Race Preparation Part 2
8. Give yourself enough travel time
It is highly likely that your first race will be close to home but if this is not the course it is vital to plan ahead to avoid any pre race stress.
9. Assemble your gear.
Assemble all you running kit the night before, pin your race number on your vest and lay it out ready for the morning, seeing this on waking will motivate you. Pack a bag with Vaseline, extra safety pins, toilet paper and bottled water and make sure you have any food supplements that you need prior and / or during the event. Don’t forget a small snack for after the event. If it helps, make a list and simply tick the boxes.
10. Get enough rest.
It is very important to get a good enough rest before the race and to go to bed at the normal time. We become conditioned to awakening at a certain time each morning, and this time is not influenced by how late we go to bed. Athletes who go to bed late at night thinking that they will simply awake later the next morning are wrong. They will wake at the same time and will therefore sleep fewer hours. It is especially important to go to bed very early the second-last night before the race and to sleep as many hours as possible that night.
11. Wake up right.
• Avoid using an alarm clock with a loud and jarring ring. The idea is to be nudged awake by a gently alarm or by a quiet knock on the door.
• Make your drink of choice so that you can wake up gradually while enjoying the sensory pleasure of drinking.
• Repeat some positive statements about how well you feel, what a beautiful day it is, and how excited you are about the race.
12. Eat a Pre Race breakfast
Provided you eat dinner the night before a 10 or 21km race, you do not have to eat breakfast before a morning race. But if you are accustomed to eating before running in the morning, you should not feel compelled to change. The reason eating breakfast is not essential before races of up to 21km is that such races do not cause muscle or liver glycogen depletion, making hypoglycaemia an unlikely cause of fatigue at these distances. The main effect of the pre race breakfast is to restock the liver glycogen stores that have been partially depleted by the overnight fast and to prevent hypoglycaemia from developing.
13. Warm Up.
Having prepared both mentally and physically, it is time to take to the road. Check in early at the race start and leave yourself at least 30 minutes for adequate stretching, a gently warm up, and a final mental tuning. Stretching is essential to overcome the overnight tightness and inflexibility that will have developed in your most trained muscles; the calves, hamstrings and back muscles. Set aside about 15 minutes for this. Once you have stretched and warmed up, with 5 minutes to go before the race start, drink between 300 and 500ml of cold fluid, preferably the carbohydrate containing solution of your choice.
14. Run a good race.
You will soon learn that, next to your running shoes, a heart rate monitor with a digital stop watch is you most critical companion in any race, and the more so the longer the race. Having recorded the time that you actually crossed the start line, your immediate priority should be to achieve the correct running pace as quickly as possible. For novice runners this is often difficult to get right. The only way to correct this is to calculate the running pace over the each of the first two kilometres by calculating your actual running time at the first and second kilometre marks, not you total elapsed time from the official start of the race. If you fail do make this correction you will calculate that you are running slower than you actually are and may therefore be tempted to speed up.
Pacing
The goal of pacing is to run the race at an even pace – the pace you feel you can complete the race in should have been arrived at in the days leading up to the race. It is vital that you first kilometre is run at your proposed race pace or slightly slower. For the novice runner this is usually impossible so the only thing to do is to check your first kilometre time and make a concerted effort to slow down.
Drinking
Drinking and sponging is relatively unimportant in races which take less than 60 minutes. In contrast, in longer races, it is important to start drinking at around the 3k mark. It is important to start drinking early, as the rate of fluid absorption from the intestine continues at a constant rate and cannot make up for time lost if the stomach stays empty for some time after the start of the race.
Mental imaging
Once you have settled into the race (usually after a few kilometres) and are running at the appropriate pace, start associating if you wish to race at your best possible pace. The key to associating is to concentrate on precisely what you are doing each step of the way and to exclude the distractions of all the runners surrounding you.
Late Race problem solving
Near the end of any race, regardless of its distance, fatigue becomes a real issue. After completing their first 5k, novices want to run 10k or 21k a distance for which they are not yet properly prepared.
The result is that the last third of these races will probably cause a feeling of progressive fatigue and growing despair. The solution is to adopt the associating form of mental imagery and to segment the remaining distance into manageable segments, usually of 1km. You then focus all your efforts on getting through the next race segment without any concern for the total distance remaining. At first, almost imperceptibly, the remaining distance starts to shorten until quite suddenly, it becomes manageable.
After your race
After races of 10 – 21km, all runners will be mildly dehydrated and should drink sufficient liquid to correct any dehydration and sodium chloride loss incurred. The best drinks to correct this dehydration are those that you usually favour and that you will therefore drink in the required volumes.
The body can only correct its water losses after exercise if the sodium chloride losses are replaced at the same time. The body, as it were, concerns itself with correcting the sodium chloride losses and allows water deficit to be restored only when the sodium deficit has been corrected.
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