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Do You Have to Walk to Stay in Your Heart Rate Zone?

"I'm 52 years old, a very slow runner, and I enjoy triathlons. Next year I want to add completing a half marathon and a full marathon to my goals. I like the idea of training by heart rate, but to stay inside my 65–75% max-heart-rate zone, I end up walking about half the time. Ultimately, I'd like to jog both races the entire way, staying in that zone throughout. Is that a reasonable goal? And what's the average or recommended heart rate for non-competitive endurance activities?

– Tina, Abita Springs, Louisiana

Answer by Dominique: Hi Tina,
Thanks for your question about heart rate training for your half and full marathon goals. Adding those to a triathlon calendar is a great plan.

Needing to walk to stay inside a low heart rate zone is common — especially if you're newer to running, or bringing strong fitness from another sport like cycling or swimming into more running volume. It reflects your running-specific aerobic economy, which takes months of consistent training to build, not a fitness problem or an unreasonable goal. A structured run-walk approach is a legitimate way to build it.

I'll break my response down as follows:

1. Correcting the Calculation: Karvonen, Not Percent of Max
2. Is It Normal to Have to Walk to Stay in Your Zone?
3. What Heart Rate Should You Target for Non-Competitive Endurance Training?
4. Is Jogging a Full Half and Full Marathon in Zone Realistic?

1. Correcting the Calculation: Karvonen, Not Percent of Max

You're using 65–75% of your maximum heart rate as your jogging zone, Tina — it's an easy mistake to make, but it isn't quite right.

The Karvonen method applies that same 60–75% range to your heart rate reserve — the gap between your maximum and rest heart rate — not to your maximum on its own.

Here's the worked example, using round numbers. Say your maximum heart rate is 170, and your rest heart rate is 70. The difference between the two is 100 — that's your heart rate reserve.

Your jogging zone is then: rest heart rate + 60–75% of your heart rate reserve.

Lower threshold: 70 + 60% × 100 = 70 + 60 = 130 beats per minute (bpm).
Higher threshold: 70 + 75% × 100 = 70 + 75 = 145 bpm.

That's noticeably faster than the zone you've been running in.

The Zoladz method is another way to work out your zones. It and Karvonen produce similar but not identical results — feel free to use the "scientific" method to set an approximate threshold, then check it against a good dose of common sense.

The best sense-check of all is conversational pace — the pace at which you could hold a conversation with someone running beside you. Work out what that feels like for you, then use it alongside your calculated zone.

In my experience, mixing up straight percent-of-max with the Karvonen heart-rate-reserve method is the single most common heart rate zone calculation error among the readers who write in.

2. Is It Normal to Have to Walk to Stay in Your Zone?

Yes. Needing run-walk breaks to hold a low heart rate zone is a well-documented, common experience — especially for beginners, and for athletes like you, Tina, whose aerobic fitness from another sport hasn't yet transferred into running-specific economy.

Here's why: running recruits different muscles, and different, more impact-tolerant connective tissue adaptations, than cycling or swimming — adaptations that only build with running-specific volume. You can be genuinely fit on a bike or in the water and still find that running, at the very same heart rate, feels far harder. That's not a contradiction. It's simply how training specificity works.

Among triathletes I coach who are adding running volume on top of established bike or swim fitness, it's common to need run-walk for the first several weeks before continuous zone-2 jogging feels comfortable. That's a running-economy gap catching up to overall fitness — not the reverse.

A structured run-walk approach that keeps your whole session inside the target zone is a legitimate, coach-recommended way to accumulate that volume. It isn't a failure, and it isn't a sign your goal is wrong.

And the timeline is genuinely encouraging: running-specific aerobic economy typically improves meaningfully over a few months of consistent training — not a few weeks. So the honest expectation here, Tina, is this gets easier, not you're doing something wrong.

3. What Heart Rate Should You Target for Non-Competitive Endurance Training?

There's no separate "non-competitive" number, Tina. The same 60–75% heart-rate-reserve zone — worked out with Karvonen, or the Zoladz-equivalent — is the right target for any easy aerobic effort, whether that's running, cycling, or swimming.

That's genuinely good news for a triathlete. Easy-zone bike and swim volume builds real aerobic base of its own — it isn't wasted training toward your running goal. While your running-specific economy catches up, easy sessions on the bike and in the pool keep building the same underlying aerobic engine, and that fitness carries over.

4. Is Jogging a Full Half and Full Marathon in Zone Realistic?

Yes — jogging an entire half marathon, or a full marathon, within an easy heart rate zone is a realistic goal for most runners, Tina, yours included.

This is a question of building running-specific aerobic fitness over a training block of months — not a question of your zone, or your goal, being wrong.

Picture the progression in three stages: walk-run to hold the zone at first, then longer continuous jogging stretches inside that same zone, then eventually the whole session run without a break. Let your fitness set the pace of that progression, rather than trying to force today's pace to match tomorrow's.
So, Tina — to recap: use the Karvonen method, not straight percent-of-max, to work out your zone. Expect to need walk breaks at first. And expect that to change, with consistent training, over the coming months.

If it's a different pattern you're seeing — your heart rate creeping up mid-run instead of settling — that's a different issue, usually drift or treadmill-versus-outdoor variability rather than an aerobic-economy gap. And if you'd like to understand why easy pace keeps getting faster as your training builds up over time, I've written separately about how easy pace improves with training age.

Hope this helps, Tina. And best of luck with completing next year's running goals!

Kind regards,
Dominique

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