Easy pace is lying to you.
- Emma O'Toole
- Dec 21, 2025
- 5 min read
If you’re a runner or cyclist over 30, Christmas can turn training into a noisy mess: disrupted sleep, more stress, different routines, travel, and indoor/outdoor changes. That’s exactly why “easy” sessions should be guided by effort, not a rigid pace or power number. Pace and watts don’t adjust for hills, wind, terrain, fatigue, stress, or poor sleep, but your body does. In this article, you’ll learn why training by effort protects recovery, keeps your easy days truly easy, improves consistency, and helps you hit your key workouts with better quality.
Strength training for runners and cyclists over 30 is a game-changer for performance, resilience, and long-term health.
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TRAINING BREAKDOWN
"Power and pace targets don’t care if you slept badly, or are under a tonne of stress at work, but your body does."
By Emma O'Toole
Hello!
With Christmas just around the corner, training can start to feel a bit… noisy:
Different food.
Different routines.
Different bedtimes.
Maybe a glass of wine.
Maybe one too many mince pies.
And that’s exactly why today I want to talk about easy effort, not easy pace or easy power.
You’ll hear these sessions called lots of things: Easy, steady, comfortable, Zone 2, aerobic…
There’s no real right or wrong with what you call it. For mainstream running and cycling “easy” has been a default, but let’s not forget that often our “easy” workouts are still around 3x our resting heart rate. So it’s not “easy”, like feet up on the couch watching home alone, "easy”. For example, a runner’s “easy” run is 135bpm and their resting heart rate is 45bpm, that’s 3x their resting heart rate! This is why the wording can be a little off-putting, especially for those newer to running and cycling who think they are “doing it wrong” because it doesn’t feel “easy”.
Whatever you call it doesn’t matter too much here, but what does matter is that we use effort to guide the intensity of your longer or base sessions, not pace, watts, or what your watch says you “should” be doing.
Why effort matters:
For your longer runs/rides, or your base sessions in the week, using effort instead of a target pace or power is something I employ with most of the athletes I coach. This is because your body is responding to far more than just training stress.
What may feel “easy” one day, could feel “hard” the next and that’s not because you have lost fitness, that’s because your body is in a different state (check out the failed vo2 max session I did a few weeks back which showcased this exact point here).
That’s even more potent at this time of year, where for many of us our usual routine is turned inside out.
If you rigidly chase pace or power targets on sessions that are meant to be easy, one of two things usually happens:
You push harder than you should to “hit the numbers”.
You finish the session feeling more fatigued than expected.
Strength training follows the same rule: if you chase load instead of effort on days meant to support your training, you don’t get stronger, you just get more tired. This is why we use RPE, or the Reps in Reserve Scale to answer the question: how heavy should I lift?
These are are common mistakes I see regularly, particularly around Christmas, and these matter, because the purpose of easy sessions is simple:
→ Support your recovery.
→ Build your aerobic capacity.
→ Leave you fresh enough to train well again.
The goal isn’t to squeeze more out of easy days; the goal is to protect the quality of your key sessions.
The data trap
Now another thing that I often see is runners and cyclists basing their data off power targets set from an FTP test done 6 months ago, or pace targets taken from a race 6 months ago.
You’re effectively basing your workouts off of out-of-date data that might not reflect where your body is today, especially if 6 months ago your training looked different, your sleep was better and general life stress lower.
Power and pace targets don’t care if you slept badly, or are under a tonne of stress at work, but your body does.
On top of this, there are days when training strictly to numbers does the opposite of what you want. You might feel great, but hold back unnecessarily because the watch says “easy”. Or you might feel tired, but push too hard because the pace or watts say you should.
Training by effort allows you to work with your body instead of against it.
Pace, average speed, or power targets don’t account for external factors that change how hard the work actually feels. For example, running a 10-minute mile on the flat is very different to trying to hold that same pace running uphill.
Training by effort automatically accounts and adjusts to:
Hills
Wind
Terrain
Cold weather
Indoor vs outdoor differences
How to gauge “easy” effort
A heart rate monitor, ideally a chest strap or an arm strap, hugely helps. However, only if your zones are accurate, (see the end of this blog post for a free ebook on how to set up your training zones).
Heart rate is a powerful tool as it is influenced by:
Sleep (or lack of it)
Nutrition (yes, festive food)
Hydration
Stress
Alcohol
Travel
Climate
General life load
It also gives you something to focus on rather than an arbitrary effort level score out of 10, which can feel hard to gauge, especially for those with less experience with endurance sports. Judging effort isn’t something you’re instantly good at, it’s a skill; and like any skill, it improves with: experience, aerobic fitness, body awareness and practice.
So this is why I recommend combining data and feel (the objective and the subjective).
During the session, ask yourself these 4 questions:
Does this feel manageable?
Can I breathe comfortably?
Is the effort steady, or creeping up?
Does it feel harder as I go, or fairly controlled?
After the session, ask yourself these 3 questions:
How do my legs feel later that day?
How do I feel the next morning?
Do I feel ready to train again physically and mentally?
That feedback matters just as much as the numbers.
Easy effort sessions, when respected and executed well, help you to recover better, train more consistently, hit your hard sessions with more quality, and reduce injury risk.
When you train by effort you let the numbers support you, not judge you and give your body a bit of grace over Christmas and beyond.
If you’d like to grab a free eBook on how to work out your heart rate and training zones, head over to my free community for runners and cyclists over 30.
Wishing you a very Happy Christmas for Wednesday!
Emma x
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