shoes and socksTHE LAST THING YOU want is for your race to be undermined before you even get to the starting line. Race day nerves are common, but you have worked too hard to be dismantled by poor planning. There is no strategy on earth that can eliminate all the jitters and unknowns that might crop up, but certain steps can put you ahead of those who are not prepared. Focus on controlling the variables that you can and planning for the ones you can’t. From your pre-race meal, to where you’ll meet your family at the finish, to what shoes you’re going to wear, to checking the weather and having the appropriate layers, planning ahead will go a long way toward keeping you calm when it matters. Going into race weekend, Plan A, along with Plan B and Plan C, should be well rehearsed and ready to be put into motion. When you’re relaxed at the start line, you’re less likely to make silly mistakes in the early stages of the race, keeping you focused and ready to follow protocol. We often caution runners not to underestimate the amount of planning a half-marathon requires. Consider the following factors as you make arrangements prior to race morning, remembering that your race will only be as good as your pre-race preparation, whether that is the training itself or getting to the start line on time.
If you are headed to a destination race, you’ll probably have to arrange your travel plans months ahead of time. Besides needing to decide how to get to the race, you have to secure a place to stay. For the most part, cities that put on races with 35,000 or more runners will sell out of decent hotel rooms soon after race registration closes. Indeed, hotel rooms sometimes sell out as fast as the race entries. No doubt, you’ll want a reasonably comfortable bed both before and after the race.
Many runners, especially first-timers, choose to sign up for a local race to avoid the extra costs and hassle associated with traveling. Even if your race is local, you still may want to consider getting a room. While sleeping in familiar surroundings is attractive to some, others would rather stay at a nearby hotel the night before so they can easily walk to the start line the next morning. There are a couple of advantages to this strategy. You are able to get a bit more shut-eye before rising for the big day. Too, if you are someone who gets stressed by the influx of crowds and chaos surrounding race morning, you might find walking just those few blocks to the start line eases your anxiety. If you prefer to sleep in your own bed the night before, be sure to leave early enough to get to the start. Although you may live only 15 minutes from where the race begins, traffic and parking can be a nightmare in any city on race day morning. Consider having someone drop you off so you don’t have to figure out where to park.
Most runners welcome a friendly, familiar face along the course. It not only breaks up the monotony but also gives you something to look forward to as you grind through 13.1 miles. Despite this, don’t spend time worrying about where and when you’ll meet your family or friends. The best strategy here is to put someone else in charge. For the 2012 Olympic Trials marathon, I reserved hotel rooms and purchased plane tickets for my parents, but beyond that, my wife took care of the details. She set up itineraries, flew down to Houston with my parents, and made sure they got to their hotel. Beforehand she helped figure out where to find me along the course and the spot where we would meet at the finish. She knew that I needed to focus on my race during the days leading up to marathon weekend, so she picked up the slack and allowed me to forgo dealing with certain arrangements that were likely to stress me out. Consider this point person your captain and allow him or her to take control of details you would rather not handle.
In terms of where to direct your personal cheering squad along the course, it depends on what support you think you will need, and when. For some, the race is over in an hour or hour and a half, so it makes sense for your cheering quad to pick a spot that’s close enough to the start to allow them to also get to the end and watch you finish. Alternately, you may want to have that support at a point where things may feel pretty grueling—maybe at around 10 miles. If you are in that latter group, seeing a friendly face, hearing words of encouragement, or being handed a special snack may be just the ticket at that late point in the race to get you through to the finish line. In this case, consider splitting up your cheering squad so that you also have someone waiting to watch you cross the finish line.
Knowing the race course is a big advantage. If your race is local, consider getting out and running sections of the route periodically so you know what to expect come race day. If you know the turns, hills, and various other details of a course, a sense of familiarity is established. With familiarity come calm and control. The athletes in the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project will often take a trip to where we will be racing to run the course a few times. Doing this early in the training segment allows us to alter what and where we do our training to be fully prepared for the course. If you don’t have the luxury of running the course prior to competition, check the official race website, YouTube, and the blogosphere for course tours and reviews.
