Running Shorts

Flying Pig Half Marathon 1st place 1:08:32 -- event record Well, I finally finished a major Flying Pig race -- I just had to drop down to the half. Actually, I did this race more out of a feeling of local obligation than true motivation. My focus really remains on the Vermont City Marathon, which is now less than three weeks away. But a minor race can be a great tune-up for a goal race; in fact, I think it's often the best preparation. (Just wait for my next blog post to explain that.) And that's what this race really was: a tune-up, practice for the real deal in Burlington, VT. So instead of focusing on the mile-by-mile details of the race (I pretty much ran solo the whole way and won by something like three minutes), I want to focus on my plans coming into it and how successful I was at executing them. 1. Run the first 9-10 miles at a controlled effort and then shift gears to race the last 5k. On this one I was very happy with my execution. I didn...

Now that it's the heart of fall racing season and I'm getting antsy not  being able to race, I thought it'd be a good time for the first in a new series of posts. I write a lot about various aspects of training that go into race day and I also recap race efforts fairly often, but I haven't written much about the strategy and tactics  that go into each competition. In fact, not many people do talk about tactics. If anything, they get a bad rap in running circles -- as in a sarcastic, "oh great, another tactical race." When you hear people talk about tactics, they do so in a negative tone: a tactical race is one that is slow, where the runners just jog around for 90% of the time until someone finally sprints to the finish. Sit-n-kick. Of course, this is  one tactic (an effective one, at that) and one you see often in championship-style races, where place matters more than time and most athletes are of about the same fitness caliber. But race tactics can be m...