Brian Hanley is a senior lecturer in exercise & biomechanics at Leeds University & is on the podcast today to talk about achieving your marathon PB! Instead of focusing on a training plan, Brian dives into race-day tactics, pacing strategies and other decision-making processes you need to consider. Brian's insight into the physiological and psychological factors involved in the marathon results in simple and practical take aways for you to plan a successful half-marathon or marathon race. Find Brian's ReseacherGate link here! Become a patron! Receive Run Smarter Emails Book a FREE Injury chat with Brodie Run Smarter App IOS or Android Podcast Facebook group Run Smarter Course with code 'PODCAST' for 3-day free trial.
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On today's episode, Marathon PB Tactics and Strategies with Brian Hanley. Welcome to the Run Smarter podcast. The podcast helping you overcome your current and future running injuries by educating and transforming you into a healthier, stronger, smarter runner. If you're like me, running is life. But more often than not, injuries disrupt this lifestyle. And once you are injured, you're looking for answers and met with bad advice and conflicting messages circulating the running community. The world shouldn't be like this. You deserve to run injury free and have access to the right information. That's why I've made it my mission to bring clarity and control to every runner. My name is Brodie Sharp. I am a physiotherapist, a former chronic injury sufferer, and your podcast host. I am excited that you have found this podcast and by default become the Run Smarter Scholar. So let's work together to overcome your injury, restore your confidence and start spreading the right information back into your running community. So let's begin today's lesson. Let's get on with today's episode. I'm excited to bring you this one. Um, I know we talk about a little bit in during the interview, but let me just say, um, briefly here. So we're interviewing Brian who I found out, um, through Philip Hayes, the author or the, the editor of the science and practice of middle long distance running, the book we've been talking about for the last couple of months. And yeah, he put me onto Brian and said, um, you'll love this because I actually read the chapter. Um, let me just see if I've got the book in front of me. Let me just. actually get the chapter title right. Here it is. So the title itself is called strategic and tactical decision making in middle and long distance running races. And they talk about all different distances, but we're going to focus on the half marathon and the full marathon. And, um, yeah, Brian was great to have on. Brian is the senior lecturer in sports and exercise by mechanics at Leeds university, and we talk about everything to do with race strategy, like training aside, um, what to do on race day. What is the best decision to do on race day in terms of pace strategy, in terms of tactics and yeah, it was great to have him on. So let's dive in. Brian Hanley, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today? Not too bad. It's, it's sunny here in Leeds for once. Yeah. Well, I'm jealous cause it's a middle of winter here. Um, let's start off with just an introduction cause I actually don't know a lot about you. So it'd be good for me to know as well. Um, let's start off with like. where you're from and how your career has sort of developed and where you find your, your day to day at the moment. Yeah. I'm a senior lecturer in sport and exercise biomechanics at Leeds Becket University, which is in the, in the UK. I'm originally from Ireland and I studied applied physiology there first after, after leaving school. And then I traveled to Leeds 25 years ago, study doing sport and exercise science. My main interest was in athletics and coaching even from an early age. So the reason I studied applied physiology and sports science was because I wanted to be a better coach and a better athlete. From an academic point of view, I then followed that up with another degree in psychology. It was part-time while I was working and I also have a PhD in biomechanics. The PhD I did was on race walking. I was never a race walker, but race walking, which blew familiar to a lot of people in Australia because they've been very successful. We've worked with some of the Australian race walkers. Race walking has its rules, which means that it's more biomechanically interesting. So you can't really become an Olympic champion where I've been technically great in race walking, but you can in distance running to a certain extent. So from a day-to-day basis, I do a lot of teaching. research in terms of athletics and we do love sports science support as well. So recently we've been testing the Leeds United team for their pre-season. So they're a big team here in England. In terms of the pacing and racing, I was interested in these from many years of competing, as what you might describe as a competitive club runner. So I've done 71 minutes for half marathon, just over two and a half hours for the marathon. And I also did a lot of coaching of many distance runners. But when I was back home in Ireland, I actually mostly coached sprinters and hurdlers. And I think what I've learned from my academic studies, if you like, in biomechanics, physiology and psychology has helped me to understand the various aspects that are important in pacing because it's very multifactorial. In terms of research, I'll study anything that's athletics. I'm currently doing one on the pole vault because I was the scientific lead for two biomechanics research projects, one in London and one in Birmingham when the World Athletics had their championships there. So I research everything in athletics but my main focus is on distance running and race walking because I come from an endurance background and I understand the... I understand that this race is better. Yeah. And, um, like just before we started recording, I looked up the, you, you on your profile on the research gate and saw that you had 125 publications. And so your accolades are very impressive. Um, and I guess the, how I first heard about you was yes, in, um, Philip Hayes' book, which I've interviewed him a couple of weeks ago and found