Slow and steady can win the race

I am a slow runner. I want to run fast, and, in fact, there are times when I think, “Wow! I’m going so fast!” Then, I glance at my pace on my running app, and, no, I’m not going fast. Those people who look so good when they run? I’m not one of those people.

But as I researched, I learned that there are reasons runners should slow down. I don’t mean slowing down during hot, humid weather, when the moisture in the air makes it difficult to breathe and the heat makes it difficult to regulate body temperature. And I don’t mean slowing down to avoid injury or aid recovery. I mean slowing down with the goal to make yourself a better and even faster runner.

“When you’re running slowly, and your injury risk is lower, you can run more often, more miles, and build up slowly,” says Claire Bartholic, a coach at Runners Connect, an online community of runners and coaches. But running slowly also allows your body to improve the energy system most essential to running: your aerobic energy system.

Your body relies on a few different energy systems to get you up and moving. For any sustained movement, it uses your aerobic energy system, meaning it creates energy with oxygen. Oxygen helps the muscles convert fat, protein and glycogen (the form of glucose stored in your liver and muscles, which your body generates from the carbohydrates you eat) into energy. If you want to be able to finish a marathon, for example, or even a 5K or a run around the block, this is the energy system you want to develop, says Bartholic, who is a competitive masters athlete herself. And to develop it, you should run at a pace where your muscles can get plenty of oxygen.

When you’re sprinting, or running so fast that you’ve reached your aerobic threshold, or, based on your level of conditioning, when your body runs out of oxygen, it switches over to another energy system — your anaerobic energy system.

Without enough oxygen, your muscles convert glycogen into energy less efficiently, and you fatigue more quickly, which eventually forces you to slow down or stop. So if all your runs are too fast, according to Bartholic, you’re not developing the power system that you need for 97 per cent of a race. “Your maximum aerobic benefit is going to be running slowly.”

Of course, “‘slow’ is highly individualized and varies a lot between people,” according to Carwyn Sharp, chief science officer at the National Strength and Conditioning Association in Colorado Springs, Colo. That means you need to calculate how slowly you need to run to maximize your aerobic capacity, or, in other words, to maximize the amount of oxygen your body can use before it switches to anaerobic energy. First, Sharp suggests this updated method for estimating your maximum heart rate (forget the old 220-minusyour-age equation).

Multiply your age by 0.7 and subtract this number from 208, which would then be your estimated heart rate maximum, or the number of beats per minute that your heart is likely to be able to beat at its fastest.

From there, you can look at your heart rate during exercise. For a slow run, most recreational runners will want to stay within about 60 to 70 per cent of their maximum heart rate, Sharp says.

Still there are obstacles to running slow, according to Jennifer Sacheck, chair of the exercise and nutrition sciences department at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. The time factor is the biggest hurdle to doing slow runs, Sacheck says.

“Physical activity has been engineered out of our day, so people have to plan their physical activities. So, planning an hour or an hour and a half is much more difficult than saying, ‘I’m going to bang out 10 minutes.’”

Sacheck suggests that one way to fit in a long, slow run might be to run to work or home after work.