Why am I not getting faster when I run more?

You went from three runs a week to five back in March. It is August now, and your 10K still takes 52 minutes. Same loop, same time.

The answer is usually in what your week looks like rather than in how much it holds.

Your easy runs are probably not easy

This is the most common reason and the dullest one to hear. Most runners run their easy days too fast and their hard days too slow. Everything ends up in the middle, tiring enough to leave the legs heavy but too gentle to be a real stimulus.

The test is simple. Can you speak in full sentences without gasping? If not, the run is not easy, whatever you call it in the log. For most people that pace sits 60 to 90 seconds per kilometre slower than the pace they could hold for 10K. The first few weeks it feels embarrassingly slow.

Runners who train a lot put roughly four out of five kilometres at the easy end. Not because it is comfortable, but because it is the only way to have enough left to make the hard sessions properly hard.

The week has looked the same since spring

The body adapts to a new load in three to six weeks. After that it is adapted, and running the same week again gives it nothing new.

Eight kilometres Tuesday, eight Thursday and fourteen Sunday is a good week. Twenty weeks in a row is the same question asked twenty times. Progression means something rises for three or four weeks and then backs off for one. It can be the length of the long run, the minutes spent at threshold, or the recovery between intervals getting shorter. Change one thing at a time or you will not know what worked.

Hard is not the same as specific

Running intervals until you are wrecked feels like training that pays. Mostly it is practice at being tired.

Threshold work and very short fast intervals train different things, and most recreational runners need more of the first. One threshold session a week with 20 to 40 minutes of work at a pace you could hold for about an hour, plus a long run, goes further than most people expect. If every hard session is instead "as fast as I can manage today", you get neither.

You may be comparing times that are not comparable

A 10K at 24 degrees can come out a minute slower than the exact same fitness at 12. Wind and hills do the rest, and tired legs from yesterday show up in the pace immediately.

Progress is also slower than most people expect once the first year is behind them. Year one gives you minutes. Year three gives you seconds, and that is still progress.

Get yourself a test you can trust. Same loop, same time of day, rested legs, every six to eight weeks. Or race a 5K and let the clock there be the verdict.

Sometimes the answer is more rest

If you sit at a low level of tiredness all the time you get the training but not the effect of it. The body rebuilds while you rest, not while you run.

Sleep and stress come out of the same budget as the sessions. Week after week of five hours of sleep and five runs gives you less than four runs and seven hours of sleep. How that data can be read is covered in the running app that adapts to your recovery.

And sometimes you really are running too little

The opposite is just as common. Three easy 5K runs a week is twenty kilometres, and twenty kilometres builds no faster 10K runner no matter how well they are arranged. Then "run more" is the right answer, but slowly. A few kilometres a week across months, not a doubling by next Monday.

If the weeks cannot be made longer there is another way to lay them out, and the logic is the same as in marathon training on three runs a week.

How to work out which one it is

Open the log and go through the last four weeks. How many of the runs were actually at the easy end, measured on heart rate rather than on how you remember them? Does week four differ from week one in any way? Did the hard sessions look different from each other, or were they the same session under different names? And is there a test in there that tells you what shape you are in, or is feel all you have to go on?

Most people find their answer right there. If you want a full plan to hold your own week against, there is one in the half marathon training plan for under 2 hours.

Where the log runs out

Coach Fartlek is our own app, so expect bias. It reads your sessions from your watch through Intervals.icu, which means it sees the same thing you can see in the log, except every week and without you having to go looking. Ask it why you have stalled and the answer comes from your own runs, and you can argue back when it does not match how the training felt.

The app needs a watch connected through Intervals.icu, covers 5K to the marathon and does nothing else. The price is on the pricing page, and there is a free trial.

Start with the easy runs anyway. That is the change that costs the least and usually gives the most.