Most race expos are akin to bustling flea markets. I’ll admit that I sometimes love wandering the aisles, browsing the latest running shoes, gear, and goodies. Despite this, I urge you to avoid spending any length of time on your feet at the expo, a common mistake I see many runners make. They are in awe of the pageantry surrounding the big event, so they stand around on hard concrete floors in the convention hall instead of resting on their couch or hotel bed. For most Sunday races, the expo is open Friday and Saturday. If this is the case and you are able, go during your lunch hour on Friday and pick up your packet. This keeps you from lingering too long, so you can have a relaxed pre-race day. If you can’t make it to the expo until the day before the race, go as early as possible to avoid the crowds and then get the heck out of there so you can go somewhere and put your feet up.
Whether you’re attending an organized pre-race pasta dinner or staying home with your family to eat, the guidelines are the same. Most important, carbo-loading doesn’t mean having four plates of spaghetti and three loaves of bread. Eat a regular-sized meal, but make sure it’s healthy and high in easily digestible carbohydrates. The main goal is to top off those glycogen stores prior to the race. This is actually a goal for the last few days leading up to the race, so don’t treat your pre-race dinner as your main source of carbo-loading. Indeed, this meal should cap off a balanced week of eating as suggested in the nutrition chapter; otherwise your pre-race dinner won’t make much difference. Practice ahead of time by eating the same meals before your long runs so you know what to expect on race day. Additionally, while hydration is an ongoing process, make sure you use the day before the race to continue taking in water and sports drinks. Proper hydration takes time and should be tended to throughout the week.
Use the evening prior to the race to make sure all your t’s are crossed and i’s dotted. Your drop bag should be packed and ready to go, the timing chip fastened to your shoe, your clothes laid out, and your water bottle full. When you head to bed, chances are that sleep will be fairly hard to come by. Don’t fret if you are tossing and turning. You should have banked plenty of rest over the past 10 days. If you do find yourself awake, consider grabbing a midnight snack, like an energy bar or a piece of fruit. While this isn’t necessary, the body burns through about half of the glycogen stored in the liver during the overnight hours. By eating a late night snack, you further reduce how much you need to replace in the morning, potentially avoiding stomach upset. If you get especially nervous right before a race, this is a good way to consume calories before the jitters set in. Instead of needing 300–500 calories in the morning, you may be able to reduce that to just 100–200 calories to top off glycogen stores.
What you eat for your race morning meal depends on when you wake up. It’s not uncommon for a runner to have trouble sleeping the night before a big race, so getting up early is often better than staying in bed and overanalyzing your race plan. The amount of time needed for digestion depends on the person; some runners need 3 full hours to digest a meal before running, but others only need 1. If you wake up 3 hours or more before the race, you can get away with chowing down on a normal breakfast, like a bagel with peanut butter, a banana, and coffee or juice. Any closer to gun time, however, and you need to be more conservative. As discussed earlier, within a few hours of the start, eat less solid food and mostly carbohydrates. With an hour to go, stick with something like an energy gel, which will satiate you for a short time but won’t give you a full feeling. Furthermore, begin measuring your liquid intake by sips, not ounces. The last thing you want is to have water sloshing around in your stomach during the first half of the race. Eliminate wild card scenarios by planning everything from where you’ll stand in the start corral to which port-a-john station you’ll utilize. Hold on to your water bottle in the corral and continue sipping as you wait for fun time.
In addition to what you’re putting in your body, you must consider what you’re putting on it. Check the weather forecast for both before and during the race. If you end up standing in the corrals for 30 minutes or more, you’ll want to be prepared. Weather in a spring or fall race can be unpredictable—often unseasonably warm or unseasonably cold. At the Detroit Marathon and Half-Marathon, for example, which is held in October, the weather can vary from 80-degree heat to near-blizzard conditions whipping across the Detroit River. Most years, the temperatures hover between 30 and 40 degrees, making wardrobe choices particularly tricky during the early morning hours. While your legs may go numb standing around before the sun fully rises, you’ll feel fine once you begin running. This means that you’ll need to wear layers to stay warm prior to the start, but then be able to easily shed garments as you warm up during the race.
One of the most common questions among runners in our training programs is whether they should wear nice running gear that they’ll have to carry with them or something old they don’t mind tossing to the curb. The Hansons solution is simple: Wear something you’re willing to lose. For your bottom layer, sport your regular running gear with the race number attached, but over that, wear an old pair of sweatpants from the bottom of your dresser or a sweatshirt you wore to paint the living room. When you begin to warm up, which you will, you can throw off the top layer without a second thought. Just make sure to pin your number on the layer that you don’t plan to take off during your race.
