If you lived in an area with no other track runners but you wanted to improve your track times, how do you train specifically for solo time trials? I am thinking of mental training as well as physical. Solo races are hard - especially without the fan fare and without anyone pushing me.
I figure if I can get 3/4 of the distance at goal pace I can gut out the last bit. The hard part is to not let my mind wander and lose time. Perhaps I need a dog as my rabbit!
You drive to an open track meet.
When you start doing harder work, try to hit your splits without looking at your watch (look at it after, obviously, but not during intervals). After a while, you'll get a pretty good feel for your pace, which makes it much easier to hold. Right before your TT, do a quick 400 at race pace just to make sure your pacing is down.
Even splits are the best way to go, going out too hard by yourself is a death sentence.
I actually ran my 3k pb in a time trial. I had a friend run every other lap at goal pace. I would think almost any somewhat in shape runner should be able to help you out. If you're doing it solo by choice though, I don't really know of much that could help you out. Focus I guess, but it's very tough to run anything decent completely on your own.
Get a friend to time you - give them your goal time, then they can cheer you on! It's harder to do if you are completely alone
Otherwise measure out time trial course on one of your regular runs. A couple of miles fast on this will seem much easier than running round a track on your own
If you have a definite goal time, split it up into 100m or 200m segments. (People usually aim to run time trials at even pace, which makes this easier.) Then give a list of those times, a digital stop watch, and a whistle to someone. As the watch hits each split time, s/he blows the whistle. You can gauge immediately whether you're on pace or ahead of/behind it. Don't worry about splits, just "race the whistle."
Two wrinkles:
1) Because people take a few tenths of a second to respond to seeing a time appear on a watch, and the sound of the whistle also takes a few tenths to travel across the track, make each time on the list that you give your friend one second faster (cumulative timing) than what you're actually aiming for. For instance, if you're going for a 3:30 split at some point, put down 3:29 on the list.
2) Have your friend practice doing this a little bit, so you know s/he won't f it up. (And hit your own watch at the start/finish of the trial, just in case.)