Race Tactics

While reading the The Running Times for this month, I came across an article on Race Tactics. The article delved a little into two common themes such as the "set and kick" approach or the "push hard to wear down your opponent" approach.

But to me race tactics are a lot more than just these two approaches. Race Tactics have to include self awareness. Meaning that as you are racing – you are well aware of everything going on inside on your own body: are the feet hurting, how do the calves feel, are the hamstrings tight, are the quads feeling heavy, how are the arms feeling, and what is my breathing like. All of these factors and many more body signals go into the decision making process before picking up the pace, trying to maintain my current pace, or even slowing the pace so that I can carry my existing effort to the end.

For many of us like me, this is plenty of information to handle during a race. But for the people who want to take it a step further, there is additional information about the guy or gal that you want to out run that needs to be factored into the equation. How do they look, are they straining, how is their breathing? Are they slowing heading up hill? Etc.

All of this stuff is real time information that must be process during the race itself, but then there is other information that can be gathered even before the race.

To be honest, with everyone that run I am always taking notes. And being that I live in Charlotte, the men and the women that I train with are the exact same ones that I race with on Saturday morning. So it would always be in my best interest to know their strengths and weakness. Do they like to surge up hills? Do they surge on the down hills? What is their kick like? Do they show the strain of a hard effort? Everything is a learning experience.

And having raced for years, I have tried my best to hide most of my "tics". This way most people will never get a good read on me during the race. As for training miles, I found that I struggle on the up hills and like going slowly down hills, and when it comes to sprinting, I only do it when I must. My strengths are fairly simple, I always try to wear people down because I am neither a great sprinter nor am I super fast. But the longer the race, the better I like my changes because speed and endurance tend to equalize as the distance grows.

 

Just some random thoughts from the Cool Down Runner