Ask any runner what their easy pace is, then watch their Garmin data tell a completely different story. The research is clear: around 80% of weekly mileage should sit below the first ventilatory threshold, in a zone where your body can run aerobically for hours. Most recreational runners do more like 50% of their miles easy, wonder why they feel flat on quality days, and plateau for months. This guide breaks down exactly how to find your true easy pace, why it matters more than any other session, and how to stop accidentally running tempo when you think you're recovering.
In 2014, exercise scientist Stephen Seiler analysed elite distance runners' training distribution and found that roughly 80% of their sessions were low intensity and 20% were high intensity. The same pattern has since been confirmed across cycling, rowing, and cross-country skiing. Physiologists call this "polarised training": two distinct intensity blocks, with almost nothing in the grey zone in between.
The reason the grey zone is problematic is biochemical. Running at moderate effort — somewhere between easy and tempo — accumulates enough lactate to stress the body but not enough training stimulus to produce the adaptation of a true quality session. You are simultaneously too slow to drive VO2max improvements and too fast to fully recover. Do it repeatedly and you arrive at Tuesday's intervals with legs that never properly freshened up from Sunday's long run.
The fix is deliberately boring: slow down your easy days, push your quality days, and let the recovery do its job. Get-Split's training plans are built on this principle — Coach V2 distributes easy, moderate, and quality sessions at a 78/7/15 split that reflects real-world compliance, not textbook ideals.
Easy pace is the intensity at which your aerobic energy system is meeting essentially all of your demand — no meaningful lactate accumulation, no oxygen deficit building. More precisely, it sits below your first ventilatory threshold (VT1), the point where ventilation rate begins to rise faster than oxygen uptake. Below VT1, you can run for a very long time; above it, fatigue accumulates.
In practical heart rate terms, easy pace for most runners falls between 65–79% of max HR. On a five-zone scale (where Zone 5 is maximum sprint effort), that is Zone 1 and the lower half of Zone 2. On Jack Daniels' VDOT scale, it maps to E-pace — the slowest of the five training intensities.
Concretely, for a runner with a VDOT of 50 — roughly equivalent to a 20:00 5K — Daniels' E-pace is 5:02–5:30/km. If that runner is typically "going easy" at 4:45/km, they are running at marathon pace, not easy pace, and they are not recovering from their quality sessions the way their plan assumes.
Set a hard ceiling at 75% of your maximum heart rate (roughly 180 minus age as a starting estimate, but a recent 5K max reading is better). Run at whatever pace keeps you under that ceiling. On hot or humid days the ceiling will force you slower. That is the correct response — perceived effort is not a reliable proxy for physiological load.
Run with a partner or speak sentences out loud. If you can speak in full sentences without pausing mid-sentence for a breath, you are at or below easy pace. If you need to grab air between clauses, you have drifted into the moderate grey zone. The talk test is the most accessible check and correlates well with VT1 in controlled studies.
Enter a recent race time — 5K or 10K works best — into a VDOT calculator. The result includes your E-pace range as a specific pace band. This is objective, updates automatically when your fitness improves, and removes the guesswork entirely. The table below shows E-pace for representative VDOT values:
| VDOT | Equivalent 5K | E-pace range (per km) | Easy HR cap (max HR 185) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 40 | ~26:00 | 6:00 – 6:35 | 139 bpm |
| 45 | ~23:00 | 5:29 – 6:02 | 139 bpm |
| 50 | ~20:35 | 5:02 – 5:30 | 139 bpm |
| 55 | ~18:35 | 4:40 – 5:07 | 139 bpm |
| 60 | ~17:00 | 4:22 – 4:47 | 139 bpm |
Use Get-Split's free training pace calculator to get your exact E-pace from a recent race. The calculator also returns M, T, I, and R paces so your full week of training is calibrated in one step.
There are three common mechanisms that push easy runs into moderate territory:
The Garmin data on elite distance runners shows their easy runs are genuinely slow. Eliud Kipchoge's famous easy-day paces are frequently above 5:30/km despite his race pace being well under 3:00/km. His easy days are at 65% of max — the same ratio applies to a 50-minute 10K runner.
Easy pace is a physiological state, not a number. In summer heat, humidity, or at altitude, the pace required to stay in the easy zone drops significantly. A runner whose standard easy pace is 5:20/km may find that 6:00/km is needed on a 28-degree humid morning to stay under the HR ceiling. This is correct. Running by heart rate rather than GPS pace automatically adjusts for environmental conditions.
Get-Split's plan engine records the conditions from Garmin data and flags when a workout is likely heat-compromised. If your HR data shows the easy run was in Z3, the system marks it as a moderate-effort run for fatigue modelling rather than a full recovery day.
Easy runs are not junk miles. They deliver:
These adaptations take 8–12 weeks to manifest in race performance, which is why base-building phases feel unrewarding. The payoff is a higher ceiling for quality sessions — your intervals hurt less, your threshold pace drops, your long runs finish stronger.
Get your E-pace free on Get-Split →Check three signals after the run: average heart rate below 75% of max HR, you could hold a conversation throughout, and your average pace sits within your VDOT-derived E-pace band. If all three are true, it was easy. If HR crept into Zone 3 in the second half, the run was moderate despite feeling comfortable — which is fine occasionally but not the target for easy days.
Not quite. Recovery pace — used the day after a hard race or particularly brutal session — is even slower, sitting at the very bottom of Zone 1, typically 65–68% of max HR. Easy pace covers the full Zone 1–lower Zone 2 band. Most easy runs are not full recovery runs; they are aerobic stimulus runs that happen to be below the lactate-threshold intensity.
No. Every elite runner's easy pace looks slow relative to their race pace — the ratio is what matters. Kipchoge's easy pace at 65% of max HR is around 5:30–5:45/km. His marathon pace is 2:55/km. The gap is huge, and intentional. Your easy pace is not a reflection of your fitness ceiling; it is a tool for maximising recovery between quality sessions. The fitness shows up in your race times, not your Strava feed.
This is a cardiac drift or aerobic base issue. It often affects newer runners whose aerobic base is underdeveloped — the heart is working harder than necessary at any given pace. The fix is to genuinely walk-run to stay under the ceiling even if it feels absurd, and to accumulate aerobic volume consistently over 8–12 weeks. The pace at which you can keep your heart rate in Zone 2 will rise progressively as your aerobic base develops. Get-Split's heart rate history graph tracks this progression.
Enter a recent 5K or 10K result into Get-Split's training pace calculator. The platform returns your VDOT E-pace band as a pace target and can push structured workouts to your Garmin with that pace range loaded. Every easy-run session in a Get-Split plan has an explicit pace ceiling baked into the Garmin structured workout, so your watch alerts you if you drift above it.
Yes — and this is one of the best signals of genuine aerobic development. As your VDOT rises, your E-pace ceiling rises with it. A runner who ran easy at 6:10/km when starting a plan and who now runs the same effort at 5:45/km has improved their aerobic economy, not just gotten faster on quality days. Get-Split tracks VDOT over time so you can see this progression explicitly.