I had a great race.
Enjoyed Myself
Got To Run Fast
Learned A Lot
It would be tempting to leave it at that but… if we want to race faster then we should try to learn from every race.
Two fundamental principles of racing.
Go Fast When The Race Is Slow.
Be Strong At The End.
I fell short on both of these points.
Pacing
John’s comments on pacing…
For your next run event, practice even pacing, even if it means controlling your pace the whole way.
Score yourself for effort (1-5) over the last 1/3rd of the event. If you score 3, you can increase your pace for the next event, if you score 4-5, you are spot on.
The half marathon is generally best done around Z3 for a competitive age-grouper, which will become Z4-5 towards the end, through fatigue, but maintaining the same pace.
The words in bold are a reminder => deliver current fitness to the finish line BEFORE seeking outperformance.
Holding back is difficult to achieve. This was a big race (~4,800 finishers). I got carried away. The course, with downhill kilometers at the end, rewards a conservative start.
Actions to race better:
Review heart rate and pace across the duration of your race. Draw a line showing the average, and see when/where you were above/below the average. Consider: were my “above average” efforts worth it?
Choose shorter, low-priority events where goal pace, and even pacing, can be practiced without extended recovery.
TrainingPeaks has a feature to see where peak heart rate appears in the file.
Strong At The End => It’s nearly always fastest to put our peak sustained efforts in the second half of our event.
Go Fast When The Race Is Slow => It can also make sense to lift effort on, and over the top of, climbs.
Elevation can complicate pace analysis but not always. Using my account at TrainingPeaks to dig in:
First 30 minutes: pace per km of 3:55 with elevation change of +5/-36 meters.
Final 30 minutes: pace per km of 4:27 with elevation change of +16/-52 meters.
Pretty clear something was going on. What might that be?
Durability & Peripheral Fitness
Like many athletes who “step up” the distance, I struggled to lift effort at the end of my race.
Both pace and heart rate were falling at the end.
We see this with marathon, 70.3 and Ironman run files. So look for it there. Note “lulls” don’t always happen at the end. Most often, there will be a lull around the 2/3rd mark of the event.
Competitive Athletes, the “2/3rds point” is often the best time to attack if you are feeling good. Late climbs, followed by rolling downhills, are an excellent place to get a gap.
The questions to consider:
Was it all pacing?
Might there be other causes?
Hydration
Nutrition
Durability
For this duration and the conditions, I’m comfortable ruling out hydration/nutrition. Durability was a factor and has two components:
The ability to move for the duration of the event.
The ability to tolerate the pace of the event.
As an athlete, “stepping up” both of these are likely limiters. Here again, segment analysis can help.
Action: Look at the fastest 3k, 5k and 10k segments and compare to what’s been done in training.
My fastest segments (of the season, so far) were inside my long event.
I was racing above my velocity:duration curve.
My race day performance was faster than my training.
This is good if it applies to total duration. We want to set bests on race day.
This is not good if it applies to, say, a best-5k inside a Half Marathon.
Pulling the above together, we have several factors we need to tolerate
Average Pace
Peak Pace
Distance
We also need the skill to choose pace, when excited in a crowd. All of these are trainable.
Part Three will cover how to address these common limiters.
Choose - Change - Sustain
Link to Part One, Breaking Down Ambitious Goals
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