Race season is upon us. And that means lots of athletes are starting to prepare by making their lists & checking them twice. While lists are great, there is a bit more to preparing for a race. Oh…like training?!! 😉 So, just exactly how do you get yourself “race ready”?
Here are four things to consider when preparing for your best race day:
Get Yourself Race Ready
1. Race the way you train. I made this #1 because it’s such a common mistake. Believe me…I made this critical error in my 1st Half Ironman triathlon…during the run portion. I trained all my long runs at a 10:00 / mile pace. But come race day, I blasted out on the run at an 8:00 / mile pace. What was I thinking??? Truthfully, I wasn’t. I let my ego take over & boy, did I pay. I finished…but as you can see by my bent over running pic…it was not pretty!
The trick is to use all your tried-and-true training methods to make your race day more successful. If you use walk/run, you’ll use those same ratios on race day. If you do warm-ups prior to every training session, you’ll want to do the same type of warm-up prior to race start. If you eat certain foods in training, eat those exact same foods on race day. You know the rule: NEVER DO OR TRY ANYTHING NEW ON RACE DAY!!
2. Develop (and practice) your race strategy. You’ve put in months of training & preparation for your race, so why would you leave your race day strategy to chance? Or worse…why would you not even develop a race strategy? For most folks, races fall apart not because they haven’t done enough training. No, races fall apart because they fail to form (and test out) an effective race strategy. Will you negative split? If yes, how will you do that? By 1/2, by 1/3, by 1/4’s? Will you ease into your swim by doing a few drills in the 1st 10min? If so, what drills? Will you use your heart rate, your RPE (rate of perceived exertion), your watts, your pace to guide how fast you go? No matter what strategy you come up with, be sure to test it out in training. That’s really the only way to know if it will be an effective strategy or not. Develop it. Test it. Train it.
3. Contingency plan. Again, those months of training have been done. But then, on race day, you get a flat…you drop a chain…your run shoes go missing…you lose your goggles. What will you do? Spend some time thinking through all the different things that might go wrong…and then come up with a plan of attack. (This is a great thing to do on your Rest Days!) Obviously, we can never plan for every contingency, but I guarantee that your confidence will be higher if you’ve at least thought through the more obvious ones. Also, this process will help you find the areas that you might need to spend a bit more time preparing…like changing your flat tire!
4. Set goals that you can control. This is another area where folks make critical errors. When you ask an athlete what their race goals are, you often hear goals that are simply out of an athlete’s control. I.E., I want to get a PR. I want to swim faster than last year. I want to beat Athlete Y. Notice that none of these goals are 100% controllable. They are dependent on multiple factors: weather, the race course, who shows up, what shape other athletes are in. When we set goals that are outside of our control, we set ourselves up for disappointment. If you really wanted that PR, but race day brought windy, blustery weather, you probably won’t achieve your goal. Instead, I encourage athletes to set goals that are totally within their control. Things like: a solid mental state, a positive attitude, followed an eating/drinking plan, sticking to race strategy, maintaining rpm / spm goals, great swim technique for as long as possible. By doing these things well, we are more likely to get a better time. Don’t chase your time goals. Rather, do your work & let the time goal come to you!
Happy training & racing, Everyone!
If you’d like help with your training/racing strategy, click here for more info.