In my experience, the best way to mentally prepare yourself prior to a race is simply to be calm. Getting your heart rate up before you even start running is never a good idea. A good way to find that calm is to approach the race with “cautious confidence.” Step back and spend a moment thinking about your training, reminding yourself that you are fit and ready to race. Training doesn’t lie. Be realistic in pondering the difficulty of the race, but also remind yourself that all your training has prepared you to handle it.
Why does this approach work? For one, it forces you to slow down and accept that the task at hand is going to be hard and at times is going to hurt. This keeps you cautious to the point of avoiding overzealous pacing right out of the gate. In addition, when the going gets tough during the race, you are prepared for it. You knew it wasn’t going to be a cakewalk. By preparing this way, you are able to have positive and motivating thoughts ready and waiting to help you endure.
Race time is go time. Once the starting gun goes off, it’s time to cash in all those hard-earned chips. The most common question we get about race strategy regards mile splits. We have already discussed the physiological reasons behind pulling back on the reins and running a conservative pace the first half of the race, but there is more to it than that. Throughout training, many of your workouts are focused on running particular paces. We strongly believe in the truth attached to the old adage “Race the way you train,” and we have emphasized even pacing during workouts in hopes of getting the same result on race day. More specifically, the training is meant to prepare you to run fairly predictable splits throughout, with the second half of the race slightly faster than the first, called a negative split strategy. We remind runners that going out slow will almost never cause any lasting damage to your overall pace, but starting too fast might. If you go out way ahead of pace and begin to fade, not only will your body feel the strain, but your mind also takes a beating as you get passed by other runners who started slower.
What’s more, every current world record from the 5K to the marathon has been set via negative or even splits. Most PRs are set that way too. When you start out at a pace you can maintain and then find yourself passing other runners who overestimated their abilities, you’ll discover a newfound confidence in the later stages of the race. While many runners say that they feel the best at the beginning of the race and want to capitalize on that by banking time early on, this approach nearly always ends in disaster. A half-marathon is a substantial number of miles, and what feels like a comfortable pace at mile 2 may not feel so great at mile 10.
While you should remain steadfast in your race plan in most circumstances, flexibility may be required. Sometimes a fast result at the end of the day depends on getting lucky with a few variables, in particular, weather. It can be disappointing to train your hardest only to be met by 80-degree heat, hurricane winds, or even a monsoon. I know. I’ve been there and have the less-than-satisfying race times to prove it. In these situations, which will surely affect your race performance, it is easy to feel that all is lost. While there are plenty of quantifiable gains from training for a half-marathon, even if the stars don’t align for a great race day, not being able to run your best performance can be heartbreaking. But weather is not something you can control, and you have to make the best of the situation. I remember facing challenging conditions during my senior year of college at the NCAA Cross Country Championships. It was so frigid that day that we actually had a team meeting to discuss the possibility of frostbite in an area you would least want to have frostbite. I remember the announcer giving us the 2-minute warning before the start and then saying, “It’s a balmy 9 degrees, and with the wind chill, it’s negative 13!” These were not ideal conditions, to be sure, and I was disappointed that the weather was not in my favor, but I wasn’t going to let it stop me from putting forth my best effort. If your race day presents challenging conditions, remind yourself that everyone else is facing them, too. Take some time and consider the real reasons you decided to train for a half-marathon in the first place and the numerous benefits and personal growth that have resulted from training. Surely it is not a total loss, even if you have to adjust for a slower pace.
In the same way that we have emphasized smart training, you also must be wise about your race strategy. If the forecast has thrown a wrench in your original plans, alter the course of action accordingly to ensure you reach the finish line in one piece. From a temperature standpoint, you can expect to slow down anywhere from 5 to 8 seconds per mile when the temperatures reach the 60s and higher. Generally speaking, you would likely run 5 seconds slower per mile at 60 degrees, 10 seconds slower at 70 degrees, and 15 seconds slower at 80 degrees. This, of course, can depend on a number of factors. For instance, if you have been training in the heat for months, it’s not going to affect you as much as it does other runners. The same goes for smaller runners as well as highly trained harriers. When it comes down to it, weather-related adjustments of expected finishing times vary depending on the individual.
