Embracing the concept of slow and easy runs can feel like a game of mental gymnastics. Can you really become a better, faster runner if you’re consistently going at a pace that feels easy and relatively slow to you? “It can be very hard, especially for new runners, to really understand that anything positive is happening when a run feels really easy,” South Carolina-based exercise physiologist Heather Hart , CSCS, certified run coach and founder of Hart Strength and Endurance Coaching explains to Runner’s World . But regularly pushing the pace and taking your easy runs into difficult territory means you miss out on some pretty major benefits of slow running, especially if you’re doing that for the majority of your runs. To convince you to pump the brakes, we tapped two experts to reveal all you can gain from slowing down—both physically and mentally.…