Coach Tip Tuesday: Why Race Execution Matters

If you’re like most athletes, after you’ve worked consistently and diligently in training, you expect that that hard work will come to fruition on race day in the form of good race results.  This is a reasonable expectation, but perhaps surprisingly, consistency and working hard in training isn’t enough to have a successful race.  You must also execute the race itself in a particular way in order to achieve a desired result.

Most amateur endurance athletes do not understand how important race execution is.  Quite frankly, even athletes who have been training and racing for many years often underappreciate how much of an impact race execution has on their race performance and experience.  Across the board, athletes do not fully understand how easy it is to go too hard too soon in a race or to make other mistakes in how they execute a race.  I’ve observed that this is true no matter what the athlete’s primary endurance sport is, whether it be running, cycling, triathlon, or open water swimming.

The simple and hard truth is this: You can be in the best and fittest shape of your life, but if you blow your race execution, your fitness, endurance, and strength will not matter.  In fact, if you mismanage your race execution, your final race result and/or how you feel during the race will likely make it look like you don’t have much fitness or that you didn’t train much at all.  How you execute a race is just as important as the final result of a race; in fact, how you execute a race is what yields the final result of a race.  This is so important to understand and appreciate, especially if you are carving the time in your busy life to train and work hard in your training.

How to Recognize a Poorly Executed Race

The first step to recognizing if you had a poorly executed race is to determine what you were capable of and see if your race result aligns with that.  While this step may seem simple enough, the truth is that this is actually really hard for many athletes to do because often what athletes are actually capable of is not what they wish they were capable of or what they want to be capable of.  (Read: It’s not uncommon for athletes to wish for and/or want a race result that is faster than they are actually capable of.)  Honest analysis of your abilities (which requires a substantial amount of self-awareness and probably a hefty slice of humble pie) is the key here.

Your training leading into a given race will give you an idea of what you should be capable of doing in a race.  Very specifically, the average results from key workouts completed during Peak Phase are good indicators of what an athlete will be able to do performance-wise come race day.  When I’m helping the athletes I coach manage their expectations of their performance on race day, I look at data from workouts in this phase and - depending on what sport they’re training for - use metrics such as average heart rate, Normalized Power, average pace, and more to project what we realistically think that they will be able to achieve on race day.  If an athlete achieves a result that is slower or worse than we projected based on their training data, then that often is a strong indicator that something went awry in their race execution.

If you’ve had a race where your end result wasn’t what your training indicated you were capable of, you can usually glean a lot of information from your race splits.  While official race splits are helpful, reviewing data recorded during a race by a wearable (such as a Garmin) is the best way to do this.  Data recorded via a wearable is continuous throughout the entire event and personalized for the individual wearing or utilizing the device.  Official race splits only indicate the time and pacing that an athlete achieved at a specific point in the race; there are more data points (such as heart rate, cadence, power, elevation, laps, and more) relevant to how a race went and was executed that can be recorded via a wearable device.  

Assuming that the data is accurate (because bad data is worse than no data), you can go back and analyze the data that was recorded during the event afterwards and conduct a thorough post-race analysis.  How do the metrics from the first half of the race compare with the metrics that were recorded in the second half of the race?  Are there any anomalies in the data?  How did certain metrics (such as heart rate) compare with others (such as power)?  How did pacing splits compare against each other throughout the race?

For all endurance sports, comparing the first and second half of the race against each other gives valuable insight into how the race was executed.  The most common mistake in race execution is going out too hard too early in the race.  This isn’t surprising when you consider that the most common training mistake that athletes (and especially self-coached, beginner, or insecure athletes) make is doing too much too soon.  If the second half of a race is slower than the first half, that’s a strong indication that the race wasn’t executed as well as it could have been.

Why Proper Race Execution is Challenging

Pacing for longer endurance events (half marathon and longer in running, Olympic distance and longer in triathlon) is difficult because the athlete’s RPE (Rating of Perceived Exertion) at the correctly executed pace or power for the distance that they are racing is likely going to feel lower than the athlete knows they can do.  The key to proper pacing in endurance events is to learn to calibrate the proper RPE to the pace or power that the athlete knows is actually sustainable for the duration of the event that they are racing.  This is a skill that takes a while to sharpen because how a given RPE feels is often different on race day from how it feels in training for several reasons.  Factors such as sleep, heart rate, stress levels, hydration status, weather, and tapering all impact how an athlete feels.  In practical terms, this means that on race day, an athlete often feels better at a given RPE than they did in training when they executed the same RPE.

Thus, executing a proper RPE in a race often requires an athlete to set aside their ego and go at an RPE that translates to a pace that feels “easy” to them.  All too often, athletes cave to the temptation to go harder and/or faster because they want a “better” (aka faster) end result, and they think that pushing the pace is the way to get there.  However, as the great Eliud Kipchoge says, you get faster and better “slowly by slowly”.  Paradoxically for a lot of athletes (and especially inexperienced or impatient athletes), exercising patience and restraint is the way to execute a race well and to cross the finish line faster than you have before.  This paradox is very difficult for a lot of athletes to trust, and it’s been my experience that athletes will need to have several botched races before they are willing to give it a try.

Finally, developing a race strategy is something that doesn’t just happen; it needs to be intentionally thought out, planned, and tested.  The amount of time and mental bandwidth that this requires is sometimes more than most age-group athletes are willing to invest in their training.  All too often, age group athletes assume that checking the boxes and doing workouts will automatically end with the results that they want in terms of their fitness and race performance.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.  Truly successful training and race execution require more than just the doing of the workouts on one’s schedule; it requires thoughtful engagement with and reflection on one’s training.  Once again, I’ve observed that it takes athletes a while to embrace this truth (and it usually happens after they have disappointing race performances and/or missed goals).

