If You Feel Like You’re Not Making Progress in Training, Use This Coach’s Method to Better Track Your Runs—and Improve Performance

We’ve all been there: You head out for an easy run and settle into your usual pace, but after a mile or two, your breathing feels labored and you notice your heart rate climbing higher than normal. However, you’re still going at your usual pace on your usual route, so what gives? If you judge the run by pace alone, you might see no reason to change anything.

But those other signals suggest you’re paying a higher price than usual to hold that speed. Of course, you probably already know that factors like heat, hills, fatigue, and stress can make your usual pace feel harder. But with so much advice about what to pay attention to during a run, it can be tough to know which signals to trust and how to use them to evaluate your effort.

And without a clear way to interpret those signals, you might inadvertently push too hard on an easy day or miss the intended effort during a speed workout. Repeat these mistakes, and over time, you can disrupt the balance between training and recovery, making it harder to build the fitness you need to race your best. The solution: A system from ultramarathon runner and endurance coach Nick Farr, head coach and founder of P3 Fitness.

Farr organizes running feedback into three categories—performance output, biological load, and subjective feedback—and uses them together to understand how a run is unfolding. Here’s how to use Farr’s three-category system to make every run count, build fitness more consistently, and arrive on race day ready to perform your best. For example, your pace tells you how fast you ran.

But, inherently, it can’t tell you how difficult that pace felt or how your body responded to that pace. To get a fuller picture, Farr separates training feedback into three categories, each of which answers one of those three questions: Evaluating the answers to these questions in concert with one another helps Farr and his athletes understand whether a run matches its intended purpose. It also gives runners a way to recognize when environmental conditions, fatigue, or other factors might call for an adjustment.

Performance output describes the work you produce during a run. Metrics like pace, speed, distance, time, elevation, cadence, stride length, and power fall into this category, Farr says. These metrics help you track what you accomplish.