There are two seemingly opposite “struggles” that many runners—including myself—grapple with: 1) maintaining an effortful even pace for long runs and races, and 2) running easy miles too fast .

Pacing yourself is a skill—and it can be a pretty difficult one to master. I’ve been getting real-time feedback and training my own pacing intuitiveness via a lesser-known (and perhaps vastly under-appreciated) feature on Apple Watch known as Pacer.

The feature came out in 2022, but even as a devoted Watch user (I’ve consistently run with it since it came out in 2015!) I had yet to take full advantage of it. So, I decided to put it to the test this spring while training for the London Marathon on April 26, which I’ll be running with Apple.…