Training well, but racing poorly

You need to do a hard 20 second sprint in the middle of the race to gain confidence and then keep the effort HARD HARD HARD! You will drop many seconds using this strategy. Staying very angry helps too.

dznuts wrote:

I'm sure most people here have gone through a period where workouts have been going well, but races have been bad. My PR is 14:50 and the workouts I am able to do now are about even with my workouts leading up to my PR 2 years ago. At this point I have had multiple races over 15:20 (or equivalent). I'll go out around PR pace (because my training indicates I should) and feel O.K. for the first half, but gradually slow down after that.

Does anyone have any advice on what I should do? Do I need to take a break? Physiologically, how is this even possible? I can't put a finger on what is different between now and when I was doing virtually the same training two years ago.

Go out about 10 seconds off the pace. I always did better warming into a race and closing solid. Run your intervals in a negative split, and finish off your LR with a faster finish. The key is you are teaching yourself to finish strong. Even your easy runs should have an easy mile the first one and the last should be slightly quicker. It's an advantage to be closing quick when everyone is dying.

Winter is not the best time to PR, maybe you do need to step back and run easy for awhile too? PRs are hard to break after running awhile, and it takes patience. Nice PR BTW!

Race more. It's a skill in its own right and no amount of training can fully develop it.

Magic wizard coach! He he, Hogwarts time!

I agree. You need a great coach to figure it out. So look somewhere else because Jan Stensson is a lying coach. ;D

What happened to Slava, Jan?

Slava is just doing fine! :) He will soon report himself ( Just a little "tasting, he did 15 x 400m at 69.8 sec average today)