What Are Junk Miles?

Junk Miles are runs that are:

• Too fast to be recovery runs
• Too slow to provide training stimulus
• Done purely to pad weekly mileage numbers

They exist in the "no man's land" of training — effort without benefit.

The Problem Zone

Intensity Spectrum:
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Easy        ⚠️ JUNK ZONE ⚠️        Hard
(Recovery)   (No benefit)      (Stimulus)
Z1-Z2           Z3              Z4-Z5
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Signs You're Running Junk Miles

Why Runners Fall Into This Trap

1. Ego: Slow running feels "lazy"
2. Social pressure: Group runs at arbitrary paces
3. Strava culture: Faster = more kudos
4. Misunderstanding: "More effort = more gains"

The Science

Research shows optimal training follows the 80/20 rule:

• 80% easy/recovery (Zone 1-2)
• 20% hard/quality (Zone 4-5)

Elite runners run SLOWER on easy days than most amateurs!

How to Eliminate Junk Miles

Make Easy Days EASY

• Run at conversational pace
• If you can't easily chat, slow down
• Check heart rate (Zone 1-2)

Make Hard Days HARD

• Intervals, tempo runs, hill repeats
• Focused effort with purpose
• Full recovery between sessions

Quality Over Quantity

Better training:

• 40 miles/week: 32 easy + 8 quality

Worse training:

• 50 miles/week: all "medium" effort

Remember: Every run should have a purpose — recovery OR stimulus. There is no in-between!