Pace & Effort are NOT the Same Thing

The terms “pace” and “effort” are often used interchangeably by athletes.  This isn’t a good practice or habit to get into because in the world of endurance sports, “pace” and “effort” are not the same thing.  While they are somewhat related and can influence each other, they are two entirely different concepts.  Understanding this distinction is really important for athletes.

Read this Coach Tip Tuesday: 

https://www.fullcircleendurance.com/blog/coach-tip-tuesday-pace-effort-are-not-the-same-thing

Resources:

Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) Training Zones Chart

Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) Calibration & Development Workouts

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Chapters

• 0:00 Opening
• 0:16 Introduction
• 0:41 What is Pace?
• 1:15 What is Effort?
• 1:55 How Pace and Effort Get Confused
• 4:39 Why Athletes Shy Away from Effort
• 7:58 How Pace and Effort Interact with Each Other
• 11:45 How to Learn to Use Effort and Rating of Perceived Exertion
• 15:08 Deciding Whether to Use Pace or Effort
• 16:19 Technology Will (Not Might) Fail
• 19:26 The Bottom Line
• 20:07 Closing

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the full circle podcast, your source for insights into the science and art of endurance sports training and racing. I'm your host coach Laura Henry. Today is Coach Tip Tuesday.

Pace and effort. Out of all of the things that I talk about with athletes, these two concepts and the interplay between them is what sparks the most confusion for athletes. What's interesting and possibly deceptive about this is that athletes don't even realize that they are confused or that they misunderstand the concepts of effort and pace.

So what is pace? If you look it up, the word pace has a surprising number of definitions. But as the word relates to endurance sports, the most applicable definition of pace is the speed or rate at which something happens. In other words, pace is a measure of the speed or velocity at which you do your sport.

In swimming, it is expressed as minutes per 100 meters or minutes per 100 yards. In cycling, it is expressed as miles per hour or kilometers per hour. In running, it is expressed as minutes per mile or minutes per kilometer.

What is effort? Like pace, the word effort also has several definitions. The most applicable definitions for effort when it comes to endurance sports are a serious attempt and something produced by exertion or trying. The most common way to express effort in endurance sports is rating of perceived exertion, more commonly known as RPE.

Rating of perceived exertion, or RPE, is a way of measuring and communicating the intensity level of physical activity. It is a subjective measure that is gauged on a rating scale, most commonly on a rating scale from 1 to 10. I have a training zone chart that explains this in the show notes.

The most clear indication that an athlete is confused about pace and effort is when they use the terms interchangeably. I see this all the time when I'm working with athletes on performance coaching in their post-workout notes. As an example, let's consider a workout that is planned or written entirely on RPE.

In a workout like this, the entirety of the workout, the warm-up, the main sets, the cool-down, are all planned on different levels or numbers of RPE. In the post-workout notes for such a workout, an athlete will often comment on how they manage their pace with no reference to effort at all. They will also often use words such as slower or faster to describe different parts of the workout, which are adverbs that describe changes in speed and velocity.

In other words, these words, slower and faster, describe changes in pace. Since the workout was planned on effort, the athlete should have been focusing on managing their effort and their subjective exertion as they were doing the workout. By noting that they manage their pace versus managing their effort and or by using words such as slower or faster, the athlete indicates that they were focusing on and using a metric, pace, that was not part of the planned workout.

They were focusing on the speed at which they were completing the workout. If they had been focusing on their effort, they would have stated that, or they would have used adverbs such as easier or harder, which are words that describe changes in effort levels, not pace. Sure, I know, maybe this seems really in the weeds or maybe even overly nitpicky on my part, but here's the deal, friends.

Words matter because different words, like it or not, do mean different things. Which words we say and which words we write indicate what we are truly doing or feeling. When I question an athlete about feedback that includes language that contradicts how a workout was planned, it's not uncommon for athletes to tell me that they didn't mean what they said.

It's also not unusual for athletes to tell me that they didn't even consciously realize that they were thinking about or talking about something different, pace, than what was planned, effort. That, that right there proves my point. Athletes are not even aware that they are confused about this distinction between effort and pace.

And that is what is both deceptive and concerning about this. The first step to wisdom and proficiency is self-awareness. If you are not aware that you are misunderstanding key concepts that pertain to your training and your racing, you will be unable to master those concepts.

