The nature of someone who runs is generally going to lean towards challenging themselves, and striving for improvement. As a result of this, I often see people training far too hard and/or too fast in ways that harm them. I don’t have any delusions that this blog will change that, but hopefully if you’re someone who tends to push it a bit too much, reading this might at least give you food for thought.
What do I mean by running too fast?
This covers a whole range, and will depend, as ever, on context as well, but common issues I see are running warm-ups and cool downs at marathon pace or faster, not easing off enough during recoveries in interval sessions and running too quickly during work intervals.
Let’s explore each of these.
Warm-ups and cool downs
These serve two very different purposes of course, but generally they should be at a similar pace. There are sessions which aim to mimic racing conditions more closely, especially for long runs where a “fast finish” session can replicate running hard towards the end of the marathon. More often than not though, there should be a noticeable increase in pace after your warm-up and significant reduction of pace into your cool down.
To run too fast in the warm-up means your body isn’t prepared. Your risk of injury will be much higher, you’ll move less well meaning a negative impact on your running style, and it’ll feel much tougher which can easily knock your confidence.
Cool downs on the other hand, are designed to help your body return to a normal state of function, breaking down lactate, and beginning the repair process. You might not feel any downsides of running this too fast, but they’re there. Again, the point about movement comes into play, with fast running on tired legs being one ingredient in the recipe for injury.
One other caveat applies to runners taking 4 hours or more for the marathon. That’s not a definite and fixed number, but often I’ve found that runners around this pace and beyond are limited more by endurance due to the volume of training, rather than an inability to run faster. They regularly find marathon pace very comfortable, and only find it challenging over longer distances. Where a 3 hour marathon runner would likely find marathon pace tough and certainly wouldn’t warm up at that pace, a 4+ hour marathoner could well go right out the door at their marathon pace, or very close, with little difficulty.
Running efforts too hard.
This is by far the most common one I see. 71% of respondents to a survey I recently created, said they run effort sessions at faster than race pace. If you’re consistently running faster than race pace in your effort sessions, it means one of two things.
- Your racing isn’t (relatively) very good for some reason (e.g. your pacing isn’t right, mental toughness lets you down, strength needs improvement or nutrition is holding you back).
- You’re running too fast and should slow down.
I’ll be honest, there may well be an element of the first answer involved, but I’d generally say the impact of competition (in person and via Strava etc.) is the larger factor, as can be seen when so many people train regularly in their carbon plated shoes.
The same survey I mentioned earlier, gave people the opportunity to make suggestions, one of the more common of which was the desire to run more sessions at 5k pace or faster. The problem is, there’s only so much benefit that extra top end speed will give you. For a 5k, those sessions are helpful, but more often than not, the more important training sessions will be those that get you running at your target paces for longer, either through longer repetitions or more repetitions.
If people are already running faster than they should be, then adding sub 5k pace work will only exaggerate that, making them quicker, but minimally more able to endure. As distance runners we need to prioritise duration over pace, for the most part..
Recoveries too fast.
Finally we come to not slowing down enough in “easy run” or jog recovery sections of effort sessions. Jog recoveries can be used during longer effort sessions in the later stages of training for 10k to half marathons, or alongside short, fast reps when prepping for a marathon.
No matter which you’re going for, the work effort is your main priority, so slowing down appropriately during your recoveries is key to ensuring you can hold pace, or rather have the required pace feel appropriately difficult. You can run recoveries too fast and still hold the work pace, but doing so will be excessively challenging, meaning the risk of injury or over-training is higher. Repeat this over the course of a 8-12 week plan and you may well come across issues.
More often than not though, I see people running too fast during recoveries, then in the second half of the session they can no longer keep up with the work pace.
The other side of this coin is easy runs that are far too fast. There isn’t a 100% correct idea, but a usual guide is marathon pace plus 45-60 secs/mile, or 5k pace plus 2 minutes/mile. These may or may not be that close to each other, but the fact remains that many people run easy runs too fast as well. Whether we’re aware of it or not, this has a negative impact on our harder sessions, again making those harder than they should be or meaning we don’t get to hit the correct paces/efforts.
As you can see, running too fast at various times of training sessions can create problems in different ways. It isn’t always a negative, since you only know what you’re capable of until you try it, but as a general rule of thumb, don’t try and push faster than you feel you should/could. Plan sessions and paces carefully, then work as closely to that as possible.
Written by Kyle Brooks, Running Coach based in Norwich, Norfolk