Practicing Race Day Situations

Flex your muscles in practice so you can do it on race day

Oct 07, 2022

If you aren’t practicing race-day scenarios in training, you’re messing up big time.

Last weekend, as most of you know and remember all too well, we had a crap-ton of rain throughout the weekend. And, like a good portion of readers here, running still had to be run. And a slightly smaller portion of you had races lined up that you still wanted to run.

So here’s my message to you out there: practice different race day scenarios during your training. Throw a bit of adversity into your training so you can flex that muscle on race day if you need to.

90% of your training should be about maximizing efficiency. But that last 10% can be mixing it up so you have the skills needed when race day comes.

What kind of training can you do that would fit into this 10% category? Here you go:

Run in crappy weather
Run a hilly course on workout day
Try running hard on tired legs
Train on less-than-ideal sleep
Run early, run late
Positive split a run (run fast early pace and settle in)
Negative split a run (run controlled early, then get quicker)

You don’t want to always be messing with your training, but it certainly helps to have some of your training geared to some mishap happening. The bigger the race, the more you want to make sure you’ve turned over every stone.

Good luck to everyone running Chicago this weekend, including Shannon!