I've heard that doing 75% of the distance of your race as a solo time trial can be a good predictor of race time. For example, you time trial a 1200 in 3:45, so this is an indicator that you could probably race a 1600 in 5 flat.
Or you time trial 1.5 miles in 9:00. This an indicator that you could probably race a 2 mile around 12:00.
Anyone experimented with this?
As you probably know, this is exactly the workout (i.e. 3/4 of a mile in 2:59) that Roger Bannister interpreted as indicating that he was ready for a sub 4 minute mile.
It is very hard to do though I think for certain psychological types over a certain distance, at least without pacing. E.g. even for a 3km it would be challenging without pacing or some other external stimulus. Apart from the difficulty of pace conversion, doing it on a treadmill would probably be very helpful due to the exact pacing.
hard to do wrote:
It is very hard to do though I think for certain psychological types over a certain distance, at least without pacing. E.g. even for a 3km it would be challenging without pacing or some other external stimulus. Apart from the difficulty of pace conversion, doing it on a treadmill would probably be very helpful due to the exact pacing.
For me, it was more like 80% of the distance. A 39 second 300 solo time trial got me a 54 second 400, not the predicted 52. A 90 second 600 got me a 2:05 and not a 2:00 800.
The only one that was close was the 1200 - 1500 conversion. A solo 3:36 1200 (72 sec/lap) got me a 4:30 1500 in a race (also 72 sec/lap). I was completely exhausted after that 1500 and would not have been able to hold on to that pace for another 100m.
The longest race I would do the 75% of the distance time trial is for an 800m. Otherwise, the time trial feels like a race and you want to save that effort for the actual race.