If everyone agrees that negative or even splits are the best approach, then why so many people still positive split 5ks?

They tried to run even or negative splits but failed since they were too optimistic about their fitness. End of thread.

if you really have never positive split any race it suggest your starting to slow and underestimating your fitness

I know strava is loaded with recreational people, but also some decent non elite runners too. For reference, this weeks leader board on Strava LRC group top 20 all have positive splits(yeah I'm bored right now, bored enough to look through a random sample of LRC strava members).

weird wrote:

if you really have never positive split any race it suggest your starting to slow and underestimating your fitness

This is not true at all.

another runner wrote:

weird wrote:

if you really have never positive split any race it suggest your starting to slow and underestimating your fitness

This is not true at all.

or you never has a bad day

Positive split is actually a good strategy if it’s not too extreme.

Watch the men's 3000m world record

The 5K is a tricky distance. You can be a bit more cautious in a longer race and then get on pace, but you've got to get your pace just right in a 5K almost from the start. The pace is quite a bit faster than your lactate threshold, so you're on a short fuse to blowing up the whole time. You don't do as much work at 5K pace as you do near LT, so the pace isn't as instantly familiar, particularly after a taper. By the time your pace on your GPS watch is accurate - if you even have one - you've run far enough to do some damage if you've gotten too ambitious.

For people focusing on longer events, a 5K is often a tune-up race, so you're not exactly sure what your fitness is. Probably not a lot of people peaking for a January 5K, so most people are not sure what their fitness is right now in any case. Winter training tends to be less consistent than summer training due to weather conditions, too.

Cou should positive split anything shorter than half marathon.

The first 200-400 m can be run anaerobic and a bit faster than your steady pace.

But what if you ran your PR before the age of strava and garmin?

The answer is simple: most people do not know how to race.

Well, according to this article optimal pacing is to go out 3-6% faster than goal pace for the first mile. So yeah, I guess slight positive split is the best way for non-elites.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17149992

There are a ton of other factors that can produce positive splits though.

1. Inexperience racers going out too hard. Go to a local 5K. Watch how many people take off at a dead sprint.

2. Racers simply not knowing their fitness. Maybe they peaked in the fall and this is just a function check where they underperformed. Or they just did a fun holiday race and overestimated their shape.

3. Underestimating the impact of winter weather. More layers, colder weather, wind, etc.

4. They were a front of the pack runner with nobody close enough to catch, nobody close enough to catch them, and just coasted in the last 800m.

I think most people like negative splitting. It's a psychological boost to know that you are getting faster and passing people. BUT positive splits arnt always a bad thing. Every race takes on a different form and sometimes you gotta roll with the pack if they go out hard... especially in shorter races.

It's smart to exclude elite runners from this discussion. Pacing is kinda irrelevant in a tactical race. Shoot... Mo Farah took a water break in the Oly 5000.

People are morons.

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another runner wrote:

weird wrote:

if you really have never positive split any race it suggest your starting to slow and underestimating your fitness

This is not true at all.

Not only that - it is not even English at all.

"it suggests"

"you're starting"

"too slow"

when a question is based on an assumption I always think it worth while to question the assumption. does everyone agree that negative splits are the best approach? I see it widely reported as being a good strategy, but, for example, no world record for the 800m has ever been run off a negative split. so if it is such a good strategy, why is it so hard to find examples of it working at the highest level?

I read a survey of performances in the US Olympic trials, and this found only a very small percentage of runners ran a negative split. however, the report very honestly added that it was not possible to know how many of those runners had tried to negative split, and failed. the point being that race results (or Strava date) are not an accurate indicator of runners intentions, only of their achievements. maybe a lot of folks don't negative split simply because they are not a machine with perfect pacing strategy.

another important point is that an awful lot of runners have no idea how unfit they really are. a large proportion of them say things like, "I'm hoping to run x" or "my target is to break y" when it is pretty obvious they have no hope of doing either of those things. so they are, effectively, starting too fast trying to neg split a target they have no hope of reaching and then dying a horrible slow death in the second half. calling that a positive split is an insult to splits.

seeing so many of them does not prove, or even suggest, that it is the best approach, merely that it is the most common. to show that it was the best approach you would have to demonstrate that it, at least theoretically, would provide better results than any other possibility, but all you have is an anecdotal comparison with one other approach. this is not necessarily indicative of anything other than the existence of stopwatches.

that could be true if you had only ever run one race, or always go out dreadfully slow, or start at the back of the pack, or are pushing a buggy or loaded down with gels and a backpack and automatically self-loading hydration station, or whatever, so it adds nothing to the discussion.