your subject, this topic, this chapter that you have around pacing strategies and sort of mid-race tactics, um, very fascinating and something that I hadn't even considered as a topic on the podcast. And so when I find something that's quite unique and quite fresh, I thought I had to have you on. So, um, reached out to Philip and he was more than happy to be like, yeah, you should get Brian on, he's really good, really knowledgeable. Um, so here we are today on the topic. I think, um, where I start, well, where I wanted to start was because most of the audience are just recreational runners. I can just imagine a lot of them trying to get a really good training in place, like try and get there. Maybe they look up online, but really just set themselves up for a half marathon or a full marathon where they look up a schedule online, or maybe they have a running coach and they just follow that, you know, 12, 16 week running program, but not really have a pace strategy in place. Once it actually gets to race day, they just think I'll just. do really well in my training and then just what happens on race day happens on race day and that's probably where I'd find most people's mindset, I guess you could say. Um, so to follow that up with a question, how important is it to have a pace strategy when it comes to race day rather than just relying on the training itself? Yeah, I think, um, sometimes distance runners, they consider themselves different from every other sport, but you know, you, you wouldn't, if you were a rugby team, you wouldn't just practice your fitness and some handling skills and then go into a game and hope for the best. You'd have some sort of strategy planned. Or even if you're an actor in theatre, you know, on the stage, you don't just learn the lines, you've got to learn when you deliver the lines and how you deliver the lines. So a lot of runners, what they do is they do the, if you like, the basics and then, but they never think about what I'm actually going to do in the race. Now we say race, of course, as you say, a lot of your listeners will be recreational. and therefore they're not trying to win the race or get maybe in the top 10% or something. They're trying to finish in the best time they could or just even finish. But it doesn't matter really what your aim is. The principles of planning for the race are the same. So I think the number one risk, of course, is that if you don't have a plan as to what time you want to achieve or what your intermediate major EGAY goals are is that you just run too fast at the beginning. You get carried away, you run too fast and then you're just too tired at the end to get that personal best that you were aiming to do or just even to finish. Sometimes people begin the marathon especially so fast relative to their ability that they simply don't finish and they end up walking or whatever. Of course I mean I used to race a lot here in Leeds and I'd see the same people every week or every few weeks And I think, you know, it was just a social thing for them. They weren't that worried about what time they did. Um, so they, they run for years, but ever learning what they've done right or wrong, because they wouldn't analyze it afterwards. They just turn up, they run and they're happy enough. And if they get happened to get a PB, well, that's great. But, um, so, uh, training for, for pace management is really important for recreational runners because. Like I said, if you're not elite and you haven't got those years of experience and training built in, then you need to make sure you optimize what you have, because it will be limited in terms of trying to finish the race in a good time. Now, as I said, recreational runners, if their main aim is to finish the race or get a personal best for them, they're unlikely to be worried about, are they going to win the race? Now, if you're... trying to win the race. Like let's say we go to the other extreme, which is the Olympics or the world championships. That's a different thing altogether. The way they race is they can easily do the distance. They can do it very fast, but they need to use special tactics to try to give them the tiniest of advantages. So we did a study on the 2017 world championships, 10,000 meters, and we were able to show how little bursts in the middle of the race burned off certain athletes who didn't have the sprint finish then. we're talking about tiny amounts of seconds. We're not talking about the recreational understood just trying to finish. So there's no need for a lot of recreational athletes to worry about sprint finishes or developing special tactics. It's just trying to get around in the best possible speed. So what I would say though is that, you know, you ask about like, you do all the training in advance. and then you do the race. And there can be a bit of a difference between the two in that I've heard someone, I can't remember who it was. I think they're from France. They said, you shouldn't train for the event. You should train for the adaptation. And what they meant was, when you plan your training program, you should train to develop your VU2 max, or your lactate threshold, or even just your time on your feet, rather than worrying about how the race works out. But I think, necessarily agree with that. I see the point of yes, you should train for the adaptation, but if you don't train for the actual way the event works out, then you've wasted your adaptations. There's no point in having an amazing VO2 max if you kind of ruin it by running too fast in the first kilometer of the marathon or something like that. This applies in some ways more to the tactical races of the Olympics that are on at the moment. Um, but it does apply to, if you like, uh, recreational runners as well. So yes, trained to adapt your body to be better, but then don't waste it by having poor tactics on the day. You have to have both. I think. Yeah. And that's, it makes a whole lot of sense. And, um, going back to your chapter in the book, it does cover tactics, like pacing strategies and tactics for different distances and you're talking about like the. short to medium distances around the track and then it sort of extends into the marathon kind of distances. So there is a little bit of science around this and a