Finding Your Distance

Ideally, the distance you race the most, the one you enjoy the most, and the one you're best at are the same. I might be best at 800m, a distance I haven't raced since high school, but that's unusual. 

If you're passing people regularly the second half of a race, you probably should be racing longer. If you're getting passed a lot in the second half, either you trained badly, got hurt, or you should be racing shorter distances.

A thought experiment I like to use is: if at the end of a hard workout you are given the choice of running one more mile, but it has to be your fastest mile of the day, or running two miles at any pace, which do you choose? Every distance runner I've asked has chosen the 2 miles. Every sprinter has chosen the one fast mile. I've actually tried it; I decide on one, worry that it's not going to be the fastest and so I'll have to run 2 anyway,  so I speed up, continuously thinking of "spent cost fallacy" and continuously speeding up until I sprint the last meters.

A different thought experiment. Imagine you're equally good at every distance from 100 meters to 100 miles. You can run 1/10th of a race distance at race pace every day for weeks (I've done it), so you could run 10m at 100m pace Monday, 40m at 400m pace Tuesday, 150m at 1500m pace Wednesday, 500m at 5K pace Thursday,  1500m at 15K pace Friday,  5K at 50K pace Saturday, and 10 miles at 100 mile pace on Sunday. Moreover, if you were equally good at each, they'd feel like the same effort. You're probably already saying these would feel very different, but if you truly were equally good at each, these workouts would be interchangeable! You could train for 100m races by running 70 slow miles a week - and a few have advocated this. You could train for 100 mile races on only 70 meters a week  - and a few people have actually proposed that as well.

Obviously, this would work for exceptionally few people in practice. You probably have a feel for where on that continuum you would fit.

You have to start somewhere, though. And for that, there's a general training plan that works fairly well for most people for most distances for some time. I call it "The Standard Model." That's what I'll describe in the next post (or 2). By doing it for a while, you can also learn to zero in on what your best race distance probably is and I'll explain that too.