This morning my training plan said 5 miles steady, so I headed out expecting a fairly straightforward run where I could just settle into a rhythm and tick it off without overthinking it too much.
But within the first couple of minutes I could tell it wasn’t going to feel as smooth as I expected. My legs felt heavier, my breathing was a bit more noticeable, and despite the fact that I felt that I was working harder the watch told me a different story, suggesting I was out for an easy run not a steady run.
By body definitely told a different story.
This is usually the point where it’s easy to start questioning things. You wonder if your fitness has dropped, or if you’re just having an off period, or why you suddenly can’t seem to hit the paces that used to feel comfortable.
In this post, we will look at how your RPE (Rate of Perceived Effort) gives a more realistic picture of your training.
Looking Beyond the Pace
When I replayed the run in my head, a few things stood out straight away.
I hadn’t slept particularly well the night before, which already puts you on the back foot before you even lace up your shoes. On top of that, it was really windy, the kind of wind where you feel like you’re constantly working just to maintain forward momentum, even if you don’t fully realise it at the time.
I also hadn’t eaten before heading out, which is something I usually get away with on shorter runs, but today I felt noticeably hungry quite early on. And yes, it does sound that I am making a lot of excuses but I genuinely couldn’t hit the pace I wanted. My body certainly felt that it was in the ‘Steady Zone’ but the pace was not adding up.
None of these things on their own would normally feel like a big deal, but when you stack them together, they can change the effort of the run quite a lot.
This is something we do a lot as runners, judge our runs almost entirely based on pace and what the watch tell us. We rely on this as the main measure of whether a session was good or bad.
The problem with that way of thinking is that it ignores everything else that affects how a run actually feels and what your body is doing underneath the surface.
Sleep, nutrition, stress, weather, terrain, and accumulated fatigue from previous training all play a role, even if you don’t consciously think about them when you head out the door.
So when a run feels harder than it “should” at a certain pace, it doesn’t automatically mean you’re getting worse. More often than not, it just means the effort required on that day is higher.
RPE In Running
This is where RPE (Rate of Perceived Effort) in running becomes really useful, because it gives you a way to judge your runs based on how they actually feel rather than just what your watch is telling you.
Your watch might show a slower pace and suggest that you’re not working very hard, but that’s only part of the picture. It can’t account for how you slept, what you ate, how you’re feeling, or how much those conditions are affecting you on that specific day.
RPE in running fills in that gap.
You’ll often see RPE described on a scale from 1 to 10, which is simple and works well for most runners, but it actually comes from the Borg scale, which runs from 6 to 20 and was originally designed to roughly match your heart rate when multiplied by ten.
That might sound a bit technical, but in practice it just gives a more detailed way of describing effort. For example, a steady run might sit around 13 to 14 on the Borg scale, which lines up with what most runners would call a moderate, controlled effort, whereas an easy run would sit closer to 9 to 11 where everything feels comfortable and sustainable.
For everyday runners, you don’t need to overthink the numbers, but understanding how RPE running works helps you realise that effort isn’t random or vague, it’s something you can learn to recognise, trust, and repeat.
RPE for Everyday Runners
What this really comes down to is being honest about what your body is telling you, rather than forcing it to match a number on your watch.
There will be days where everything lines up and the pace feels easy, and there will be days where you have to work much harder for less, and both are completely normal.
If you only look at pace, it’s easy to misread those slower days as a step backwards, when in reality they’re just a reflection of everything else going on in your life at that moment.
When you start using RPE running consistently, you begin to judge your training based on effort rather than ego, and that’s where you start to see more consistent progress.
Because at the end of the day, running isn’t just about putting one foot in front of the other. It’s influenced by far more than that, and once you start to recognise those factors, it becomes much easier to train consistently without second-guessing every run.
Using RPE in Your Training
Once you start to understand RPE running, the next step is actually applying it in a way that makes your training more consistent rather than more confusing.
The simplest way to think about it is that you’re no longer trying to hit a fixed pace, you’re trying to stay within a specific level of effort, and you allow your pace to adjust depending on what your body is capable of that day.
For example, if your plan says an easy run, you might aim to keep your effort around a 3 or 4 out of 10, where your breathing is relaxed and you can hold a full conversation without thinking about it. On a good day, that might naturally translate to a quicker pace, but on a day where you’re tired, it could be noticeably slower, and that’s exactly the point.
The same applies to steady runs like the one I did this morning. Instead of chasing a pace, you’re aiming for something closer to a 5 or 6 out of 10, where you feel like you’re working, but still in control. If the conditions or your energy levels mean that effort comes at a slower pace, then that’s simply what the run requires on that day.
It becomes even more useful when you look at harder sessions. Let’s say you’re doing intervals, rather than panicking if your pace drops slightly halfway through, you focus on whether you’re still hitting the right effort, maybe around an 8 out of 10, where speaking more than a few words feels difficult. If that effort is there, then the session is doing what it’s supposed to do, regardless of what the pace says.
Long runs are another good example, because this is where a lot of runners accidentally drift too fast. By keeping your effort capped at around a 4 or 5, you make sure you’re actually building endurance rather than turning the run into something more demanding than it needs to be.
What you start to notice over time is that your pace will fluctuate from run to run, but your effort becomes much more consistent. That consistency is what allows you to recover properly, hit your harder sessions with purpose, and avoid that constant feeling of being slightly too fatigued.
It also takes a lot of the pressure off. Instead of feeling like you’ve failed a run because the pace wasn’t there, you can look at it and say, “I held the right effort for what my body had today,” which is a much more useful way of measuring progress.
Tracking your RPE As Well as Your Pace
When you start paying attention to effort in this way, you get a much clearer picture of how your training is actually going, and not just how it looks on paper. This is where logging your effort becomes really useful, and it’s something you can do easily within your ARC(Achieve Running Club) plans, where you can track your RPE running alongside the session itself.
Over time, that gives you a far more honest view of your training than pace alone ever could. Your Strava might tell you that you didn’t run fast enough or that the effort wasn’t high, but it doesn’t know that you didn’t sleep well, that you were running into strong wind, or that you started the run under-fuelled. We can be hard on ourselves when we see our pace dropping, and it’s very easy to lose confidence in our ability based on those numbers alone, but what we have to remember is that we are human beings not machines, we are living bodies dealing with a range of internal external factors every single day. When you start to factor that in and use your perceived effort alongside your data, you begin to train with more awareness, more consistency, and a lot less frustration.
I’d be interested to hear how you use RPE in your own running, or if it’s something you’ve struggled to trust, so feel free to share your experience in the comments.
For more running related advice and information check out our other blog posts and our range of running books.
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