With my A race around the corner and the start of race season for many of my athletes, I’d been reflecting a lot on race pacing. More over after what we saw on Kona last month. If you see the podium, Patrick was 13th off the bike, Magnus Ditlev was 3rd and Rudy Von Berg was 12th. Not to say what happened to the leaders and favorites after the bike. So, what happened here and what we can learn about it?

First, we need to know that professional racing strategies are different from those of amateurs.. Why is that? Mainly because of what Nassim Taleb describes as antifragility. They are willing to risk everything to move from 2nd to 1st, and don’t care much if that might cost them falling to 5th, 10th or last if it doesn’t go as planned. Or a small increase in performance outweighs a big decline. So it is expected that some of them will pass that line and blow up. That explains why some athletes go with the all or nothing mindset, the one we should not take as amateurs.

Different strategies are best for different incentives, so let’s dive into a few.

The PR or ER mindset, its the all or nothing mentality some pro takes. It makes sense for them as the only way to win in Kona is breaking at least bike or run and the overall course record, in a course every great athlete had tried their best for many years.

The “I’ll follow what they are doing” strategy is also interesting. Though people recommend you to do your own race, if you want to beat someone or learn from another athlete, like in a Gran Fondo race, it might be a good tactic to know their position and adjust your own strategy accordingly. Mark Allen, after trying to beat Dave Scott for many years, decided to pace just as Dave, if he goes fast, he’ll go fast. If he sat down and play cards, probably Mark should had done the same. Then he attacked in the last climb and finally won his first of 6 World Championships in Kona. This race became known as THE IRONWAR, famously documented by Matt Fitzgerald book.

All right, but next week I don’t feel like blowing up and I don’t know anyone I want to follow.

I love the Philosophy of the Raramuri, as told from Caballo Blanco to Cristopher McDougall.

When I think on my first stand-alone marathon, if I had just gone “easy, because if that’s all you get that’s not so bad” instead of doing PRs in every distance of the first half, I might had finished 20 minutes faster at least and in way less pain. See my own pace chart below as a guide of something to avoid. What if instead of starting 10 sec/km faster than my goal pace just to 'bank some minutes,' if I had instead gone at my goal pace or saved just 1 sec/km?? No one knows, but probably the slope of that chart would not be so steep.

From easy, we should start building on feeling (back to being mindful and knowing ourself, as I discussed in the previous blog post). One never knows; maybe we’re being too conservative or too aggressive in our planning compared to how we feel that day.

I am not a huge fan of going at a specific pace referring to a zone, but to go to the actual feeling of that zone (my athletes should remember “conversational pace - Z2” right?). A bad sleep, a cold, training load, bad food, work stress, you name it. All of those factors will change your HR and your maximum output, therefore all the zone structure. In finance they say its better to be approximately correct than exactly wrong. And to get there we should know the feeling of each zone / effort. Know ourselves.

Another way to plan the race is to have an A, B and C goals / plans. It could be like this: A plan is to PR in the run leg and the whole race, B could be to do a sub 10 hr Ironman, and C could be to empty your tank, not blowing out and running-racing the whole race. One never knows what could happen on a race, and on long endurance races many bad things could happen, and having several plans helps us refocus and sticking on giving our best always. Again, this comes from experience and knowing ourselves.

There are several ways to approach pacing, but most of them have the crucial factor of knowing yourself, listening to your body and believing what you are capable of. Going back to the classics: “If its endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining”, wrote Marcus Aurelius in Meditations. You need to know that its endurable, and you need to believe in yourself to perform.

Is it crazy to plan to do something great? If you had done the work, absolutely not. Even though it was thought to be impossible to break the 4-minute mile, Sir Roger Banister went for it opening the flood gates for many more people to beak it going forwards. Paraphrasing Kilian Jornet in his book Above the clouds, “Rules were set by those brave enough to break the previous ones”

Just one last thought here. There are many ways to pace your race and even though none of the different classes I used here would be a perfect fit for you by itself, they are a guide to help you find your best approach, so for this never ending process of learning how to train and race to your best, consider Bruce Lee’s advice

Back to Kona—want to see great pacing? Check out Cam Wurf’s race. Fantastic, consistent and strong. Obviously this comes from years and years training and competing at the top of the endurance world. What do you think?

Coach Corner

Keep it simple. In my view, the best approach to training is to keep sessions similar and simple, making only small adjustments over time. This makes it easier to track your improvements and identify weaknesses, maximizing each session, weeks and months. The biggest challenge is motivation. It’s often easier to keep athletes motivated and consistent with varied, fancy workouts in the short term than simple ones and focused on the long term, so balancing simplicity and motivation is crucial—and the optimal point is different for every athlete. Just see two great runners and how they trained: Emil Zatopek did back and forth 400ish meters for every training session, Frank Shorter did almost everyday a 10k plus a long run on weekends. Its not about fancy, its about long term consistency and improvement.

Also, if a session is more simple or less fancy, it helps to train the mind to be focused. If you consistently do 3 hr bike trainer sessions with no phone or much entertainment and keep focused the whole time, then the bike leg of your next race will be way less demanding for the mind.

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