Defining "Easy" - The Base Aerobic Effort
“Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.”
—Samuel Johnson
The cornerstone workout to every base-building phase—honestly, to any phase in your training schedule—is the “easy” run. But I’m not comfortable with that word “easy.” For me, when I think of “easy,” I think “effortless” or “slow.” In this sense, the term “easy” sounds no different than “recovery,” and recovery is certifiably slow—and must feel too slow in order to meet its training purpose. That should not be the case for “easy.” The trick for me is to define that word easy before I go for a run, to prevent myself from running too fast, which is something I’ll do unless I hold myself back. Running the base aerobic workout too fast is a common fault among runners—beginners and experienced runners alike—and can force the need for longer recovery (which can be discouraging) or lead to over-training (which can be traumatic).
Tricks to try to keep your Easy Run easy:
Carry on a conversation with a running partner.
Whistle or Sing!
How many times can you say the ABCs in order without taking a full breath?
Try a reverse progression. Start out at what feels like a comfortable pace, then get slower each mile until half way, then allow yourself to progress back to the pace you started.
There are other words for the easy run that may be of help—endurance run, aerobic run, distance run, base volume run—but still we are stuck in the indefinite world of semantics. Runners looking for a quantitative measure of “easy” can find themselves in a quandary of relative data. Regardless of which training calculator you use—whether it’s McMillan Running, Jack Daniels, or Hansons—the common measure based on heart rate is anywhere from 50% to 80% of maximum heart rate. Not only is that a wide range of effort, but it still is of little help to me because I have no idea what my max heart rate is.
I know it’s somewhere in the range of ~180-ish, but using the calculations based on my age (51), it would be either 169 (220 – current age = mhr) or 172 (208 – (0.7 x age) = mhr). Neither of these measures feel accurate to me because I can run comfortably fast at both heart rates for a decent amount of time. (During my last marathon, I ran the final three miles at an average bpm of 172.) There are machines that determine maximum heart rate, but most of us do not have access to such technology. The best I can do is determine my max heart rate based on experience.
But what if you’re new to running? What if you have not measured your experience?
Here’s my solution: call the “easy” run whatever you need to call it in order to satisfy its purpose. In the course of a training program, the easy run will comprise of half to two-thirds of all training sessions, and its purpose is to expand the aerobic volume over time without taxing the more immediate need for recovery.
I know my workout will have met the purpose of an easy run when I pay attention to how my body feels at the end of it.
For instance, I know I have run my easy workout too fast when I finish with the feeling of being depleted—or of waking up the next day knowing that I cannot run the faster workout that I had planned.
Likewise, I know I have run my easy workout properly when I feel refreshed, when I have worked up a good sweat but still feel like it would not be a stress on my energy system to do a 20-minute core and strength session, or run it again (if I had to) in a six to twelve hours.
As a runner who is addicted to running with my GPS watch, I force myself to take a break from my obsessive attention to performance data by superseding how I feel for what I did. My training calculator, based on a recent race effort, says my current “easy” pace is in a range of 7:47 to 8:48. The discrepancy of effort in that range is vast. On the slow end it feels like walking; on the fast end, almost a race effort. No other training pace has as wide a range as the “easy” effort, which is why I recommend trusting how you feel at the end of a run over running a specific pace or effort.
Track your “easy” effort and keep a record of your impressions in a running journal.Over time, your collective assessment of how you feel at the end of an “easy” run will be a more accurate factor in determining how well you have accomplished the workout’s purpose.