How to Determine Proper Race Execution in a Triathlon

Triathletes (and other multisport athletes) have the benefit of three different legs; since all legs of a multisport race are timed (including Transition), this means that they automatically get more splits in their official race results than many other endurance athletes get from sports like running or cycling.  While data from wearable devices is valuable for triathletes, just looking at the individual splits from each leg of a triathlon can indicate how the athlete executed the race.

In most distances of triathlon (from Sprint Triathlons all the way up to the IRONMAN distance), the bike accounts for approximately 80% of the total race distance and usually around 50% of the total race time.  With very, very limited exceptions, the bike leg of a triathlon is the component of the race that takes the longest (by a margin of at least 10% when compared to how long the run leg of a triathlon takes).  So, when looking at the race splits and data from a triathlon, an athlete can tell pretty much immediately if their race execution was solid by comparing their bike split to the run split (and, to a lesser extent, to the swim split).  

If the bike split and the run split are almost equal and/or if the run split is longer, then the athlete did not execute the race properly.  Mismanaging the bike leg of a triathlon (most notably: going too hard on the bike) is the number one reason for DNF (Did Not Finish) results in the sport of triathlon.  Seriously.  There is nothing that impacts a triathlon more than how the athlete executes the bike leg (and by extension, how much an athlete trains for the bike leg of a triathlon).  

This is because the bike leg sets up the run leg.  A successfully executed bike leg is a result of several important factors, including high bike fitness, proficient bike handling skills, and patient restraint.   No matter how great of a runner a particular athlete is (runners turned into triathletes: I’m looking at you), they will never be able to run to their potential on the run leg in a triathlon if they do not train properly on the bike or manage their execution of the bike leg properly in the race.  Having an insufficient amount of time in training on the bike and/or going too hard on the bike leg in a race itself will snowball into an athlete having an absolutely horrible run leg - both in terms of how they feel and the paces that they are able to sustain.

There are some limited exceptions to this.  For instance, I have coached a handful of athletes over the years who couldn’t run (for one reason or another) and planned to walk the run leg of a triathlon.  I’ve coached others who needed to have a balanced ratio of running and walking as part of their running strategy (meaning that they walked at least as much - if not more - than they ran).  For athletes like this, we expect that their run time in a triathlon will exceed the time from their bike leg, and this is something that we plan for accordingly throughout all of their training.  Everything from the types of workouts that they do (in all disciplines) to how they execute those workouts is designed with this end strategy (needing to walk 50% -100% of the run leg of the race) in mind.  It is really important to note that this approach is not the same as an athlete who is forced to walk most of the run leg due to mismanaging their race execution; that is the result of poor planning, not an intentional and thoughtful strategy throughout their training.

How To Properly Execute a Race

So what does all of this mean in practical terms?  The most clear piece of advice about race execution that I can give athletes is this: 

In almost all circumstances, you must go easier than you feel like you can early in the race.  As I often tell the athletes I coach: It does not matter how fast you start the race.  What matters is how fast you finish the race, and how fast you finish the race is directly linked to what you do throughout the entire race.  Therefore, you must learn to exercise restraint, check your ego at the start line, and to do less than what you feel like you “can” do in a race early on.  What we’re seeking is an effort/pace/power that you can sustain throughout the entire race, not an effort/pace/power that you can hang on to for half of the race and then fall off of for the rest of it.

In many race situations, this means that other athletes will be “taking off” and passing you early on.  Let them.  Athletes who have followed my advice can testify that they are able to pass those same people later in the race who pass them early on by successfully pacing themselves early in the race.  Athletes who pace races very well do not get passed en masse in the later stages of a race; they are the ones doing the majority of the passing at that point.  This is because they have conserved enough energy to build their effort over the course of the race, perhaps even to the point where they are able to execute a negative split.

Data from wearables can be leveraged in real-time to help athletes with this, especially as they are learning the art of restraint.  If an athlete knows what a sustainable pace, power level, or heart rate is for them based on their recent training leading into the race, they can check in on those metrics throughout the race to see if what they are doing is in alignment with what they know is sustainable for them.  (This being said, I will always continue to advocate for athletes to develop and sharpen their ability to leverage RPE since RPE does not rely on outside technology to be effective.) 

If their current data shows that they are going faster than what they know they can sustain, an athlete can slow down until they see that they are maintaining sustainable paces.  If they see that their Normalized Power is too high, they can back off their effort and speed until their Normalized Power is in a proper range.  If their heart rate is too high, they can back off on their effort until it comes back into a sustainable range.

It’s important to note that the difference between a well-executed race and a poorly executed one can be very small (and that it is often much smaller than athletes realize or want to acknowledge).  In terms of pacing, it can be within 1 mph average on the bike or within 30 seconds per mile on the run.  In terms of power, it can be as little as a 15-watt difference in Normalized Power for a bike leg or bike race.  In terms of heart rate, a difference of 3-5 bpm in average heart rate can make that difference.  Appreciating that it doesn’t take much to tip the scales one way or the other is an important part of developing, implementing, and successfully executing a race strategy.

The Bottom Line

Race execution is an underappreciated part of race results.  In my experience, it takes disappointing race results for athletes to treat race strategy and execution with the reverence it deserves.  Learning how to analyze your race results and then how to glean insights from them that can be used when developing future race strategies is an important part of becoming a mature and successful athlete.  In your next race, aim to approach your race strategy with thoughtfulness, restraint, and wisdom so you can cross the finish line fast and with a smile.