Cheers.

Obvi wrote:

People are morons.

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morAns

I get what you're saying. I was only seeing one (random people's 'strava' 5k prs) and seeing the opposite of what most people would say is the best approach for a 5k. I get that there are many things that can arise race day and how some things turn brown unexpectedly in a race , ironically these are PR times and not just a test of fitness. These are times most people would say, "yeah man, I'm a sub 15 min guy" the road that got them there doesn't matter because they still broke 15 for a 5k even if it was a large positive split race, they wouldn't brag about how they negative or even split for a 15:42 two weeks before though.

And yes i do ask this question as a way to view my own performance and how I can race better. All my PRs are negative splits, which makes me wonder if I'm not trying to my potential. Most of my races first mile is always slower than goal pace because that's what I've been taught, that's what I've been practicing, and that's what other people (by large) agree upon.

So today when I was bored i was just randomly looking at other people's PRs for a 5k and started seeing a massive trend that nearly everyone of their 'suggested' 5k PRs were positive splits it got me wondering if it's the best approach for the non elite guy.

ItsOnlyRunning wrote: Well, according to this article optimal pacing is to go out 3-6% faster than goal pace for the first mile.

interestingly, the paper doesn't actually show that at all.

I concede that the paper does actually say that, in the sense that the specific words, "In order to optimize 5-km performance, runners should start the initial 1.63 km of a 5-km race at paces 3-6% greater than their current average race pace" do appear in the paper, but what they did, the study they carried out, the experiment they conducted, does not make that point.

1) the study had only 11 subjects. this is not a statistically significant population size and therefore anything this paper might show is nothing more than an interesting anecdote. there is also no control group. when testing a training or performance intervention there should be a control group so that you compare the study subjects with the control group. in this study, the subjects were compared with themselves, which is, essentially, high school level playing at science for demonstration purposes. it isn't actual science.

2) to show that strategy A is optimum, you would have to show that it was better than any other possible strategy. all they did was test three possibilites. therefore, all they can say is that strategy A was the best of those three. they have literally no idea what the optimum strategy is, or whether or not there even is an optimum strategy.

3) their own words state quite clearly that what their experiment showed was that initial mile pace "can be 3 to 6% greater than current average race pace without negatively impacting performance." which means you don't get worse if you do this. it said nothing at all about making improvements.

4) their 3-6% pacing strategy was based on current best time, as performed on the treadmill in the lab, not the target time for the race or even on the runners known personal best. so, this has nothing to do with racing, it was about equalling their most recent performance. fiddling with initial pace does not make you worse than the run you did three days ago.

this is a very good example of a scientific paper claiming to show something the experiment protocol and subsequent analysis does not support. it is a very common occurence and the reason why I recommend a thorough read of any science paper you want to quote.

Cheers.

Positive split the 800

Anything longer even or negative split.

That is fact.

There are reasons a pr can be run with positive splits.

The first would be that a runner never negative splits a race.

The second would be the cousre is downhill the first half .

The third is that a 5k isn't that far so even if you go out a little fast and positive split a couple seconds, you may have just had a great day and your time is faster than you have done with a negative split. You still would have run a little faster with a negative split.

On the other hand, you can go out too slow, run a negative split and be nowhere near your potential.

That is why you have to race. The only way to fine tune your effort is to run a few races. Go out harder in a couple and hang on. Go out slower in a couple and catch a bunch of runners. Try to hit even splits in a couple more. By doing this, you can find the optimal effort to run your fastest time