FlyingMonkey
Distinguished Member
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- Sep 5, 2011
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The one I use goes:
Zone 1: Recovery pace (a pace you can literally belt out a song without trouble)
Zone 2: Endurance pace (fluid sentences & paragraphs. A little breathy towards the upper limit.)
Zone 3: Threshold pace (a sentence here and there.)
Zone 4: Interval pace (paces you can hold for 2-5min sustained w/ jogging recoveries. maybe a word or two at times.)
Zone 5: Repetition pace (paces you can hold for 1-5min per bout w/ standing recoveries. maybe a grunt is possible.)
Mine is similar (based on Daniels):
Long (Easy) - 50-60% effort, <1/2 of my running volume is in this area year-round; 2/3 in the first three months.
Steady (Marathon) - 60-70%, about 1/5 - 1/4
Tempo (Threshold) - 80-90%, whether pure tempo or distance intervals, about 1/6 to 1/5
Intervals, hill repeats - 90-95%, about 1/8
Sprint repetitions - 95-100%, not doing any of these at the moment...
'Race pace' is actually much less specific than these and varies between 70-100% depending on the distance.
'Recovery' similarly depends on what you are recovering after! It's not necessarily easy pace or slower.
I don't measure heart rate, so I judge this based on breathing and pace. Of course this means that as I achieve certain paces regularly, I then adjust my expectations. So my current paces are a lot higher than they were when I was coming back from almost nothing in 2019.