Roughly, going from running most days to taking a 9-ish day break was worth a few seconds per km slower at the same effort. So if you’re starting out, here’s what I’d take from it:
- Don’t stress about hitting 5 or 6 days a week. Three runs a week that you never miss beats a big week followed by ten days off.
- When life gets busy, a short easy 20-minute jog to keep things ticking over is worth way more than it looks, because what you’re really protecting is not taking the long break.
- Frequency does still help, but mostly because adding days is how you slowly build your total over time. The trap is adding too much too fast, picking up a niggle or a cold, and getting forced into exactly the kind of long break that sets you back.
There’s a popular chart going around that says runners who run more days per week tend to have faster marathon times, and it gets repeated as “just be consistent, run more often.”
I work on the data side of athletedata, so I wanted to see if that actually holds up – I looked at about 8,000 easy runs from 167 runners. For each person I tracked whether they were running a bit faster at the same heart rate (a simple sign you’re getting fitter) depending on what their previous 6 weeks looked like: how many runs, how many total minutes, and the longest stretch they went without running.
A few things came out, and I think they’re genuinely useful if you’re early in your running:
– Running more often, on its own, didn’t make people faster. The catch is that when you add a run you’re really just adding miles, and it’s the total time on feet that nudged fitness, not the number of days.
– Chopping the same weekly total into more runs did nothing.
– The thing that actually lined up with running worse was long breaks.
The single biggest signal I found was the longest gap without running in someone’s last 6 weeks. The bigger the gap, the slower they ran afterwards, even when they’d done the same total miles around it.
Roughly, going from running most days to taking a 9-ish day break was worth a few seconds per km slower at the same effort. So if you’re starting out, here’s what I’d take from it:
- Don’t stress about hitting 5 or 6 days a week. Three runs a week that you never miss beats a big week followed by ten days off.
- When life gets busy, a short easy 20-minute jog to keep things ticking over is worth way more than it looks, because what you’re really protecting is not taking the long break.
- Frequency does still help, but mostly because adding days is how you slowly build your total over time. The trap is adding too much too fast, picking up a niggle or a cold, and getting forced into exactly the kind of long break that sets you back.
Build the habit first, then add miles slowly enough that your body keeps up.
For what it’s worth, the effect sizes here are small and this is just a pattern across a lot of runners, not a law.
Full blog article: https://www.athletedata.health/blog/is-running-consistency-frequency-or-gaps-data
The Rolex Life 
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