And thus, by extension, you will not be able to reach your potential and see fully realized gains in your sport or in your goals. In many ways, it's understandable that athletes, whether consciously or unconsciously, shy away from dialing in on their effort and instead focus on a more tangible concept, such as pace. Pace is something objective and concrete.

It is something that can be clearly seen and clearly stated. An athlete can check out a bit and transfer over the thinking to a device that spits out this metric to them. It honestly does not require much work on the athlete's part to think about pace as a metric, since it is measured tangibly and provided by an external device.

That external device does all of the calculations and work to generate a metric such as pace. Effort cannot be measured by a device because it is subjective, and being subjective means it's nebulous and intangible. In this world that we live in, where literally anything and everything can be tracked and quantified by a physical device, something nebulous and intangible is often difficult for people to understand, much less embrace.

Dialing in on one's effort is the ultimate engagement with and development of one's self-awareness in sport. Thus, it requires a much more substantial investment of mental energy to use RPE, especially when one is first learning how to gauge their own effort, than it does for an athlete to use metrics that are generated by external devices. This being said, just because we have grown used to and pretty dependent on data and quantifiable metrics does not mean that they are inherently superior to everything and anything else.

Some of the most meaningful measures of things are challenging, if not completely impossible, to measure tangibly. In the world of endurance sports, one of these meaningful measures of athletic performance that cannot be measured tangibly is an athlete's effort or rating of perceived exertion. In my experience, the majority of age group athletes tend to prefer objective metrics, such as pace, over subjective concepts, such as effort, because of the time and energy investment that is required on their part in order to truly understand effort.

Elite and professional athletes, on the other hand, do understand the value of effort, and their understanding of this is what distinguishes them from non-elite and non-professional athletes. While professional athletes may be wearing devices made by companies such as Garmin or Polar, they are often doing so because they are sponsored by those brands, and therefore they are contractually obligated to be seen wearing their sponsor's products. While professional athletes may be wearing devices, they may not always be using devices the way you think they might be.

In the 2024 U.S. Olympic Marathon trials, Sarah Hall took her watch off and flung it into the crowd at mile 17. Why did she do this? Well, she didn't have any use for the data. Her splits did not matter. 

In fact, the data about her splits might very well have been getting in her way and distracting her from what did matter. From mile 17 until she crossed the finish line, she raced entirely on effort. She trusted her ability to manage her effort, which was a skill that she had earned from years of experience and commitment to becoming self-aware.

She ultimately finished fifth in the race. While she didn't make the Olympic team, only the top three do that, she had the best finish of her career at an Olympic trials, and Sarah Hall has run in a whopping eight Olympic trials. Pace and effort, while they are different, are related to one another.

To expand upon a quote from cycling coach Charles Howe, pace calibrates perceived exertion and perceived exertion modulates pace. This means that doing something at a given pace is going to feel like a certain amount of effort. Furthermore, doing something at a given effort is going to translate to being completed at a certain pace.

What's tricky is that since it's objective, a given pace is always going to be a given pace. 15 miles an hour is always 15 miles an hour. Nine minutes per mile is always nine minutes per mile.

But on one day, 15 miles an hour might feel easy, around an RPE4. On a different day or in different conditions or circumstances, 15 miles an hour may feel very challenging indeed, say around an RPE8. Even within the same interval or the same workout, how you feel about the same pace can change.

For instance, you may start a half marathon at a pace of nine minutes per mile and think that it feels like RPE4. By mile 12, that same nine minutes per mile pace may feel like RPE7 or RPE8. Effort, on the other hand, as we have discussed, is subjective.

How you feel changes daily and it is impacted by so many things, your stress levels, sleep, hydration levels, and more. This means that running at RPE4 may translate to a pace of 10 minutes per mile one day and then a pace of nine minutes and 15 seconds per mile on a different day. Because so many things influence it, the same RPE can result in different paces, even within the same workout or the same interval.

For instance, using the same example as before, let's say you start a half marathon at RPE4, which translates to a pace of about nine minutes per mile in the first few miles. As you move through the race, you maintain that same effort level, RPE4. However, due to course conditions, weather, your fitness level, and the fatigue that is accumulating in your body, that same RPE4 effort level translates to 10 minutes per mile pace in mile 12.

