One of my coaching goals for 2017 is to clean up my TrainingPeaks workout libraries, which have become a giant mess. Workouts are all labeled differently and I have to make loads of changes each week.

Now that I have a clear goal in mind as to how to progress, I've come to the discussion on Recovery Runs vs. Easy Runs - and been thinking a lot about whether we need to differentiate between the two.

In the past, I've only given the term "Easy run" and simply instructed athletes to run at their easy effort based off of how they feel that day. If it's the day after a hard workout, then that easy pace would be slower. If you have had a few weeks off, then you might feel fresh and easy might be a little faster.

An recovery run is an easy run, right? Well, you might feel like death and super slow, but the effort should be of the easy variety.

Calling the runs "easy" solved the problems in my eyes and kept it clean.

But, lately, I've been thinking more about it and I'm going to bring back the Recovery run label. By calling a run a recovery run, I'm sending the signal that "Hey, it's okay that this run might be painstakingly slow, but you are coming off of a hard week/workout/sickness/etc. and you can run as easy as you want because that's the goal."

I think by making the distinction, I can help drop down the amount of times a runner would run too hard on an easy run following a workout. If I call it Recovery, then the signal is sent to really dial it back and go sloooooow. Especially since I'm not there to guide them through the workout, rather I'm trusting them to execute it on their own.

So, AR - do you make the distinction between easy/recovery in your training? Do you take easy runs easy and let the pace come, or do you tell yourself that it's truly a recovery run and make sure to run it super light. From an athlete point of view, if I was coaching you, would it be good to make that distinction?