I spent the first few years of my distance running life chasing round numbers on my watch. 10k/6 mile whatever runs, 3 mile (5k) get a good heavy breathing going on my local neighbourhood root. And the whole time I thought I was training, I really wasn’t. I think I was just collecting numbers that sounded good when someone asked about my weekend.
Then I found Phil Maffetone and his MAF heart rate training protocol, which kind of forces you to think in minutes instead of miles. That switch was a huge “aha” for me. Once the distance faded away into something I saw at the end of a run, I could actually feel what each run was doing to my body. Wild concept, I know.
So yeah, I’m gonna say this little soft hack out loud: For most runners, most of the year, distance based training is probably making you worse.
Let me go a bit more down the run science rabbit hole (this is more to do with your brain!).
What Your Brain Is Actually Doing Out There
There’s a study by Faulkner and crew where they had runners do a 6k (4 mile) run with no feedback at all.
No watch… no splits… no nothing.
Those runners ran slower than the ones who could see their pace and distance. When runners were completely blinded to both elapsed time and distance, they took a more cautious approach to pacing to prevent premature fatigue.
Sounds like a dope win for the distance focused folks, right? Naw, it’s actually a trap.
That study tells you something kind of weird/cool: The second your brain knows the endpoint, it stops training and starts racing. It runs little background calculations the whole time like:
- How much is left?
- How hard can I push?
- When can I open the tank?
You think you’re doing an easy run but your nervous system thinks you’re managing a 10k hard effort.
That’s fine on race day and TBH, that’s the whole point of race day. But you’re doing it on a Tuesday in February for no reason, and it’s undoing all that base you laid down from December.
The Base To Race Shift
Here’s how I coach it now – I call it the Base To Race Shift and it’s stupid simple to do (if you’re playing at home, take this now!).
Early season is all time based running. Think of these types of runs:
- 45 minute easy zone 2
- 70 minute long zone 1 with a 10 min fast zone 3 finish at the end
- Even Vo2 Max intervals with 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off x10 with full 3 min rest in between done three times total.
No miles, and no kilometers as we aren’t letting our watch tell us what kind of day it is (that’s what we let our body do).
And it’s way easier to compare the two. A 45 minute easy trail run and a 45 minute elliptical session are basically the same training stress. And you stop pretending the off-road hilly trail route that you love “doesn’t count” because it was only 4k but still took you 36 minutes to complete.
Twelve to sixteen weeks out from the race (less for shorter stuff) I bring distance back, but slowly. You need it now because you’re training to run a race that is a specific number at a specific pace and there’s no cheating that (maybe one day my pipe dream of time based races can become a reality… one day!).
Plus your watch might lie or die on race day and you’ll need to pace by feel anyway. But that’s the back half of the year and not the whole year.
The Dare For You
Try this right now if you’re doubting distance based training now – Go and delete the distance field from your watch face. Like I’m for real!! Do it. Replace it with elapsed time and heart rate and nothing else. Run that way for 30 days.
You’re gonna hate it for about a few days but then something weird happens. You start running by feel and your easy days finally get easy, your hard days get hard and your body wakes up.
“The goal is the duration, not the final distance on your watch.” — Running With MB