Even though the paces were different, nine minutes per mile, 10 minutes per mile, how you felt RPE4 was the same. One of the more advanced and challenging concepts for athletes to understand is that what a given effort translates to speed or pace wise for a shorter time interval, such as three minutes, will not translate to the same speed or pace for a longer time interval, such as two hours. For instance, a three minute interval completed at RPE8 will translate to a faster speed or pace than two hours completed at RPE8 would.

But shorter intervals don't automatically call for higher effort levels. There's value to learning to execute and manage any effort level for both short and longer intervals. I see this pop up often when athletes think that just because the interval is shorter, that they should go faster or harder, but that's not true.

It's important to learn how to go all efforts at a bunch of different durations. Sure, you're not going to be able to handle an all out effort for two hours. I understand that, but you can still rein it in and go RPE4 for a three minute interval, and then also learn to maintain RPE4 for two hours.

This concept is particularly challenging for athletes who do long course events, such as half marathons, marathons, Ironman 70.3 races, and Ironmans. The longer the race, the more critical pacing becomes to an athlete's success. Managing pace and effort for longer events is challenging for athletes to master because perceived exertion at the correct pace for events like this that are this long is likely going to feel a lot lower than the athlete knows that they can do, especially in the early stages in the event.

So this means that even though it feels really easy, you need to start off easy when the distance is long. The best way to learn effort to truly learn it is through calibration. Calibrate means to determine, rectify, or mark the graduations of.

In this process of learning effort, we are seeking to calibrate ourselves. We are seeking to learn to mark the graduations of, aka distinguish, the different RPE levels within our own selves. This process of self calibration often takes a really long time, but the results are worth it.

One way to quote unquote jumpstart this process is to do a workout focusing solely on different effort levels. To do this, it is best if no devices are used at all for the workout. Zero.

Zilch. Nada. No bike computer.

No specifically designed fitness device. No smartwatch. No watch at all, smart or dumb.

No phone, I know, the horror. Nothing that can measure anything tangibly at all in any way, shape, or form. Once you've ditched your devices, you're left with just yourself.

So you can begin the workout. Start off at a very easy effort, RPE1, RPE2. Remain here for a bit, and then increase your effort one step, one number on the RPE scale to RPE2 or RPE3.

Stay here for a bit, and increase your effort by one step more. Continue this process until you have made it all the way to RPE10. Then do the same process in reverse, coming down the steps, RPE10 to RPE9, and so on.

While you're doing this, really pay attention to the physical sensations and responses that you have to the different levels of RPE. Note how these responses and sensations differ from each other at different levels. Dialing in on this is how you will start to be able to internalize how the different levels feel, and how to distinguish different effort levels from each other, such as being able to differentiate RPE3 from RPE4, and RPE6 from RPE8.

Doing this workout a few times is really helpful. Once you've done it a few times, increase the duration of the intervals, and pay attention to the sensations you feel as you increase the duration that you are holding a particular effort level for. If you are a multi-sport athlete, you should do this workout in each of the disciplines of your sport.

Swimming, biking, running. I've included example workouts for this calibration workout for swimming, biking, and running in the show notes. Even beyond your initial executions of this type of workout, you should include iterations of it in your training at least every few months, so you can check in with yourself, recalibrate as necessary, and thus ensure that you are staying in touch with what each effort level feels like to you.

After you've done this no-devices, effort-only workout a few times, you can start to add devices back into your workouts. But be wary of the temptation to look at, and use, tangible metrics when you are mid-workout. Even if you're not consciously using them, be wary that they might influence you during a workout.

When athletes are learning effort, I find that advising them to have overall duration, as the only data field accessible and viewable on their device, is very useful, as this takes away their ability to judge and or execute the workout on anything other than effort while they are doing the workout. After the workout, they can look at any recorded metrics as part of post-workout analysis. But looking at any metrics such as pace mid-workout is often distracting for athletes, and it diminishes their ability to execute a workout on effort alone until they are more experienced and proficient in using effort as the basis of their workout.

