Eduardo - Trail Run Planet

I have never claimed to be a fast runner by any standards. Luckily the rocky trails near where I live wouldn’t allow me to run fast if I wanted to without falling. So, hearing that we should do most of our running slower works for me. But I still needed to figure out why. Learning to run slower allows you to run further with less injury risk and do so while burning more fat as fuel. It is also a good way to explore new trails, prevent mental burnout, and increase motivation. Let’s look at ten key reasons why you should run slower too. How Running Slower Allows Increased Volume With Reduced Injury Risk The path to getting fitter and stronger involves increasing the amount of time that you run each week. At the same time, we want to make sure that we do that without getting injured. When you run slower you are able to run with less pounding impact on your body. Therefore, if you do most of your running slower during the time that you are increasing your running volume, you will be able to do so without suffering injury setbacks. How To Embrace The Freedom That Running Slowly Offers As opposed to the structured nature of the more focussed workouts like hill repeats or intervals on the track, a slower run gives you unstructured freedom of options. You can use your slower run to explore new trails and routes. If you have to stop so that you can pick your line across some technical terrain that won’t bother you as you don’t have any specific pace targets. Likewise, if you hit a dead-end and have to turn back you can just chalk that up to the adventure of exploring. If the terrain isn’t technical you can use your slower runs to listen to an audiobook or podcast. I use my slower runs to catch up on the podcasts that help me improve my blog writing skills. When I get back from a run I feel more motivated to tackle a new blog post, like this one. How To Add Variety To Your Training As A runner If you do all of your runs at your normal race pace you will likely just wear yourself down and be too tired for those key really hard workouts. By doing most of your running at a slower pace you will have the variety in your training to really target the hard workouts and make them count. How To Use Fat As A Fuel Source While Running When you run slowly your body is able to oxidize fat as a fuel source which is important. During long endurance events, your body fat is a vital fuel source as you won’t be able to consume enough calories to match your output. If you don’t train your body to tap into body fat as its fuel you won’t have that near limitless fuel source readily available during your next really long event. Speaking of consuming calories, when you run slower you can better digest the food that you take in during your training. That makes your slower runs the perfect way to try out different fuel sources to see which works better for you. How To Use Slow Runs For Recovery What I find is that for a day or two after a really hard workout my body feels sluggish and the idea of adding more workouts fills me with dread. Going out for deliberately slow runs on those days actually speeds my recovery more than just resting at home would. Those slow recovery runs get blood flow through those achy muscles and my legs feel looser at the end of the run. I normally follow a recovery run with a bit of foam rolling while my legs are warm and loose. How Running Slowly Can Add Motivation To Your Training It is not always easy to get excited about a really hard run early in the morning when you know that there will be a whole lot of suffering happening. However, by contrast, I find it much easier to be motivated to get out the door for an easy run just before dawn knowing that I will be able to catch the sunrise from along the trails at a pace where I can really enjoy the experience. Slower runs are also great for inviting friends because you are running slowly enough to be able to have a conversation while you are running and not get out of breath. How Slower Runs Prevent Mental Burnout When doing hard workouts like tempo runs or interval sessions it requires a lot of mental energy to stay focused and on top of the pace that you are pushing. This is one of the things that has led me to be mentally burned out before the end of the season. When I now go out on a slower run I sometimes deliberately ignore the numbers on my watch so that I can switch off the part of my brain that would be obsessing over pacing targets. I once went on a trail run with a friend where we started our Garmins, then put them in our hydration packs for the whole run so we removed the temptation to even check our watches. How Running Slowly Teaches Your Body To Better Deliver Oxygen The way that running slowly allows you to burn fat as a fuel source is by supplying your muscles with enough oxygen to be able to use fat for fuel. When you run slower you encourage your body to create more blood capillaries in your working muscles so that you can better deliver all this extra oxygen to the muscles that need it. Those capillaries will then be able to deliver more oxygen and flush more lactate during your next race. How Running Slower Builds Better Endurance If your goal is to run a marathon or longer then you will need to increase your endurance by ramping up your training volume. The best way to add all those extra miles to your training volume is by doing more slower runs because you can recover faster from a slower run and be ready to do another run sooner. When ultra-distance running coach Zack Bitter is getting a client up to the endurance level needed for running 100 miles, he sets his training program by time. In other words, each training run has a total time target, like 90mins for a weekday run and 3hrs for a long run over the weekend. Your pace/distance is irrelevant when following his program. Why You Should Copy The Professionals Lastly, a really good reason to run slower when you go for a training run is that that is what the professionals do. Yes, even Eluid Kipchoge does most of his training as slower runs (about 80% of his training volume is at a slower pace). Though to be honest I doubt I’d be able to keep up with a Kipchoge “slower” run for very long. In case you are now wondering how slow should your slower runs be, the good news is that I’ve written an article called How Slow Is Too Slow For Trail Running that you can find here on Trail Run Planet.