little bit studied around pacing strategies for a marathon. Can you maybe just explain where the science has settled in terms of the best pacing strategy for an individual who doesn't want to win? But I can be safe to say that if someone's training for a marathon and they're a recreational athlete, they want to... If it's, if they've already done a couple, they kind of want to get a PB. They're kind of aiming for a PB. So, um, where do we, where do we land in terms of pacing strategies? Well, everything else being equal. Um, there's no doubt that an even pace is the best strategy for distance running. So running, uh, if you want to do, uh, let's say three hours for the marathon, then you want to go through halfway in an hour and a half. You want to do the first quarter in a quarter of that time in 45 minutes. It's. it there's no kind of doubt about this promise sometimes what happens is you we look at least runners we see how they run i'll go or they won the olympics that must be the way to pace but it's not it's a it was the way they run trying to win uh... at good example actually is the uh... sub to our attempts by uh... kip shogi uh... when he did in monser first he tried to mons and then he did uh... didn't get it Now it's not a true world record because he had so much help if you like, but he ran a completely even pace. Apart from the end when he suddenly realised he was nearly finished and he speeded up. But the reality is that even if the world's best runner ever needs to run an even pace, so do recreational runners. So yeah, in the elite they will sometimes use variable paces to disrupt their competitors, but definitely for recreational runners the best aim is to run at a constant pace. Now... Like I said, everything else been equal. But the problem of course is that that's a flat course. So, you know, I've gone back to Kipchoge in Vienna. It was a completely flat course. They had the bends specially made for them. They had a car in front. They had pacemakers. That's when it's gonna happen. So we have to be realistic and know that no normal person course is gonna be absolutely flat and nice temperature and so on and pacemakers and so on. We have to think about equal effort, not equal speed. So if we know that in the first half of a race there are going to be lots of uphills, and in the second half the race is going to be more downhill, then obviously we will adjust our plan that we might be running the first half a little bit slower and the second half a little bit faster. So it's not quite a constant pace, it's more like a constant effort. The problem though is that, I think this might be something we mentioned in the chapter actually, is that equal effort is not as easy as it might seem, because we have this thing called racing of perceived exertion and it gets used a lot in labs. So anybody who runs in a laboratory for some running testing, they often will show you a sheet of paper that has numbers on it, a guy called Bork came up with it, and you'll say 10 or something like that for medium intensity or 16 might be very hard. So we have this rating of perceived exertion in our heads and this is like a feedback source for us. So when we are very tired towards the end of a marathon our rating of perceived exertion might be 18, something really high. But the thing about it is that it's perceived, that's the P part of our PE, it's perceived and our brains are not always great at this perception. because when we start a race at the very beginning, you can think that you're running effortlessly. It feels quite easy because you're quite excited at the beginning. If you've trained for a marathon, then doing the first kilometers is quite easy. So your perception of how hard you're running at the beginning might be false, as in your perception is that the running is easy, but physiologically, in terms of how much fuel you're using or what percentage you're running a few to max or how much lactate has been produced, there might be wrong. There might be, if you like, misreading by your brain of what's happening physiologically. So your raising of perceived exertion is low. You think it's easy, but actually you're doing damage to yourself because you're physiologically working a lot harder than you think you are. Now, Sometimes people do know this, they know that they're not able enough to keep up with other people, but they keep up with them anyway. And one reason given for this is what we call positive affect, which just means positive feelings and emotions. If you let people get too far ahead of you, it can be quite demoralizing. So what people do is they keep up with others, makes them feel better that they're with a group and that they have a chance of doing a good time. But I think that's backfires in the end because when you get tired you drop off and that becomes even more demoralizing than if you let them go in the first place. I think a better strategy psychologically is to start off slowly, be disciplined in knowing that don't worry they're gonna come back to me and gain from when you start passing them out towards the end. So there's nothing better than in the last half of say a half marathon or a marathon that you're passing people out in fact in any race. that you're passing people out gives you a real boost you feel like you're going a lot faster than you actually are and it really encourages you to finish. The opposite of that is when people are passing you out and that's no fun at all. There was a good example actually it's not in running it was in 20 kilometer race walk in 2012. I had a friend who was competing she told me after like two kilometers she looked behind and she couldn't see anybody and actually I checked the results yesterday in all the splits and she was in the... 50 something to have 60 after two kilometers, but she ended up 18th. And she was able to be disciplined enough to go, okay, I'm not going to go off with this really fast pace at the beginning and then have that big boost. That's the big psychological boost of passing people out at the end. And that is more about positive emotions and so on. So there's a lot to be said for being disciplined at the beginning of a race to gain the benefits physiologically and psychologically towards the end. So in terms of the test pacing