One of the things that I can still clearly remember from the days when I used to race competitive cross-country was that our coach almost never had us doing any of our training sessions at what would be our race pace. What did make things slightly different was that we would have at least one competitive race each and every single week and there would be some weeks where there would be two competitive races taking place. Therefore there was a certain amount of running that we did that was at our race pace but it never took place during any training session.
Training at your race pace is both too fast for aerobic fitness and too slow for anaerobic fitness improvement. You increase metabolic fatigue making you too tired to get results from your key interval training. A few workouts at race pace help you get a feel for your target pace, nothing more.
Let’s take a closer look at this phenomenon of not training at race pace and whether or not there are any grounds for breaking the rule at any stage during your training program for the key event that you’re training for.
Why You Should Never Train At Race Pace
What our coach used to tell us was that race pace was something that we do when we are racing. There was only one time that we would need to practice what race pace was. That was right at the start of a season so that we could get the instinctive feel for a good race pace that we can sustain for the distance that we’re competing in.
Because our cross-country season had up to two races each and every single week we would only need to be spending the time we were actually racing as our race pace training.
What we would do during training would be either running at about 30% slower than our race place for most of our training and then specific interval sprints on the track or hill repeats on a steep hill. During our slower runs, we would spend a significant amount of time on technical, uneven trails so that we could become more confident at running quickly over uneven terrain.
Or coach almost never had us train at race pace, yet we were able to produce a cross-country team that consistently won the league championship every season for my years of high school.
So if you are racing on a regular weekly basis or every second week like we were, there’s absolutely no reason to be incorporating race pace workouts into any of your training sessions.
The only time I can see the need for doing any training at race pace would be if you are training for a specific event and you are not racing that specific distance regularly at all. Then you could get some benefit from doing some of your sessions at closer to race pace.
But here again, I wouldn’t do an entire training run at race pace. I would incorporate a certain number of longer intervals at race pace somewhere during my longer runs so that my body can learn what running at my target pace feels like.
Should I Be Training At Race Pace
When it comes to executing race pace workouts, what I found most often is that I tend to incorporate them into marathon training. There are certain benefits to race pace training workouts when training for any distance but it is in marathon training with I find the greatest carryover into my ability to hit my goal time in my next marathon
The reason why targeted race pace workouts during marathon training work so well is simply because when training for a marathon you won’t be racing a marathon every second week. More to the point, you shouldn’t be racing a marathon every second week otherwise you won’t have the energy to be able to run your targeted marathon when the race day comes around.
So what I would do when doing a targeted race pace workout when I’m training for a marathon, is just take one of my long runs and incorporate two maybe even three intervals during the course of that long run where each is in the region of 15 to 20 minutes in length, and do those longer intervals at my targeted marathon pace. This is simply to give me and my body the feeling of what running at that place will be.
Should You Train At Your Marathon Pace
Physically there’s no clear benefit to training at race pace beyond a certain degree of taxing on your aerobic endurance levels and getting a clear feel for what your goal pace, or in this case marathon race pace will feel like.
What I do know is that doing most of my training substantially slower than my marathon training pace gives me a far better endurance-building workout than training at my marathon race pace.
What I have noticed, however, is that my marathon race pace tends to be the ideal slower long-run training pace that I need to use when training for shorter events like half marathons and 10 km races.
Again, here what I would say is that race pace refers to the pace of the race that you are specifically training for. Therefore, when you are training for a much shorter race, your weekly long run may very well be at the race pace of a much longer event that you’re not specifically targeting at that stage of the season. In these instances, you can get all the race pace training that you need in order to get the feel for the race pace needed in your longer event.
Does Slow Running Make You Faster
The question of whether running slowly makes you a faster runner, the answer is an undoubted yes. if you look at the elite coaches who train athletes at the Iten Performance Institute in Kenya, you’ll notice that the vast number of workouts tend to be at a pace that is really easy running by their standards.
While it’s true that the easy pace of an elite athlete is much faster than what I’m able to run, it is the concept of running slowly relative to the speed that each runner is capable of doing.
What I aim to do during a slow run is be slow enough that I only work my aerobic endurance level. That also means I am sufficiently rested to be able to cope with the more taxing workouts that come a day or two later on my training plan. The concept of a slow run is running slowly relative to my ability/fitness level and not the fitness level of an elite Kenyan athlete.
I wrote an in-depth article here on Trail Run Planet about exactly how training slowly can make you a faster runner. Take a look at it once you have finished reading this.
What Is The 80/20 Rule In Running
Back when I was racing cross-country our coach used to incorporate the 80-20 rule in our training program. We would do 80% of the total amount of running time in any week running at a pace approximately 30% slower than our normal race pace for cross country races.
Then we would do higher-intensity workouts, sprinting interval training on the track, and hill repeats at a super high-intensity level that we would not be able to sustain for long. When viewed as a portion of our total training time, these high-intensity workouts made up the 20% balance of our training during the course of any week.
This combination of doing 20% of our training time at a really high-intensity level, and 80% of our training time at a much easier level, meant that by the time we got to our next high-intensity training session we were rested enough to be able to get the absolute maximum out of that training session as opposed to carrying too much fatigue from doing our easier runs too quickly.
This is something that I’ve seen many of my friends doing. They run their easy runs too quickly and are then too tired to get the absolute maximum benefit out of the high-intensity training sessions.
Why Does Running Slower Feel Harder
I’m sure that you’ve noticed this just as much as I have myself and that is, when doing my slow runs at my really slow running pace I tend to find that these slower runs feel more difficult than what I expect them to be feeling.
What makes this feel difficult is when I’m running really slowly I have to make changes to my normal running form. When I’m running fast, my heels kick up closer to my butt during each stride simply as a way to get my foot forward quickly enough to be able to land under my center of balance. I wrote a whole article on the mechanics of the high heel-lift that you see faster runners using.
Whenever I run slowly, there is no need to kick my heel up as high when bringing my foot through to land for the next stride. Likewise, my lean angle is less. In other words, the degree to which I’m leaning forward while I’m running changes when I’m running slower. When I run slowly, I tend to run more upright as opposed to leaning forward when running will quickly.
The combination of these two changes my running technique: the change to my body angle, and the change to the amount of heel-lift changes the angle at which my foot hits the ground during each stride.
When I deliberately run slower the factors that I have just mentioned mean that I need more leg power relative to the speed that I am running as opposed to letting the biomechanics of good running form generate the speed. This slower pace creates different loads on my muscle. So even though the pace still feels easy and doesn’t tire me out, my quads feel more fatigued than I’d normally expect them to based on the amount of effort I am putting in.
But I have to say that I keep running at a slower pace because of the benefits I get in terms of improved aerobic cardiovascular fitness.