If you’ve worked with me for any bit of time, you may have seen a fancy word in your training log come up more times than just about anything else. The word?

“Easy run.”

_{I bet you thought I was going to say “strides”! I’m getting there!}

The problem that most runners have – like 99% of runners, is that they run too fast and too hard for the majority of their “easy runs”. This is a particular problem in beginners, where for whatever reason they always think every run has to completely gas them out from being able to start their engine the next day.

If you’re always running hard, you’re never actually progressing.

We can have a few hard days a week, mainly a workout focused on building a specific engine within your repertoire; and a long-run focused on building endurance for long-distance events.

But a cycle where every single day is hard leaves no room for progression, and much more margin for error and injury.

Because here is one of the magic secrets of running: Every time you run, whether it be slow or fast, easy or hard, you are putting a significant stress on your body.

Even easy running is already a good amount of stress to build fitness and aerobic capacity. Add in “hard” and you’re now able to reach the higher end of your full potential and the upper limits of your racing capabilities.

But you’re also increasing the risk that you won’t actually be able to properly recover from that work.

Especially, if the previous day was actually too hard.

Without the easy (which again already puts your body under stress), you can never reach the higher limits of what you might be able to achieve on your harder days.

Just as an example in my own week, yesterday I did a high-intense uphill threshold workout from the bottom of a road literally called “Mountain Highway”, climbing (but not rock climbing) 700-metres in 8-kilometres.

The goal was to stay in my “threshold” for the eight minute uphill efforts – which for me is around high 170s to low 180s in HR.

If I go higher than that, it’s unsustainable to continue at that same effort for 8-minutes. If I go lower, I’m not necessarily pushing as hard enough as I can theoretically go to get my ceiling up. So for 8-minutes, 4 different times, I stayed at around HR 179, never really going too much higher or too much lower. Pretty cool eh?

But the point is: Do you think I could do that again today?

NO!

I mean I could. But I wouldn’t be able to even reach the 180s in heart-rate, let alone run that fast uphill. If I did, I’d be risking some kind of severe injury, whilst not even getting the return on investments.

Because the return on the investments is in the recovery from that effort. It’s in the easy running that follows, building muscular capacity on tired legs in a safe way.

But there is one thing that I could theoretically do today that wouldn’t hinder my recovery.

STRIDES. Namely, hill strides.

It wouldn’t be advisable or wise, but it would be better than any other strategy for pushing “hard” again today.

Strides are that one thing you can do in your training that is both hard AND sustainable.

You can do strides just about everyday if you want (although I wouldn’t recommend the day or two after a workout or race). This is because strides never actually break down your body in the same way that longer efforts do (they don’t develop lactic acid). You reach close to your top end speed for a blimp in time, and then it’s over. Then you jog to recover, let your heart-rate down and then go again.

Doing 4-6 of these 2-3x per week, with a mix of flat and hill strides, is the #1 thing you can do to strengthen your efficiency, top-end speed, and power all at the same time. Again:

✅ The demand on your body is significantly lower.
✅ The echelon you can reach is significantly higher.

You practice good form, and high cadence leg turnover, without the downsides of muscular fatigue and lactic acid build-up.

Then you might be asking, well then why don’t you have us do workouts like that? Say 16 x 30s, rather than just 4 x 30s to warm-up for the workout?

Because the distances that we are running don’t require that much top-end speed.

We need just a little bit to go a long way. Those 4x30s efforts that you do 2-3 times per week are the #1 thing that is helping you run faster times than you thought you were capable of in your workouts. Subsequently, that can translate over to your races so long as you play things smart.

If you want to join a track club and run a mile PR, this is how we would get you there. Through shorter sprint workouts.

But for a 50K or 50-Mile, what you actually need to do is build up the capacity to handle that speed and the muscular demand of things like uphill and downhill, for longer periods of time. 50K+ races are typically not won and lost in the final 400m sprint.

They are won and lost in the downhills, primarily, and occasionally with moves being made on uphills.

That is the reason why about 75% of the work you do on workouts for mountainous races is uphill, with a downhill recovery jog (uphill speed is also just more sustainable from a muscular demand perspective than flat or downhill, and can push your HR higher, thus increasing VO₂ max faster).

It’s also one of many reasons why we do a ton of hill strides.

We’re building the ease at which you can run those things late on in your race when it starts to get tough. The goal isn’t to train you to run up the mountain the fastest. It’s to be able to handle the demand of that mountain at hour 3, 4, 5, etc., of your race.

So that is what workouts are for, building that muscular capacity over longer periods of time.

Now add in the strides, and we can get you fitter and faster for being able to do those longer intervals better.

You can then carry over that speed at lower heart-rates to workouts. You can then carry that over to races.

If we do them after easy runs (where the body has already undergone sustainable stress), we can more sustainably add in that high efficiency turnover and fast demand on tired legs. We can also use it as a “check-in” for the speed work we’re about to do.

That’s one of the reasons why we schedule them…

✅ Before races.
✅ Before workouts.
✅ As the first bit of speed work post-race.

So while I don’t think strides are anyone’s favourite thing when it comes to running, there are few things that can give you more bang for your buck from a training and physiology perspective, especially in helping you reach that echelon you have for yourself faster.

So with your strides, keep them controlled, keep them smooth, keep them at a 9, and watch the magic that unfolds in your future workouts and races.

Thanks for reading and see you soon!