The Art of Running by Feel
In the age of data, numbers, wearables, and tracking to no end, running by feel has become a lost art.
Specific paces, distances, and times are often prescribed by coaches to communicate training (i.e. a 5 mile tempo at 5:20/mile pace). This method is precise, and avoids miscommunication between athletes and coaches. This, in itself, isn’t a bad thing. But to a certain point, this can inhibit runners’ ability to gauge what their body is telling them. When athletes listen to their body, they’re more likely to train efficiently and see improvement because they are optimizing both training stress, and recovery.
What is “Running by Feel”
We’ll start with my definition of running by feel. With today’s run technology and training trends, running by feel means paying more attention to your body than to the numbers shown on your watch. The numbers should tell us what we did, not what to do. It means noticing how your body responds to training, and being able to make intuitive training decisions based on that feedback.
Take three examples:
On pulling back: I prescribe an athlete an 8 mile easy run. That athlete got a poor night of sleep and is feeling a head cold come on. The runner who “runs by feel” would head out for the run, and cut the mileage if their body isn’t feeling well. They understand the purpose of the days’ training, and can balance this with the feelings they are experiencing.
On pushing forward: I prescribe an athlete 4 days completely off after a race. This runner knows that their body recovers well after doing easy jogs in the days following a hard effort. So they communicate this insight with me, and we adapt the plan to 2 days of easy running, and 2 days off.
On paying attention to your mind and body: I prescribe a one week break following the conclusion of a training block. The athlete notices when coming back from the break that they still feel a bit unmotivated to run, and their body feels fatigued still. They communicate this with me, and we decide to extend their break another week and write a more gradual buildup into their next race to allow for more space mentally to check back into training.
These are just a few examples of how athletes can effectively use the feelings they are experiencing to guide their training. The answer isn’t always to pull back, sometimes it’s to push forward too. But making these decisions is much easier and more effective when taken in context to how one is feeling.
Running by feel occurs in two parts. First, you truly listen to what your body is telling you. To start this, you have to be in tune with how you usually feel, what feeling good actually feels like, and what feeling poor feels like. This noticing is effective to employ both on the run and outside of the run. Second, those conclusions are turned into actions. Sometimes, this may be a decision to push harder, other times it might be the decision to stop or slow down. There isn’t always a right answer, but making decisions informed by what your body is telling you is a great way to train consistently and efficiently.
Here is a list of questions that can facilitate this:
- Do your legs feel bouncy or flat?
- Are there any point-soreness you feel?
- How are you breathing? Deep/shallow, heavy/light?
- Do you feel coordinated/in rhythm?
- Are you excited to train?
Along with paying attention to how you feel, you must also learn to run appropriate efforts for specific workouts. Learning what VO2, lactate threshold, sub threshold, and race specific efforts feel like is crucial to executing workouts (and races). There is a time and place for focusing on running specific speeds during workouts, however far more workouts should emphasize running the correct effort. Legendary coach Renato Canova calls this “studying the effort.” This keeps us from pressing to hit specific paces and times that we arbitrarily assign value to. Focusing on executing the correct effort during workouts gives us the assignment to tap into the feeling and the rhythm, which brings you into your own body. This is ultimately what is relied on in races, so practicing and emphasizing effort teaches valuable race skills.
Practical Takeaways
So how can feeling and effort be emphasized in training? One simple way is to start with easy runs. One of the main purposes of easy runs is to recover your legs for the next hard training session. Easy runs allow time to check in with how your body and mind are feeling and provide the flexibility to adjust as needed. Allow your legs to run whatever pace feels “easy,” and give yourself a range of duration or miles to hit. See how long you can go without checking what pace you are running, or even delete the “lap pace” value from your watch screen (or as crazy as this may sound, run with no watch!). Some days it may feel better to run quicker, rather than running slow, while other days it may feel best to truly jog. As long as it is “easy” to you, you are doing what you need.
Another way to emphasize feeling and effort is to let go of times during some workouts. Instead of checking splits mid-rep, on every rep, run what you perceive the right effort to be and see what your time is at the end of the rep. As you gain experience, and do more workouts at specific intensities, you will become more skilled at this. This is a good trick to implement every now and then to see how your effort is matching up with speed. It will help you learn what certain paces feel like, which will likely lead to better in-race skills.
How I Encourage Running by Feel
As a coach, I emphasize feeling and effort with my runners by prescribing efforts in workouts, in addition to times/paces, and sometimes only prescribing effort. There are certain days where splits and paces are more important, but for the most part, I encourage athletes to learn the effort of different training intensities. For example, when writing an 8-mile sub-threshold run for an athlete, I will include a rough pace range, (this may be 5:30-5:50 pace for a 14:30 5k athlete) but emphasize how the workout should feel. I will describe a sub-threshold workout to be “comfortably hard,” “steady without pressing,” or “you should be able to talk in short sentences.” Then, I’ll allow space to describe the feeling of the workout after the fact in their training log or athlete-to-coach communications. We will discuss what we learned, and use these insights to inform a future sub-threshold session. This shift in emphasis away from the numbers helps bring an athlete into their own body during a session, they become more intuitive, and have the opportunity to take more ownership in their training.
Conclusion
As with everything, there is no one size fits all solution to running by feel and emphasizing effort. It is important to consider these principles and to find ways to challenge yourself to practice them more. Running with less emphasis on time and pace, and more on effort and feel, can facilitate less stress and burnout, greater insights into your own training, more consistency, more personalisation, and overall more enjoyable training cycles.
