I Ran My Slowest Pace in Years. Here's What I Did About It, Maybe.

I went for a late night run on Friday night. Nothing unusual about that on the surface – I run, I swim, I cycle, a rotation I have kept up since coming back to Singapore. But this particular run left me staring at my Strava afterwards at a number I did not like.

7 minutes 50 seconds per kilometre. Over almost 12km. One of the slowest paces I have run in years.

To put that number somewhere useful: three years ago, running regularly here in Singapore, two to three times a week, I was doing 10 to 14km at just over 6 minutes per kilometre, sometimes dipping under 6. Then we moved to Melbourne, where the cold made it genuinely harder to get out the door, and running became something I did when I could rather than something I did on schedule. Somewhere in there, I learned about Zone 2. So I started to consciously slow myself down – running by the talk test, keeping myself in the heartrate zone that exercise physiologists say the real aerobic base gets built. Quietly, over months, not weeks.

So Friday's number should not have shocked me the way it did. Plus, this was not a normal week. The Wife landed back from Melbourne on Sunday, finally, after a stretch apart, and between catching up properly and the Monday public holiday throwing the rhythm off further, I did not swim and I did not cycle. Friday night was the first time I had moved my body properly in days. And instead of doing anything sensible like easing back in, I ran nearly 12km – noticeably further than the roughly 8km I have been managing lately.

A rested body (and maybe a little, ahem, “overfed“), an ambitious distance, at the tail end of an already disrupted week. Any one of those would explain a slower pace. All three together, and 7:50 stops being a mystery and starts being fairly predictable.

And yet. The moment I saw that number, my first instinct was not "of course, look at the week I've had." My first instinct was to wonder if something was wrong with the whole approach. Was zone 2 actually working? Had slowing myself down all this time been the wrong call? I found myself thinking about a Singapore running coach I had heard speak about training balance – his view was that the slow runs matter, but you cannot neglect the fast ones either, roughly one hard run for every two or three easy ones, something to do with keeping the fast-twitch muscle fibres from going quiet while you spend all your time in the aerobic, slow-twitch zone. I thought about a recent basketball game too, and how it left me wondering whether my current regime, gentle and moderate as it is, has actually made me softer rather than fitter in the ways that matter on a court.

By the time I had walked it all the way through, I had more or less decided: add a fast run. Sunday nights, 3km, hard effort, on top of the swim, the slow run, the cycle.

Now, here is the part I want to be honest about, because it is the part that actually interests me more than the training plan itself. I do not know if that decision is correct. I know why Friday's pace was slow – irregular running in Melbourne, a rest week, and a distance jump that was, by my own admission, too much too soon. That is a perfectly sufficient explanation on its own. It does not require a new theory of training. And yet, within minutes of seeing one disappointing number on a watch, I had reached past the boring, obvious explanation and started reaching for a fix – a new rule, a new ratio, a new Sunday commitment.

That reaching is what interests me more than the pace itself. One data point, heavily confounded by circumstance, and I was already halfway to overhauling the plan. It is a very human response, and I suspect it is not limited to running. It is the same itch that makes you want to sell a stock after one bad week, or abandon a diet after one indulgent weekend, or doubt a whole strategy because of a single result that circumstances alone could explain. The slow run did not prove zone 2 doesn't work. It proved I had a different week. Those are different findings, and only one of them justifies changing anything.

That said, I am still adding the fast run. The fast-twitch argument has some logic to it independent of Friday's disappointment, and variety in training rarely hurts. But I am trying to hold two things at once, which is harder than it sounds: making the change, while admitting I do not actually know if Friday's number gave me any real evidence that it was needed. The schedule is also going to need reshuffling now that the Wife is back properly – we spent the week re-exploring our own neighbourhood together, a movie, dinners, noticing what has changed since we left, which was its own quiet pleasure and its own good reason to let one run go slowly wrong.

Maybe that is the more honest way to run into your sixties, or your fifties, or whatever decade this is for you. Not with a plan you trust blindly, and not by tearing the plan up after one bad outing either. Somewhere in between – making the adjustment, while staying suspicious of how quickly you convinced yourself it was necessary.

Have you ever made a change to a routine, a strategy, or a habit based on one disappointing result – and later realised the result had an obvious, boring explanation that had nothing to do with the plan itself?

👉 Hit reply and share your thoughts – I’d love to hear what’s resonating with you.

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