By Coach Adolfo Salgueiro

A handful of weekends ago, while running with a friend, I asked her about her latest marathon. She had plenty to say about the poor organization, but what bugged her the most, and with plenty of reason, was her pacer’s strategy.

My friend and her buddy were aiming for a specific time goal and decided a pacer was the way to reach it. Isn’t that why they’re there? But this particular one decided the way to achieve the goal was to go faster so the group could “bank time and be ahead when they were tired at the end”.

What? Seriously? What running genius came up with that one? WTF?

The reason for a pacer’s existence is to keep a pace, hence the name. They’re there to facilitate the feasibility of you achieving a preset finishing time. I wrote about running with a pacer a few years ago, so I’m not going into the details of what it entails. I do recommend you check out that post by clicking here.

Let’s illustrate how bad this strategy sucks with an example: Let’s say you trained for a 3:59 marathon, so you’re averaging about 9:05 per mile. If your pacer is running just 5% faster, which doesn’t seem like much, he/she will be guiding you at 8:38 per mile. If you can make it to 15 miles in 2:09:30 without imploding, you will be 6:45 ahead. To make your goal time, you now have 1:49:30 to complete 11 miles. That is a 9:57 pace.

Does this make sense for someone who trained to run around a 9:05 pace?

Ensuring you hit the wall with enough time to spare when the suck fest begins will not improve your chances of hitting your goal. That’s a guarantee. My friend and her friend did the right thing; they ditched the pacer and ran their own race.

This said, what is the most sensible racing strategy for a race?

Negative Split

The best strategy is usually the negative split. Even though it sounds bad just because of the word “negative”, it is the sensible way to go, especially as distances or time on your feet get longer.

A negative split means you complete the second half of your race faster than the first. This can be achieved by properly managing a race. You start easy as you warm up and sort out the initial foot traffic, you follow your race plan to the tee, you hydrate and fuel properly, and then, you have plenty in the tank to coast to the finish line. Strong, happy, and having achieved your goal. Speaking for me alone, this is a better experience than having a few minutes to spare during a guaranteed, miserable end of the race.

In the example above, imagine the runner took three miles to warm up at 20 seconds over marathon pace, then picked it up at 5 seconds over pace until halfway. Then she picked it up for 10 miles at marathon pace, and when she found herself at mile 23, she still had enough to kick it up a notch, going 7 seconds under pace. That is a marathon in 3:59:28. First half in 2:00:50 and the second half in 1:58:38, a 2:12 negative split.

What makes more sense?

But What About a 5K?

One thing is a 5k, another one is a longer distance where you can’t push with all your might for the duration of the race.

There is a valid 5K racing strategy where you run the first mile as fast as you can, the second one a tad slower as you adjust for fatigue, and then you hold for dear life on the last mile to give it whatever you have left. This is different from banking time, as it is a short race in which you are taking advantage of being fresh at the start. You don’t have time to adjust if you make a mistake, and you still have enough in you to finish strong, even without a negative split.

There are plenty of bad racing strategies, such as running someone else’s race, running ahead of the pacers, trying new gear, not warming up if you plan to start fast, etc. But among all these crappy ones, there is an undisputed world-record holder: Banking time for later.

Any thoughts? Please share in the comment box below.