Sometimes I fear my running career has plateaued. Well, not my career, but my pace. I lace up four or five times a week, push hard enough to feel pleasantly wrecked, watch my mileage climb steadily upward, and then—after months of honest effort—still find myself running the exact same pace I was running a year ago. It's clear that in order to get faster, effort alone isn't enough.
I see a lot of competing advice from "runfluencers" online, usually focused solely on everyone's favorite workout: Zone 2 cardio (and all the ambiguity that entails). However, Zone 2 alone isn't going to help you break through your plateau. The best way to improve your running can be boiled down like this: Slow down on your easy days, and go harder on your hard days. But understanding why requires a short detour into how your aerobic system actually works.
“Zone 2” is a term drawn from the five-zone system of heart-rate training. For runners specifically, this zone translates to “easy pace” or “long slow distance pace.” The tricky thing is that for most recreational runners, this pace is far slower than it feels like it should be.
If your mission is simply to get some cardio done, you shouldn't waste your time obsessing over zone 2 versus zone 3 workouts. However, if you're trying to run faster, you do need to first learn how to run slower. What happens at a truly easy, low-intensity effort is you can lay the aerobic infrastructure that eventually makes everything faster.
How to train to run faster
Running economy—how efficiently your body uses oxygen at a given pace—is one of the strongest predictors of performance. I spent the last month testing and reviewing the Garmin Forerunner 970, and next month I'm adding the HRM-600 chest strap in order to properly test the "running economy" metric. Here are the workouts I'll be doing to try to improve my running economy:
Interval training. This forces your cardiovascular system to operate near its ceiling. Short, sharp intervals—think 400 to 1,200-meter repeats at a pace faster than your current 5K—improve VO2 max and reinforce good form under fatigue. These should feel genuinely difficult, and as such, they require real recovery. One interval workout a week is a solid start.
Strides or short accelerations. Strides are a great way to train your turnover speed. Adding four to six strides after an easy run, two or three times per week, is a low-risk, high-return habit to improve running form and eventually speed.
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It's true that around 80% of your runs should feel easy enough to talk in full sentences. But at least once a week, you should be pushing yourself, such as with threshold work or interval training. Add mileage gradually and only when the easy days actually feel easy. For our purposes here, intensity is the point, not quantity. Go truly easy when easy is what's called for, and truly hard when the session demands it.
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