Pappy wrote:
FrankShorterCC3 wrote:I said "Excepting for."
In my opinion "going out fast," rarely results in a faster time for an athlete unless he or she has been holding back in a race. In 12 years as a high school coach I never witnessed such a phenomenon. One of my athletes claimed all the way past graduation that going out fast was the best plan for him. However his statistics proved otherwise. (His best race was his last one where I gave him the exact plan for the entire race. He set a huge PR on a course he ran 3 straight times that season!)
Sounds like you should of coached him for races before the last one.
Good response.
I coached this particular kid for 3 years of CC and Track & Field. It was his idea initially to go out fast in races. In CC his junior year that meant going out as high as 5th place at the mile in a race with 150 runners. He would then finish 75th or so. I talked to him about this the first time he did this and he said that his goal for the year was to hang on longer and longer as the year went on. Since this kid's older brother had been a top runner I felt I had to go along.
If I coached again I would suggest that kids try different things during the regular season so that we could determine their best racing style for the important races later on.
I imagine that there are those who psychologically may be better off starting faster. I've never seen it myself although I suppose Tom Byers would be considered an exception to this rule. I have seen him on video. I once saw a kid win the state 800 title by running the first lap in 50, the last lap in 65!
I also saw a kid whose best time coming in was 51 seconds for the 400, win that race in negative splits. He set the state record at that time in the mid-47 second range by coming from last place. This was easy to see as he was in lane 8!!!
It's not common to have 400 runners get negative splits but I had a 400 kid who was terrible in the 5K and 1600 move down to that distance and he always ran negatives.
I've been told that someone whose strength is there speed should start fast.
Someone whose strength is their strength should start slow. For me that is how it worked out. My head coach in college, not the distance coach, accused me of lacking confidence.