Pacing Tips for Runners
Hi there! 👋
In this month’s newsletter, we wanted to talk a little bit about pacing, since this is something many runners struggle with.
Pacing is all about gauging your effort and holding something back so that you can finish at a similar intensity as you started. It’s important both when you’re racing, and when you’re doing a structured interval session. There are several reasons for this:
Most people will start hard in a race and then slow down considerably towards the end. If you can pace things more consistently, there’s a big mental benefit (and associated performance boost!) when you begin overtaking people at the end of a race. This can keep you in a positive frame of mind, allow you to dig deeper and maintain a higher pace overall.
If you’re doing a relatively short race (i.e. less than an hour), then there’s an additional physical benefit to starting at a slower pace, rather than blasting off the start line at an effort that’s above your threshold. This is due to the ‘VO2 slow component’, or in other words, the time it takes for your aerobic system to fully switch on. At the start of the race, your aerobic system won’t be fully functioning, and starting hard will build up a lot of lactate and associated fatiguing metabolites. However, if you started more conservatively, and instead put in the same hard effort later on in the race, then the aerobic system would be able to handle this better, and you’d create less fatigue from the same intensity. The most efficient pacing strategy is either a flat pacing strategy (maintaining the same pace at the beginning as the end) or a slight negative split (slightly increasing your pace towards the end).
In an interval session, this same principle of the VO2 slow component applies. So you’ll be able to do more work in a session if you start a little more conservatively, since the first few intervals will create less fatigue. This allows you to get a bigger training stimulus overall. Also, many training adaptations are intensity-specific. So if you pace things well, you can be hitting the right intensity zone for all your efforts, rather than being a little too high initially, and then a little too low later in the session. This generally leads to higher quality training sessions.
Of course, your actual pace in terms of minutes/mile or minutes/km depends on hills, wind, terrain etc. When we speak about pacing races or intervals, we really mean moderating your effort level rather than your actual running speed.
Your effort level can be measured in a number of ways. The most basic is to pay attention to how the effort feels subjectively - how hard are you breathing, how do your legs feel and so on. We often use a scale of 1-10 to describe how hard an effort feels - referred to a rating of perceived effort or RPE. Heart rate is another common measure of running intensity.
This article explains more about RPE and heart rate and how these translate to different running intensities.
One limitation with both RPE and heart rate is that they take some time to respond to a change in intensity. When you first start running at a high intensity, this won’t immediately feel very hard or raise your heart rate by very much.
An alternative tool to help with pacing is a running power meter, which measures changes in the speed and direction of the foot (and sometimes other variables) to determine how much force is applied to the ground with each stride. This is very responsive to changes in running intensity, and is a great tool to help with pacing. The leading running power meter is the Stryd foot pod.
One of the best things you can do as a runner is to develop your own ‘internal calibration’ for how hard you’re running. This is something you can hone through training and then deploy in a race to help you get the effort level right. With practice, you should be able to predict your heart rate and running power pretty accurately from feel alone, which is a really valuable skill to use in a race, where you’re looking to tread that fine line between what’s sustainable and what’s unsustainable.
News
We have a new article on our website about distributing your weekly mileage in order to optimise fitness improvements and minimise injury. You can read it here.
We’ve also begun to make some pre-built training plans available through TrainingPeaks. Our first plan is a 12-week program geared towards a 50km trail or fell race. We will be making more plans available over the coming weeks. Drop us an email if there’s a particular plan you’d like us to create. You can access the plans as they are uploaded from this page.
That’s it for this month! If you’re relatively new to the mailing list and want to see previous instalments, then you can do so here.
We really hope you’ve found this email useful. Wishing you all the best and happy running until next month!
Emma & Tom