount before this offer disappears
The one semi-legitimate reason not to do easy runs the way the best runners in the world do them (i.e., actually easy) is simply not caring. After all, a runner can improve while remaining in the moderate-intensity rut; they just can’t improve as much. There are plenty of runners out there who, faced with a clear binary choice between improving more by slowing down and improving less by not slowing down, will choose the latter, which is their right.
Odds are you’re currently among the ninety-plus percent of runners who do every single easy run too fast. If you wish to continue to impress your STRAVA followers with your blistering “Lunch Run” paces, be my guest.
But if you’d like to experience the kind of breakthrough Nick did, take the following steps:
Determine you maximum heart rate (HRmax). Don’t use the 220 minus age formula for this; it’s wildly inaccurate. Instead, consult your training data and find your highest measured heart rate.
Multiply your HRmax by 0.70 (if you’re a newer of less fit runner) or 0.75 (if you’re an experienced or fitter runner) to determine the upper limit of your low-intensity range. For example, if your HRmax is 180 BPM and you’re pretty fit, the upper limit of your low-intensity range is 135 BPM.
Go out and do an easy run without ever exceeding the upper limit of your low-intensity range for any reason. If you have to walk, walk. Pretend you’ll be punished with a year in prison if you exceed the cap at any point by any amount.
Repeat step three in all of your easy runs for four weeks.
Thank me for completely transforming your running for the better.
You’re welcome.
💬 If you had to keep your heart rate strictly capped on every easy run - even if it meant slowing way down or walking hills - would you actually do it for four weeks? Why or why not?
Catch up on past Monday Musing posts ⬇️
What Would Marcus Aurelius Do?
There was a time in the 1980s and early ‘90s when post-impressionist art became quite trendy. It seemed every middle-class home you entered in those days had a print of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” hanging on a living room wall, “Sunflowers” above the toilet in the main guest bathroom. I like Van Gogh as much as anyone, but I hate following trends, and for…
🤍 Thanks for reading,
Matt Fitzgerald and MarathonGuide Team
This one landed hard. Not because I’ve been oblivious to Zone 2 or immune to the data, but because you’re writing about something deeper than pace discipline. What you’re describing is the emotional architecture beneath performance: the pride, the self-deception, the fear of being exposed as ordinary.
It isn’t about pace. It’s about identity, shadow, and the parts of ourselves we refuse to slow down enough to meet. I’ve lived the moderate-intensity rut in more than running: senior executive roles, policy fights, the constant torque of proving I’m still here, still capable. Easy runs done too fast are the embodied version of that old survival pattern. When we must move quickly to justify our worth, slowness feels like ego death. In simplistic terms, there’s a wound beneath the behaviour.
And here’s the kicker: even as a coach, I struggle to get other people to understand this. I can practice it (OK, sometimes), but steering conversations into this terrain (the Jungian terrain, the discomfort, etc.), feels like the real hill, if you excuse the pun. I watch most athletes cling to the persona (the “capable one” who doesn’t need to walk hills), and it feels like watching myself ten years ago. These are the kinds of conversations I want to be having, but they make people flinch. They attack the illusion of control; they call out the armour; they expose the cost of refusing to descend into the underworld of humility.
Reading you confront Nick’s pride felt like watching someone coach the younger me. The version that tried to outrun childhood, grief, then midlife, and recently, the brutality of starting over. For me, slowing down is not just a training correction; it’s a metaphysical pivot. Proof that performance doesn’t need to be fueled by fear or emotional compression. And yet, even knowing this, I still find myself second-guessing how to talk about it without sounding like I’m lecturing or proselytizing or trying to convert someone to my personal mythology of pace (or power).
In Jungian terms, easy running done correctly feels like an encounter with the shadow. It asks us to surrender the persona, the part that needs to “look like” progress, to build something truer. The moment you stopped and walked, and he mirrored you, felt like the whole point: someone has to go first. That’s leadership. Not your PowerPoints or the persuasion, but the willingness to model a slower, more honest way of being.
These are the conversations I think endurance sport needs more of. The ones that create discomfort and ask us who we are without the armour of pace. Ironically, the Norwegian successes may be the hook. I’m sixty now, still learning to give myself permission to go slow, and discovering that humility can be a training stimulus. I want to get better at bringing athletes (and peers, honestly) into this space without losing them along the way.
Thanks for pushing the conversation where it needs to go. As you always do so well.
Marc
My teenage coach would make us run with his wife. She was in her mid 50s and the rule was no one was allowed to run faster than her. Those long runs through the bush are still some of my favourite memories and taught me the art of easy running.