Tips on pushing pain barrier and mental side of racing?

1. You need pre race mental prep. Tell yourself over and over again that the race will hurt bad. Do this during your workouts.

2. You also need some longer intervals to get used to being in stress later in the race. 4-5x 1K repeats are excellent for this, at between 3k-5k race pace. Run like you want to race by pushing from 500-800m. 2-3min recovery jog, not walk.

You have plenty of speed. Keep that up with 150s at end of workouts, but do the longer repeats first. That helps make you run fast when tired, like a kick.

Good luck. We're all counting on you.

Like the other guy said mental prep. Start a few days before the race. Prepare for the worst, I always ran my best when I imagined struggling the whole race. If I was genuinely afraid at the starting line I always killed it, when I was confident, I usually underachieved.

Everyone's different, this might not work for you.

Can you get a faster teammate to pace you?

unfortunately the only guy thats faster than about 5:30

It's simple enough. You go with the 4:35 guy with the intention of hanging on until you can't, or you finish. Every time you ask yourself whether you can hang on any longer, the answer is "yes". When you really cannot hang on any more, your body will let go before your mind can form the intention to wonder.

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF! *SNAP!*

Mental aspect way overrated. Get really fit and it will be easier to run fast.

I think the Hard Easy approach can help.

This means make your hard days harder and your easy days easier.

Hard days = it's on ! really mentally be in the zone.

- do a big warm up (just like before the race) .

- Torture yourself in your workouts a bit more. For example instead of 8x400s do 12x400s or cut the rest from 2min to 45 sec (200m jog float) , - do 4 mile Tempo 2 min jog then 2 mile Tempo a tick faster

- hill workouts or Hill surges after your main workout to learn how to push on tired legs

Easy days = run easy but also relax mentally , do some stretching with relaxed breathing or yoga (netflix has some yoga for runners)

Over time your body will have a switch (hard day, easy day)

Relax more on the first lap.

Most of the time, when people's pace sags in the 3rd lap, it's because they've gone out too hard on the 1st one, and they've continually decelerated until the bell.

Keep an even pace throughout the first 3 laps (if you want to go sub-4:40, then it's easy; go 70 secs for each). You might have to push a bit on the third lap to stay focussed, but if you've done it right, this shouldn't be a problem.

Remember, you can always make up a handful of seconds on the last lap if the motivation's there, and you haven't filled your legs with lactic acid (again, the result of going out too hard) and/or completely lost form.

This.

^^^This. Just get fitter.

Control your breathing. If you notice that your breathing becomes more erratic and desperate sounding, it may be helpful to focus on this aspect, taking deeper and more rhythmic breaths, until it’s under control.

This may not be your issue, but for me, I’ve noticed that it helps a little bit. Don’t know if it’ll shave five seconds or not, but it’ll help you when you start to feel like giving up.

To get really fit, you need to push the pain barrier. I’m afraid it’s impossible to teach. Either you are mentally tough or not. I’ve seen lots of kids get to the pain barrier and not push through simply because they think the pain isn’t worth it. They’re not wrong. but to excel, pain tolerance is key.

Change your beliefs about pain from something that should be avoided to something that should be pursued. Think of pain as pleasure. Think of pain as the whole reason you run in the first place. Science has shown us that a lot of our pain is actually more psychological than physical, and our beliefs actually affect our perception of it to a certain extent.

Caffeine also helps, but the post-adrenaline dump after a hard workout or race can really suck.

During the race, focus on something other than the pain. All of the following have worked for me:

-focusing on pace

-focusing on my competitors

-thinking about my coaches and teammates (wanting to score as many points as possible for my team)

-reminding myself of the saying, “pain is temporary, pride is forever”

Some of you are always looking for an intangible that doesn’t exist. All you can really do is train and improve your fitness.

You're an idiot. This is stupid advice.

What have your splits been on races where you’ve blown up in the 3rd lap?

I’ve never found mental preparation practices that help me too much to be honest. I usually run best when I’m most relaxed and have a gentle monologue in my head (“you’re okay, you’re okay” works better for me than “get your f’ing sh*t together”), but this is probably pretty individual.

Even splits make the third lap easier, but the thing that has helped me the most is just zoning out and focusing on the singlet ahead of me. If you lose contact then you have to figure out something else of course, but if there’s a pair of shoulders to focus on the mental game gets a whole lot easier.

Nope. Or at least, nope to your first three sentences.

Every 2nd-rate high school coach tries this angle, but they have it completely backwards.

You don't improve at racing by hurting more. You improve by learning to run faster while hurting less.

How do you do that? Change your focus in workouts. When you are doing intervals, especially at race pace, your main priority is maintaining composure (mental and physical) throughout the duration of the rep. When it starts to get painful, acknowledge the pain while still focusing on staying relaxed. This will teach you to inhibit the emotional reaction to pain. And instead of trying to make your last rep the fastest, try to make it the smoothest - you'll find that it ends up being the fastest rep of the workout anyway.

Before races, instead of psyching yourself out about how much it's going to hurt, tell yourself you are going to feel good.