Segment 8: The Mystery of Mile 2
Concepts
Rule of Thirds
Setting MileSplits
Progressive vs. Consistent vs. Responsive
What it means to “get out hard”
Setting Expectations
Using other athletes for motivation
Rule of Thirds
Breaking any hard task up into pieces is a useful way to digest a task. They always say - How do you eat an Elephant? “Piece by Piece”. The core message here is that you can’t worry about the end at the start, you can’t worry how much it will hurt, or how you will feel. This quickly becomes overwhelming and you will struggle to process all you want to accomplish and try to control. The more you can simply your race plan, the easier it is to execute. You should focus on breaking the race up into 3 pieces. This doesn’t have to be 0-1,1-2, 2-3 you can also break it into start, middle, and end, or even use this to tackle a central obstacle like a hill or weak area.
Here’s how I would apply it to a course with a major hill:
1 - Get out controlled and expect the hill to be hard. No Fear!
2 - Attack the hill and push for 10 steps after. Push, Breath, Go
3- Settle back in and hammer home the finish.
Don’t focus on singularity within the 3 pieces. Each 3rd can comprise of more than one “element” but you should keep it simple enough that you can verbalize it or summarize it easily. I find it most helpful if you remove the focus on mile splits as you create and set your intentions. If the effort is in the right place, the pace will follow. Running by feel is a skill.
Setting Mile Splits
What if the course is perfect for setting mile splits? I’ll keep this super simple: give yourself a split “range” or don’t focus on splits at all. Mile splits are simply information for you to use for decision-making. Whatever you hear cannot be a reason to dynamically shift your plan. Yes, if you’re feeling good and ahead of pace - it can be comforting to see or hear a good split. However, if you’re going in expecting to hear good things and you hear a slow split - this can often shift you into a negative mindset. This is especially true if you look down at your watch periodically throughout a race - seeing a “slow pace” has caused more good to great races to unravel because they gave into an instantaneous thought. In that moment when you see or hear a “slow” split you have to take it in as information but you don’t always have to adjust your behavior or let the information affect you.
Consistent vs. Progressive vs. Responsive
Effort over Everything
Is it better to negative split? What about hilly courses or courses you’ve never seen? If you think there is a perfect “pace scheme” to be found that’s simply impossible to deliver - the name of the game in racing is effort and you need to be intimately aware of your effort when racing. What we can do is look at different ways to expend our efforts, leverage our strengths, and minimize the impact of our weaknesses.
3 Flavors
As runners begin to master racing, and build trust in their training and racing abilities they progress through three distinct phases of race modeling. The first is a consistent race model (7:00,7:00,7:00) this will lead to a 21:00 3 mile and is a great first step and shows control and understanding of their effort. The second race model is a progressive race model which is considered by many to be the ideal race model. It requires significant trust in your fitness and abilities at the start and a significant amount of control over your effort not so you can just finish fast but so you can finish competitively. Nearly every world record has been run with this model and often closes with a big and decisive kick into the finish. This brings us to our third and final race model in the progression - the responsive model. If this was about racing alone - I might have called this the “tactical" model but in some cases you are presented with a course where you have little beta, or you have a tactical close race, or you are in a position to score points for your team. You are required to respond to what’s around you and therefore need to follow what tI call the racing ABC’s (Always Be in Control) which means you are conserving and managing your effort, constantly aware of how many matches you have left to burn. When it comes to the last K of a responsive race - you either managed your effort well or you didn’t. Mastery of the responsive model requires years and years of racing to get right and always carries a certain element of luck mixed in with personal insight.
Mile 2 | The Mystery Mile
The slow down in the middle mile often occurs because you’ve gone out too hard. You should still have control over the effort in the 5K from Mile 1 to Mile. The slow down occurs when you go out too hard and have to scale back your effort significantly to avoid a crash and burn scenario. This retreat to the comfort zone is when you see a delta of :20-50 seconds in a single mile. Stay controlled early, your effort should feel similar to a tempo run. Once you have mastered the consistent method of running a race, you can start to work on negative splitting your race. Once you have built confidence in how to start, maintain, and close - you will be able to gauge your effort on any course that is thrown at you.
Predict the Pain, Practice the Pain
Our brain is wired to predict, so instead of trying to push back negative thoughts - focus on settling in and using your brain to tell you when you’ve found goal pace. There is no such thing as a “pain-free” 5K when you’re truly out to race, so practice needs to replicate the effort you’re looking to put down on race day. If you can’t hit the paces in practice - it certainly won’t happen miraculously on race day. There is a point at which fatigue will set in and you have to do your best to manage that fatigue and discomfort. The first thing you need to do is to tell yourself it will be uncomfortable - this gives your prediction machine of a brain something to chew on so when it gets hard you’re not sounding alarm bells. If you’re not doing tempo runs, or workouts that help simulate your race effort - it can be difficult to know what’s reasonable for a race and even harder for your brain and body to allow you to go there. Key element is to go to a dark place in training occasionally, this will prepare you for when things get hard.
2 Workouts
Start and Settle: 1600’s, 1200’s, mixed reps
Using a grass field or a cone on the track - set a marker. This marker is your visual representation to “settle in” - normally 150m-200m in you need to settle down and relax as much as possible in your race. You can do 3x 1 Mile, 4x 1200m, or a mixture of distance reps where you aim to finish the rep at your goal 5k pace, no more than 3-5 seconds/ mile faster than 5k goal pace. Done on grass this can help you understand the effort of grass vs. pavement. If done on a track - use 400m markers and try to nail your splits every time. Key in on your breathing and effort in this session.
Broken Reps / 3 part Tempo
Think of this as a simulation where you’re breaking things up into 3 parts. The first part should be strong and similar to workout #1, where you settle in after 150-200m. Then you need to bring your focus into the 2nd part of the continuous effort focusing on maintaining your pace from piece 1 or acceleration 5-10 seconds per mile. Finally, you need to stay focused on maintaining or accelerating for the 3rd part. This 3 part tempo can take on a few different forms to practice this intentional acceleration; it can be at race pace where you accelerate inside each rep or significantly slower, with the intention of just practicing an intentional increase in speed.
1 - 3000m continuous(1km,1km,1km)
2- 2x 2km on 5:00 Rest - (400m,800m, 800m)
3 - 3x 1 Mile (400m, 800m, 400m) (Accelerate + relax, Hold Pace, Accelerate + kick)
Tails
This is a fun workout that works the last mile more than any other. Find an object that can easily be seen from a distance. The last person in the group throws it behind their back. If it’s “heads” you’re done with the rep, if it’s tails - you have to kick/close 200m once you see the object. This is a fun way to work on responding and pushing when you don’t expect it.
