When Jim first reached out to me, he was running over 60 miles most weeks… and not seeing any progress.
He thought he had to run more to see results.
But that’s not always true.
In order to run all those miles and avoid injury, he was running them at a snail’s pace.
In other words, he’d been training his body to become slower…
For years.
So I asked Jim to try the opposite of what he’d tried in the past.
I asked him to run less.
And spend some of that lower mileage at a faster pace.
To be clear, we didn’t do a “complete overhaul” to his training.
We just swapped a few of his easier miles for something a bit harder.
Strides and surges were the entry point – a few harder pushes a couple times a week – and they started to deliver results almost immediately.
Eventually, we added some actual speed workouts where he was pushing faster paces for intervals.
Sure enough, Jim started to get faster.
Because of course he did.
If you constantly train your body to go slow…
It’s gonna get really good at going slow.
If you want to get faster, then you have to train faster.
More mileage can improve your speed, but that’s only going to work to a point – yet far too many people get caught in the trap of weekly numbers and completely forget what they’re actually trying to do.
Dropping some slower miles in favor of higher intensity will help you get faster.
Now I recognize that might not matter to you.
If you enjoy running a lot of miles every week and don’t really care about getting faster, then ignore this post and do your thing.
But if you want to be a faster runner, then it might be time to pick up the pace a bit in training.
(Safely, of course).