For many runners of the half, the race day mantra to remember is simply this: Fuel and hydrate early and often. That said, you may be able to get away with less of both, depending on your speed. Unlike in the marathon, where a race can be made or broken on appropriate fueling, fueling for the half could have either a huge impact on the outcome or very little. A lot depends on how quickly you will complete 13.1 miles. If you are going to be on the course for less than 90 minutes, then fueling and hydration are a lesser concern during the race. At this pace, you will be finished with the race before your glycogen stores are depleted; you just need to make sure they are full at the start. If they are, you can be confident that you can finish strong without crashing into that brick wall that sometimes jumps out unexpectedly at runners on the course.
On the other hand, if you are running for 2 or more hours and fail to fuel properly along the course, you may find yourself feeling seriously drained well before the finish line. You will need to carefully consider your fueling plan, and the importance of starting calorie and fluid replacement early in the race cannot be stressed enough. Consider this: For elite runners, bottles of fluid containing each runner’s own concoctions are generally placed every 5 kilometers. Physiologists tell us that the stomach can handle about 8 ounces of fluid every 15 minutes or so, which is about how long it takes elite men to run 5 kilometers. For the other 99.9 percent of runners who don’t arrange access to their own bottles, there are water stops every 2 miles or so in most half-marathons. This means that if you take a cup of water or sports drink at every water stop, you’ll be taking in fluids at about the same rate as the elites. The cups that are offered are usually 6–8 ounces, and they are generally filled with about 4–6 ounces of fluid. When you take into account average spillage, a runner can get 2–3 ounces at each station. Whether or not you stop or just grab a cup on the go is up to you. But remember, getting in the fluid and calories is of the utmost importance. A couple of seconds spent stopping to refuel or hydrate can actually save minutes in the long run by helping to prevent bonking. At each station, we suggest getting a cup at one of the first tables and then perhaps a second cup at the last table. In my experience, the calories offered in sports drinks are as important as the fluid itself. When runners “hit the wall,” it’s because they are out of sugar, and the sugar in sports drinks can help combat this occurrence. The only time this isn’t an appropriate choice is if you have just taken a sports gel (or equivalent), which should be washed down with water. This will put you right in line with what most elites consume during an average half-marathon. While the sports drink is the best option in most cases, get your hands on whatever you can.
Over the years we’ve witnessed many runners who have gotten either significantly ahead or behind their desired paces early in the race. This is often a side effect of the crowded streets at the beginning of the race. Sometimes a runner will dash out at a clipped pace, in the hope of getting ahead of the crowd. In other cases, a runner is held back by the crowd for a few miles, and once out of the throng, he or she speeds up in hopes of getting back on track, making for extremely inconsistent mile splits. For instance, a half-marathoner with a 9:00-minute per mile goal pace may be slowed by the mob of runners leading the pack, causing him to run closer to 9:20 pace for the first several miles. As the crowds thin out around the 10K mark, he may feel he needs to make up for lost time, increasing his speed to 8:45 pace instead of getting back to the original plan of running 9:00-minute miles. As you have probably guessed from what we’ve said about pacing, this is a dangerous way to try to gain time. Instead, get settled back into your planned race pace and gradually pick it up over the next several miles to conserve energy and set yourself up for a strong second half.
Although you may feel great the first half of the race, that doesn’t give you the green light to pick up the pace. I can’t tell you how many runners I have seen cross the halfway point far ahead of schedule, only to crash and burn in the later miles. If adrenaline gets the best of you in the early stages of the race, prompting your pace to be faster than planned, don’t panic. Just fix it. Slow down to goal pace and find the rhythm that will carry you for miles on end. Focus on your own race and try not to get caught up in what other runners are doing. If someone breezes past you, assume you’ll catch him or her later on. In many cases, that’s exactly what will happen.
shoes and socks
singlet and/or sports bra
shorts
water/sports drink
race number
timing chip
pins or race number belt
energy gels
watch
sunglasses
hat
lip balm and/or sunscreen
post-race clothes
towel
toilet paper or tissues
antichafing lubricant (Bodyglide™ or petroleum jelly)
Band-aids to protect nipples (for the guys)
gloves/arm warmers
throwaway shirt and/or pants
money
equipment check bag
directions to start and pre-race instructions
When you head to the start line, we recommend consolidating everything you might need that you’re not wearing into a clear bag, which is usually provided to you by the race. After the Boston Marathon tragedy, seemingly more and more races are providing these and making mandatory gear checks a security measure. Take everything with you to your waiting area, and then take only what you need to the starting corral. Leave the rest at the bag check station.