Recently, there was a big discussion on DyeStat's Bay State league thread about running hard in dual meets. The discussion flared when posters speculated on how hard one team was running at a specific meet, which led to a series of posts on the value (physical and moral) of running "all-out" in dual meets, and whether doing anything less was disrespecting one's opponents.
This is an age-old question and I'm not going to offer any grand judgment on it.
But one thing that was never mentioned was the unspoken assumption that high school kids with limited racing experience always know when they are going all out. Maybe I've been away from the highly competitive BSL too long, but most of the kids I coach don't KNOW how to go all-out. One of the reasons we run meets is to learn HOW to run all-out.
We had our first meet of the season yesterday, and I can say with certainty that barring injury, every kid on the team will improve A LOT in the next six weeks. Some of that improvement will come from physical training, but a significant amount will come from being able to take better advantage of capabilities they already have. When you aren't used to racing 5K, the physical sensation of fatigue is unfamiliar and daunting. You don't know how to relax when going fast. You think you're going to die if you go faster. But after several races, you learn how to manage the discomfort and run closer to your potential.
As a coach, when I see someone suddenly slice a minute off their best time, one explanation is that they were slacking off in earlier races; another is that they suddenly got a lot fitter; but I think a very likely reason is that something clicked in that mysterious mind-body connection and they figured out how to be in the physical and mental state that enabled them to maintain a sustained effort for much longer. They figured out how to go all-out.
In every race, if you take it seriously, you learn something. With luck, you learn how to rewire your brain to reach the emotional/mental state that allows you to do your best. And if you run a race and DON'T take it seriously, well, it seems to me that you've passed up the opportunity to learn something.
Maybe when you're an experienced runner with several seasons of highly competitive racing behind you, you can "race" at 80% and not have it affect your head for the important races. In my opinion, most of the runners I coach aren't at the point where I trust that running races as workouts is a good thing. And as for myself, I've tried doing races as workouts, and I don't like it. It messes up my mental routine for races I really do care about.
I guess what it comes down to -- for me -- is that I believe that workouts are workouts (and not races), and races are races (and not workouts). Learning to keep these two straight is a lesson worth learning.
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5 comments:
Jon, I think you're 100% correct on your sentiments here. In my own case, I did run a few summer races this summer where I somewhat went "through the motions". It becomes harder and harder to fight the temptation to ease off in a "real" race when the pain intensifies. Workouts can mimic the type of fatigue, but only imperfectly. Every race I approach now for the rest of XC, I know that I'm going to have to get over the barrier and attack with some desperation that you might lose when you "work out" during races that don't matter as much to you.
I remember never truly leaving it all on the course until the last meet of my hs career. Really opened my eyes up to another level.
That last sentence sure sounds like a pronoucement to me.
Agreed with this article 100%. It's a lot harder to run fast with little or no competition, so if you learn to do that, it should be all the easier when you get to a meet where you DO have competition.
You make several good points. I also agree that kids have to go to the well of pushing through pain before they can drink the water. Having guts can only be earned.
Having said that not all races are truly races. I have found with girls teams that many are lopsided and end up being glorified time trials in the end no matter how you approach them. It doesn't matter if your team is very strong or developmental there are not that many true races in all the meets that we do over and over. I also feel that practice if done right can teach as much or more about gutting it out as most meets. I had a lot of experiences in my past with workouts being much tougher than meets.
So one solution is that you can teach kids to push in parts and use different meets to learn different aspects of racing. Most kids idea of going all out is to go out fast and fade even among many kids who have plenty of varsity experience. I know very well that you teach your kids a sense of pace and how to learn from races. But not all kids get that kind of instruction and are just simply told to go all out.
So going all out becomes a repetitive phrase for repeating the same mistake.
Also kids in Ma. race so darn many meets and it boggles my mind how many races they run if they do three seasons a year for four years. If they run all of those meets all out then they have pretty much run a full career through college, by say, their junior year in high school. Meets blend into meets and it can get pretty old. Using some meets to learn other things may indeed keep kids fresh and help them to reach a higher level.
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