Mental Tools for Race Pacing

Wow, two days of sun in a row, and no rain for 96 hours. We hit 65 F today, and even in the AM, it was “warm” enough to bike at 9 AM without bundling up.

I went out to Dupont for the Saturday morning weekly South Sound Triathletes ride. This is the ride, 7 months ago, on which I rammed that pick up truck and upended my life. But I’ve been back several times with no ill effects; no PTSD here.

The Base has a live fire zone in the middle of our ride route, and the roads have been closed there for months. Since it blocks a good portion of our on-base riding, today, we just decided to ride off base from mile 0. Down onto the freeway for 1/2 mile, then up into the Thurston County highlands, where the roads are smooth, the shoulders safe, the riding straight and (relatively) flat.

We had a good crew. Four younger riders (late 20s, mainly), who are getting ready for a half Ironman in Hawaii on June 4th. They provided some serious work ethic, but with a very light heart. The rest of us were a motley mix: one guy who was getting back to his first ride since last summer – he is a very strong cyclist, but his winter sloth (and a broken spoke today) kept him at the group pace. An older cyclist (older than me); a runner who’s learning to bike hard (meaning: he has several bikes at home, but is unfamiliar with long, steady efforts); a mid 50s guy getting ready for Ironman Canada.

And, the most nervous of us all, someone who’s been laboring all winter indoors on his bike trainer, to get ready for what might be the toughest North American Ironman, in St. George, Utah, in 2 weeks.

He’s an Endurance Nation team mate, and his just now at the peak of his fitness and starting to get his taper strength. He was twitchy, couldn’t stop pedaling, going faster than the rest of us, and circling back whenever he got too far ahead. He is so ready for the race, but he’s not yet ready to admit it to himself.

As we were both leaving the coffee shop, he came out with one final question for me, one he’d been saving through the 2+hour ride, the 30 minute run afterwards, and then the group kafe klatch afterwards, the time for trash talk, sharing war stories, and oogling new sunglass purchases.

“So, I know that St. George is either UP or DOWN on the run. How do you keep up a steady pace on a course like that, like our coaches tell us?”

“Yeah, you can’t really use a pace watch, or even heart rate there.”

“I’m thinking that it’s just based on ‘gut feel’, right?”

“Well, yes, but you have to know what that means. I haven’t used a pace watch or a heart rate monitor on an IM marathon for years. You obviously have to change your pace depending on whether you’re running up or down hill, and you do want to maintain a steady effort level and OVERALL average speed through the course of the race. So the question is, how do you do that?”

I paused, and gave him a raised eyebrow. “How are you at running downhill?” He’s not a small guy, and sometimes larger runners have trouble going down, with all the impact on their leg joints. He’s long and lean, though, and he said,

“No problem, I’m a great downhill runner.”

“Good. That helps.

“Here’s how I think about it. Yes, you do have to run at a steady perceived level of effort, whether you’re going up or downhill. One of the great things about our training, is we spend a lot of time at different effort levels, so we know what it ‘feels’ like inside to be running at an ‘easy’ pace, or a ‘half marathon pace’, or a ‘10k’ pace.

“So you’d think we just have to dial ourselves into running at our ‘easy pace’, and stay with that feeling for the whole race. If you do that, though, you’ll gradually slow down. In reality, what you want to be doing is start out at a pace so ridiculously stupidly slow that it feels like easy pace for a turtle, or for your grandmother. Then, after about 3-6 miles, you’ll find yourself going the same speed, but now it feels like the usual easy pace. As the race progresses, if you maintain the same speed, you should be ‘feeling’ yourself work through marathon pace, half marathon pace, until, in the last six miles, you are at the feeling of TP, or 10K pace. And, if you’ve timed things right, you can get into 5K zone in the last 2-3 miles, and IP, or what seems like all out, in the last 1/4 mile.

“See, you’ve got to uncouple in your mind the association you’ve learned between rate of perceived exertion and speed. There are two really hard parts about this. First, at the start, we don’t spend very much time at ‘easy pace plus 30 seconds’, so going that slow requires a fair amount of mental effort and attention. And then, at some point between 10 an 20 miles – it’s different each time, it seems – a war starts in your head. A war of belief, part of you knowing you can and should go faster, and part feeling you can’t and don’t want to.

“My resolution to that war is to just get out of the line of fire – ‘I’ simply drop out of the conflict, and let my body win. My conscious mind’s only function is to remind my body it CAN up the effort level if it starts to slack off. But the less attention ‘I’ pay to effort, the better I do. I just check my mile splits, and use them to confirm my body is doing what it can.

“Other people, though, when they let their body ‘win’, find that means slowing down or walking. Those folks – you may or may not be one of them – need to have a very POWERFUL pre-programmed motivation for continuing to increase their perceived rate of effort. Our coaches call that the ‘one thing’, and I do use that, but mine is pretty simple – time. I have a time which I commit to within the first three miles of the marathon, based on a belief (a) I know how to run *easy* enough at the start and (b) I know I have trained to be able to maintain that speed/pace thru the whole race by gradually increasing my perceived level of effort. I use those mile splits as my ‘whip’ to keep upping the ante.

“St. George will present a dilemma in that not all miles are created equal there. Some will have more up than down, and vice versa. That will be the tricky part in that race, you may have to do your time checks less frequently, to even things out.”

I guess if I’m starting to think this way again, I’m coming closer to my old racing self. I’ve got a half marathon in 3 weeks, and I need to go sub 1:40 there to get the confidence back that I still do know how to race, and that I still do have some speed, strength, power, and endurance. And, in the end, that I still want to make the effort.