"How was your run?" is a question with a very predictable answer. Nine times out of ten it comes back as a number. "Yeah, decent. 24:12."
That answer is the tell. Not because the time is irrelevant, but because it is the only measure available when the run was not asked to do anything in particular.
BLUF: a good run is one that did the job it was set. Pace is one way of judging that, for some sessions. For most of them, it tells you very little.
The Saturday morning example
You know the pattern, because most of us have lived it.
Same parkrun, same course, roughly the same effort, most Saturdays. Then a couple of other runs in the week, at whatever pace feels normal. Every one of them gets filed as good or bad depending on how the watch compares to last time.
It is enjoyable, it is social, and it is genuinely good for you. I am not about to tell anyone to stop doing parkrun. But as a training plan, it has a ceiling, and you meet it faster than you would think.
Coaches who watch this closely report the same thing: run it hard every week and any chance of improving that course PB tends to disappear after about six to eight weeks, with people starting to describe themselves as stale.
Why it stops working
Your body adapts to what you repeatedly ask of it. Ask it the same question every week and it very sensibly stops changing the answer. It is already good enough at that exact task.
There is a second problem underneath the first. When every run sits at roughly the same moderate effort, you end up in what coaches call the comfortable middle: too hard to recover from properly, too easy to force a real adaptation.
So, what that means is: you accumulate fatigue without accumulating fitness. Which is a fairly miserable trade.
The alternative is well studied. Distributing training so that most of it is genuinely easy and a smaller portion is genuinely hard, roughly the 80/20 split popularised by Stephen Seiler's work, consistently outperforms training that clusters in the middle. In recreational runners specifically, a polarised approach produced better gains in VO2max and lactate threshold than threshold-focused training over a ten-week block.
We covered that intensity picture properly in the piece on Zone 2. This one is about the layer above it: what each individual session is actually for.
Give every run a job
Here is the shift, and it is a small one. Before you go out, decide what the run is for. Then judge it on that, not on the clock.
Most sessions fall into one of four jobs:
- Easy running. The job is aerobic development and recovery. Judged on: did it stay genuinely easy? If you finished it tired, you failed it, however good the pace looked.
- Long running. The job is time on feet and fatigue resistance. Judged on: did you cover the duration, and were the last 20 minutes controlled rather than a survival exercise?
- Threshold or tempo. The job is raising the effort you can hold for a long time. Judged on: did you hold the target effort evenly, and could you have done a little more?
- Intervals. The job is a hard, specific stimulus. Judged on: were the reps consistent from first to last? A session that starts fast and falls apart is a worse session than one held steady, even if rep one was quicker.
Notice how few of those are actually judged by pace. Consistency, control and effort do most of the work.
Then change it over time
Giving each run a job fixes your week. Periodisation fixes your year.
All it means is that the plan deliberately changes: volume, intensity and specificity get manipulated in blocks rather than left the same. A typical block runs three to eight weeks with one clear emphasis, builds progressively, then eases off before the next one starts.
For example: a few weeks building easy volume, then a block where the hard sessions get longer at threshold, then a sharper block closer to a race, with a lighter week folded in regularly so the work actually lands.
That is the bit the Saturday-only approach can never do. Same distance, same effort, same week, forever, is not a plan. It is a habit. A good habit, but still a habit.
How to start on Monday
Here's what to do:
- Name the job before you leave the house. Easy, long, threshold or intervals. One of the four. If you cannot name it, make it easy.
- Judge the session on its own terms. Write one line afterwards about whether it did its job. That habit alone changes how you train.
- Use effort, not pace, as your main dial. Our RPE guide covers how a felt 1 to 10 maps onto real training zones, and why effort holds up on hot days, hilly routes and tired legs when pace does not.
- Anchor the zones to something. Set your heart rate zones with the Heart Rate Zones calculator, and use the Pace & Speed calculator when you need to turn a target into actual splits.
- Keep racing parkrun, just not every week. Race it properly once every three or four weeks and let the others be easy runs or a controlled tempo. When you do race it, the Race Pace Planner will give you the splits to hold.
The bottom line
Pace is a result. It is not a purpose, and it is a poor judge of most sessions.
Give every run a job, judge it on whether it did that job, and let the jobs change across the weeks and months. Do that and the pace looks after itself, which is a far nicer way round than chasing it every Saturday.
The key takeaway is: progress comes from doing different things, done deliberately. Not from doing the same thing harder.
If you are not sure what your runs are currently for, don't sit on it, let me know.