I know what you’re thinking. You know this already. I know you know this. We’ve all heard it before.

But have you actually embodied it yet?

In my latest newsletter, I spoke about how going faster is the more fun thing to do, because it feels nicer. It allows you to get into a “flow state”, where you feel unstoppable.

Running slow on the other hand can make you feel powerless. Especially as all those other weekend warriors blow by you.

Why then run slow and sluggish, when running faster makes you feel so much better?

Because running faster on an easy run isn’t necessarily better for your long-term development.

Especially if that slightly faster pace doesn’t fit into the context of what you have coming up later in the week (like a workout or a long run the next day).

And just because you run slow on an easy run, it doesn’t make you a slow runner.

Running easy is a conscious decision. You can control how “easy” you run and how low you keep your effort and exertion. It’s a conscious decision, and a smart one, to run slower than your body’s natural gravitation.

You can gaslight yourself into thinking that you must be feeling low in energy, or that you must be beaten up. Or you can remember that easy days are supposed to be easy, and that you’re doing exactly what you should.

In ‘The secrets to feeling like a 10’, I wrote about how easy it is to gaslight yourself into thinking you have a problem. I tested this experiment on myself when writing that article, seeing how my body and brain would react if I told myself that my knee hurt. To probably no one’s surprise, my knee would start to feel weird, even though I had no real problem.

This week, I tested the theory with easy running. On an intentionally slower run, I told myself that I felt “low energy” or that I felt “beaten up” or “off”. It worked in making me feel worse about the run both during and after. But in truth, it was a conscious decision to run slower, and a good one too!

A good one, because running slow and easy doesn’t make you a slower runner. It actually makes you a better runner, because then you can handle a higher volume of miles (a key predictor of performance), and better adapt when you do intense work (like speed work or intensity on long runs).

If you keep every day somewhat hard, you can’t actually take your hard days truly hard.

You need that easy time to get greater adaptations to training, and to actually build long-term aerobic capacity.

So next time you feel like speeding up, make the conscious decision to slow down instead!

Go out with a friend, go somewhere new, think about your life, listen to a podcast, and stop taking every run so seriously.

It doesn’t make you slower than that other guy or gal who blasted their easy run today. It just makes you smarter.

Thanks for reading and see you soon!