Pacing!
You’ve done the training. Packed your gear. The big day dawns for your race. The gun goes. Just 20 minutes later, your legs are trashed. You gasp for breath like a fish out of water. It’s game over. You have become a victim of pacing suicide. Good pacing means the difference between a good race and a bad race. But what is good pacing anyway?
A good way to look at it is to compare pacing on a road to pacing on a trail. In road races, the aim is to run as evenly paced as possible, particularly on a flat course. On a hillier route, there will be a larger variation in pace, but still within a fairly tight range.
But pacing on a trail is trickier. The variations in the terrain with quadbusting drops and tortuous climbs cause pace to vary widely.
The solution lies in using your running intensity to
