[dh5]

If you are running less than 30 miles per week or so and don't have multiple injury risk factors (e.g. prior history of injury, being older, female) you can fairly safely run at whatever pace you'd like and know that running more and running faster will help you become faster.

The idea of "zone 2 training" that is peddled sometimes on social media makes no sense if you're not running consistent mileage and actively looking to run faster. At that point, the idea is that you're minimizing injury risk in between 2+ hard efforts per week, while still getting in the miles.

[navaed01]

I don’t know about the whole zone 2 thing, but I found running 10ks and pushing myself the whole time led to fewer gains than mixing slower paced runs with separate sessions of quarter mile sprints and 1 session of squats per week.

Also running extremely hard for a good distance for me at least, became mentally a lot less enjoyable