Commentary — It’s the intensity, not the distance, stupid

I find it so interesting whenever I the discussion that follows, which I’m sure many of you have heard as well. I’ll tell someone that I’m doing a short race, say a 5K or 10K, and the person on the other end of this conversation will say the following: “why would you want to do that? You’re a marathon runner. That must be so easy for you.”

I usually just sort of nod and say something like, “well, it’s part of my training.” But in truth, I really want to put one hand on each side of their head and shake them a little and then say, “it’s not the distance, it’s how hard you run it!”

I’m thinking about this, because I ran in another 5K race this weekend and once again got these same quizzical inquiries from neighbors and friends that we’re sorting of asking ‘why bother’ with all these short races that I’m doing. But there is something important here that you runners can get from hearing me explain the answer as it really should be explained to them.

Let’s take this particular 5K race. It was small race with just 500 runners. But in that race the top 29 runners broke 16:00, which is 5:08 minutes per mile. That’s really moving. In fact, the top 74 runners completed the 5K with an average pace of less than 6:00 per mile. That’s a lot of people that were pushing really, really hard. Now, let’s factor in that the temperature was 85 degrees during the race and that ratchets things up yet another notch. For those folks, there was nothing easy happening out there in that 5K.

It all depends on what you’re putting out there. If I were to go out and do the race as as a jog or a walk, I would certainly agree that this would fall into the “easy” category and maybe “why bother” would come up. Or there might be some other reason for doing that easy effort, say running with a friend to keep them company.

What it comes down to is that the closer that we run to our physical limits, the more difficult the effort — no matter what the distance.

Coach Dean and I debated this in one of my favorite episodes of our video series. The episode was called “The Pain Episode” and in it we debate which is the more painful of two distances: the mile or the marathon. One of the questions that Dean throws out is whether any of the people that show up at my track workouts ever “look forward” to running timed one mile efforts. The answer is a big ‘no’. People hate running timed miles. Why? Because they are hard. They’re hard, because of the intense effort that is going into them, even if they only last a few minutes.

We also talk a lot about picking the right marathon pace and how all of our pace capabilities are linked. As the distance doubles, we often say, we slow down by a predicted amount. What underlies that theory is that we are pushing as hard as we can at each of those distances, meaning that we are putting out say 95% effort at 5K and 90% effort the 10K and so forth.

At each of those distances the pace is going to inflict a qualitatively different pain on you as a runner. In a short race such as the mile, the intensity (or pain) might come on earlier and last only a short period of time, but it may be extremely intense. In a marathon, the intensity may seem low for quite a long time and then — even keeping the pace the same — may really start to increase as we begin to fatigue. Then in the marathon we may get to savor that pain for quite awhile during the last 10K of the race — and maybe even a few days afterward. In both cases, when we’re running near our red-line for that particular distance, we’re going to have an experience that mirrors the level of intensity that we’re putting out.

So the next time someone quizzically asks you why you’re bothering to do a 5K or mile, you now have two choices. You can do what I often do and just tell them that its part of your training, or you can key them into a little secret. You, the runner, make the race hard by the amount that you put into it. It’s really the intensity, not the distance, that makes the difference.

Happy running!

Coach Joe English, Portland, Oregon USA
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