I Thought Running Faster Meant I Was Getting Better

 When I first started running regularly, I thought getting better at running meant one thing: running faster.

It seemed logical.

If I could run the same distance faster than before, I must be getting better at running. And if I wanted to improve my cardiovascular fitness, I thought I needed to push myself.

So that’s what I did.

At first, I had no choice but to run slowly

When I was just starting out, I couldn’t run very fast anyway.

One of my early runs was 2.77 miles in a little over 37 minutes, at an average pace of 13:24 per mile. My average heart rate was 147 bpm.

I wasn’t trying to follow an easy-running plan. I wasn’t thinking about Zone 1, Zone 2, or aerobic training.

I was simply running at a pace I could manage.

One of my early runs — 2.77 miles at 13:24/mi.

As I became more comfortable with running, though, I started getting faster.

And that felt like progress.

So naturally, I wanted to keep going faster.

Eventually, a normal one-hour run could turn into something very different. One of my runs was 6.24 miles in 1:02:44, at an average pace of 10:03 per mile.

My average heart rate was 161 bpm.

At the time, I didn’t look at that and think I was running too hard.

I looked at the faster pace and thought I was improving.

Later, I was running much faster — but many of my runs had become hard efforts.

Running started to feel hard all the time

The problem was that almost every run started feeling difficult.

I was breathing hard much of the time. After running, my knees, calves, and the bottoms of my feet often felt tired.

Nothing was really painful. It was more like my body was constantly carrying fatigue from running.

What confused me even more was that I didn’t feel like my cardiovascular fitness was improving as much as I expected.

I was running regularly. I was pushing myself. Most of my runs already felt hard.

Shouldn’t running be getting easier?

Instead, it seemed like every run was something I had to get through.

That was the first time I started wondering whether the way I was training made sense.

My first 10K made me think about it more seriously

On January 3, 2026, I ran my first 10K race.

My time was better than what I normally ran in training, and I was happy about that.

But toward the end of the race, I started feeling slightly nauseous and dizzy.

I don’t know exactly what caused those symptoms, and I wouldn’t say that my training was necessarily the reason.

But the experience made me take the question more seriously.

Something about the way I had been running didn’t feel right.

I had assumed that pushing harder would eventually make running easier. Instead, I was still struggling through many of my regular runs.

So I started reading more about running and watching videos about how runners actually train.

That was when I started learning about easy running, slow jogging, and heart-rate zones, including Zone 2.

And I realized I had misunderstood something pretty basic.

Not every run was supposed to be hard.

Knowing I should slow down wasn’t enough

Learning about easy running didn’t immediately change the way I ran.

For a while, I would start slowly.

Then, once I warmed up and felt good, I would gradually pick up the pace. Somewhere around the halfway point, the run would become harder.

Near the end, I would often push again.

I knew I was supposed to run easier, but I still had the feeling that if I had enough energy to run faster, I probably should.

So I might have started with the intention of doing an easy run, but I often didn’t finish with one.

Knowing I needed to slow down and actually allowing myself to stay slow for an entire run turned out to be two different things.

Saturday became my slow-running day

Saturday mornings had already become my longest running time of the week.

I would usually run for an hour or more.

Eventually, I decided that if there was one run I was going to keep slow, it would be my Saturday long run.

Instead of worrying about pace or distance, I started treating it as a slow, easy run and focused on keeping the effort comfortable for the entire time.

That also changed something else about how I trained.

Before, I usually thought about running in terms of distance.

How many miles was I going to run today?

With these slower Saturday runs, I started thinking more about time.

Instead of deciding that I needed to cover a certain distance, I might decide to run easily for an hour.

The goal wasn’t to see how far I could get in that hour.

The goal was to keep the effort manageable for the whole hour.

That was a surprisingly difficult adjustment at first.

Slower running started showing me a different kind of progress

Over time, I began noticing something interesting.

I could run for the same amount of time and gradually cover a little more distance. At the same time, my heart rate seemed to be getting a little lower.

I can’t say that slower running alone caused those changes. I was also simply getting more used to running.

But I could tell that running for an hour no longer felt as difficult as it once did.

These days, an hour of easy running feels pretty manageable.

It usually takes a run of around 90 minutes or longer before I really start feeling like I’m doing a long run.

A recent slow Saturday run — 7 miles in about 92 minutes at an average heart rate of 137 bpm.

This still isn’t quite where I want my slow runs to be. I’m working toward being able to run this kind of effort at around 130 bpm or lower. But compared with how I used to run, I can already see progress.

That has changed the way I think about improvement.

When I started, progress meant running faster.

If yesterday’s pace was 11:00 per mile and today’s was 10:30, then 10:30 seemed like the better run.

Now I look at it differently.

Being able to run for the same amount of time at an easier effort can also be progress.

Running a little farther at a similar effort can be progress.

Finishing a run without feeling completely exhausted can be progress too.

I still want to run faster

None of this means I’ve stopped caring about pace.

I still want to improve. I still enjoy running faster sometimes, and I still like seeing what I can do in a race.

I’ve just stopped thinking that I need to prove that I’m getting better on every run.

Some runs can be hard.

Others don’t need to be.

For me, learning to slow down wasn’t really about becoming a slower runner.

It was about learning that running harder and training better aren’t always the same thing.

And maybe the biggest change is this:

I used to think getting better meant being able to run faster.

Now I know that learning when to slow down is part of getting better too.