“It’s almost always better to finish a race wondering, ‘I wonder how much further ahead I would have finished if I had gone out a little faster?’, than ‘I wonder how much further ahead I would have finished if I had not gone out too fast and died like a pig?’“
~Dr. Jack Daniels, ‘Daniels’ Running Formula’
We talk a lot about how to pace ourselves during a race–how to be under control during the first part of the race. No race is won during the first mile, but a race can be lost in the first mile. Particularly at courses like Crystal and Mount SAC, the real race does not truly get started until after the first mile.
Particularly in the first part of a race, it is important to concentrate on your own actions and what you are doing, not on everything that is going on around you. You can’t control what others are doing around you–particularly in high school, you don’t know the relative fitness or ability of the people around you, and whether they are running within themselves or are going out crazy fast and are about to pay for their mistake. What you can control is your own race and the execution of your own racing strategy. You will benefit from being focused on the task at hand. All you can do is run the best race you possibly can, and not worry about all the chaos around you–at least in the first part of the race. Later in the race, when you start feeling tired, seeing someone in front of you can be a good target and goal and a source of inspiration…or the determination that ‘no one is going to pass me in the last 800m’ can carry you beyond where you thought you could go.
We had a great example of this strategy at the Mt. SAC race in 2016. At the one mile mark immediately at the start of the first significant hill on the course, Anjali Thontakudi was racing side-by-side with an athlete from Corona. At the end of the race, Anjali placed 6th while the athlete from Corona came in 46th. We don’t know everything about the Corona athlete, but we can safely conclude that Anjali ran a good strategic race and did not let herself get distracted or sidetracked from her own racing strategy. At the finish, Anjali was certainly giving all she had left. I think that if we tracked most of the other Monta Vista athletes that day at Mt. SAC, we would have found similarly good race results–Monta Vista looked really smart and competitive all day.
This is great lesson to remember: Don’t panic about what your position is early in a race if you are confident that you are executing your race strategy correctly.
Developing our own personal race strategies is an ongoing process. We want to experiment with going out a little faster, figuring out where to push and surge and drop the hammer, and where we will want to conserve and pace ourselves and wait until the moment to pounce. As we get stronger and more fit we want to re-evaluate how to best use our new skills during a race. Being the best racers we can be is a continual learning process.
You all are doing great…keep working, keep thinking, keep learning! MVXC is really a wonderful team.
“Run with your head the first two thirds of the race and with your heart in the final third.”
~Jack Daniels