There are times when it is appropriate to plan workouts on pace, and there are other times when it is appropriate to plan workouts based on effort. If an athlete has a performance-based, time-based goal, then planning workouts based on pace is necessary to help ensure that they will be able to hold and maintain the paces required, as well as the mental stress that time imposes on an athlete to hit a time-based goal. In other situations, pace-based workouts can be useful to help push an athlete a bit beyond their comfort zone and to help them see gains.

Conversely, pace-based workouts can be effectively leveraged to ensure that an athlete is not overreaching or going too hard in a given workout. All of this being said, effort is the most important tool that an athlete can develop in their athlete's toolbox since it is subjective. Because it is subjective, it is independent of any external devices, which means it cannot just up and fail on you.

For this reason, even if you are including pace-based workouts in your training, it is important to also include effort-based workouts alongside those pace-based workouts. The only way that effort can fail you is if you refuse to develop this skill. Effort can be used in any workout and in any situation.

It is universally applicable and endlessly reliable this way. Technology and external devices will always have a possibility of failing. If you stay in endurance sports long enough, your technology and external devices will fail on you at some point.

At the very least, they will glitch on you and they will not work as designed or intended. This is a certainty. This is not a hypothetical situation.

Being too dependent on any one skill or any one thing is very dangerous, especially when it relies on an external factor, such as a device. So when, not if, your technology fails, you need to have different tools in your athlete's toolbox that you're comfortable with and that you're proficient in that you can switch to. I'm going to share a case study that illustrates exactly why this is so important.

Several years ago, an athlete who was training for an Ironman with the goal of qualifying for the Ironman World Championship hired me to coach him. For the purposes of this example, we'll call him Sandy. That's not his real name.

As part of the interview process, Sandy asked me how I plan workouts and asked me if I plan workouts on heart rate. I answered his question honestly. I said that I plan workouts using a variety of things to include heart rate, power, pace, and rating of perceived exertion.

Sandy hired me, and in response to me planning some workouts on RPE, he said that he wanted me to plan all of his workouts on heart rate because he wasn't, quote, very good at RPE. I pushed back on this. I told Sandy that planning all workouts on heart rate wasn't in his best interest because his heart rate monitor could fail.

I told Sandy that we could plan some workouts based on heart rate, but that I would also recommend planning some workouts on RPE so he could learn a different skill and tool and have a backup for when his heart rate monitor would fail, because it would happen. This was not an if situation. I told Sandy that I would not write all of his workouts on heart rate only because my doing so would harm him more than it would help him in the long term.

Sandy told me that he had misunderstood me when I said that I write workouts on a bunch of different things. He had interpreted my answer to mean that I would write workouts exclusively on a variety of different things. Sandy felt so strongly about training exclusively by heart rate that he fired me.

His race weekend came several months later and he prepared to board an international flight to his race destination. The day he was boarding the plane, his heart rate monitor died and it wouldn't function at all. So Sandy was getting on an international flight to a faraway land without any hope of being able to get a replacement heart rate monitor in time for his race.

To Sandy's credit, even though I wasn't coaching him anymore, he did reach out to me and he let me know what had happened. He said that he knew that I had tried to warn him about this exact situation and now he was facing his A race, his top priority of the season, without any other tools to fall back on. Only then, when it mattered most and when he couldn't do anything about it, did Sandy realize how important having another tool such as effort to switch to is and how having multiple tools in his athlete's toolbox is what would have set him up for the best chances of success at his important A priority race.

Whether they realize it or not, pace and effort are often confused by athletes, but pace and effort though related are not the same thing. Learning to distinguish between the two is incredibly important. It's even more important that athletes learn RPE and how to discern between different effort levels, as this ability will be the most valuable and meaningful one that you develop as an athlete.

Effort can be used as both the base of workouts and racing and as a backup tool to other skills, concepts, and techniques. Learning to develop this tool and leverage it is what will help elevate all of your workouts and races. Learn to distinguish between effort and pace.

That's the key to success. That was another episode of the Full Circle Podcast. Subscribe to the Full Circle Podcast wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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Please send us an email at podcast at fullcircleendurance.com or visit us at fullcircleendurance.com backslash podcast. To find training plans, see what other coaching services we offer, or to join our community, please visit fullcircleendurance.com. I'm Coach Laura Henry. Thanks for listening.