strategy, if you start off at your even pace, you, you will be behind other people who end up at the same time, but, or about the same ability, but you will pass them out just by keeping that even pace the whole way through. Okay. Um, so our, our overall goal should be, especially if it's flat and especially if conditions are desirable to have that even pace, um, But even if you're honed in a little bit more, which I think is extremely hard to do is to be that equal effort between that first half of that second half and having that equal effort. Um, but then you're talking about a lot of psychological, um, factors, emotional factors, as well as the physical factors of fatigue and energy and just emotional states, depending on what happens in the race that would manipulate that perceived effort. So, um, it sounds, it can get complicated. But I think when it comes to having that even pace and trying to really have those even splits throughout the whole race, has that been shown to be superior compared to someone who does take their time at the start and is, who says, Oh, let me just take the first half or the first like third really conservative. Then I'll reassess later on if I'm feeling really good, then I'm sprinting to the finish. That sort of strategy has that. been not as favorable. It's a good question. You can gain from going a little bit slower at the beginning. But sometimes the reality is you end up losing so much time that you just can't gain it back again. A good example is the hills. Now you think about a cyclist who goes up a hill. It's a lot of work. But when they get to the top they can actually freewheel all the way down and get to the bottom without even doing any energy. But a runner can't do that. So they say it's roughly... you only gain back about half what you lose in running. In other words, if you lose half a minute running up a certain hill, then when you run back down that hill, you gain back 15 seconds. You can't gain back everything you lost because of the way the feet land in front of the body and you break on every step. So it's sort of similar with this in that if you go too easy at the beginning, And then you're going to try to, how many minutes can you realistically make up the end? You have to be very, very fast. And people are not that fast sometimes. Uh, if you're talking about recreational runners, they can't suddenly put in to six meters per cent, they can't suddenly do 20 kilometers an hour in the last few kilometers. It's, they're not physically capable of doing that. So it depends on what we, how much we mean by going easy. And I think people might over overcorrect that. I think if they say, let me go slow at the start, they go too slow. Um, cause I'm just thinking of my own pace and what I would perceive that'd be like a, you know, five minute 45 pace. And that means that like I'm about 45 seconds off, like a comfortable pace for me, but then I'm losing 45 seconds every single kilometer. And maybe that's too slow because there's no way I'd gain that sort of, um, yeah, gain that back like later down in the race because Yeah, it's, they'd accumulate very quickly. Yeah, I mean, some people do a naked of split as in they run the second half of a race faster than the other, but it's not necessarily because they ran the first half really slow. It's just because they, by going even paced to halfway, then certain pass people out, it helped them psychologically. What was interesting from some research I did on half marathon, you know, the at least half marathon runners, if you like, was that they would all deliberately slow. to the same amount as their rivals in that sort of 15 to 20 kilometer part so that they could all do the sprint finish. So yeah, people often do a negative split but it's not by minutes. It might be by one minute or half a minute. It's very rare actually in a marathon to do a negative split simply because people run out of fuel. But I wouldn't deviate too far from the even split thing. Of course it could be as well that somebody... tries for an even split and actually they in the last couple of kilometers they do speed up a bit because they've been so conservative beforehand that it's physiologically are better than they would have been but I would still aim for a certain time and start on that pace and try to maintain it for as long as possible and then get that big psychological boost of knowing that the finish is near. I wouldn't deliberately go too slow at the beginning it just doesn't you can't make it up you can't make up the time. I like how you're factoring in the psychological effects later in the race. Like if people are passing you or if you're passing people or that getting close to the finish line and then all of a sudden you just get this boost of energy because it's within your limits. We have so much evidence now that once you get here within 10% of the finish line, you get such a massive boost. I've seen in 50 kilometer race walkers, the longest race in the Olympics, they're absolutely dying. And then suddenly with five kilometers to go up, they speed up again because they know the end is near knowing the end is near is a massive, massive boost. Knowing that you're going to make it. It's a big boost. Yeah. And so I guess the next progression of this is actually determining the race pace because someone would have gone through training, um, potentially someone who hasn't done a marathon before might think, okay, well, what's my time I should aim for, or if I have done a couple before and I want to get a PB, um, what's my. desirable goal because if they want a four hour marathon, then they, they need to know that completion time before they evenly work out what their even pace should be per kilometer or per mile. And so do you have any guidance around determining what pace that should be set at? Yeah, the marathon is different from all the other races. So we'll come back to that one, I think, because it's so different. But if you, you know, ultimately experience is the key because the more you run the more training you do the more years of training you do and the more races you do the more likely you are to get the pace right. It's really difficult for a first-timer no matter how good they are. So even elite track runners who've run the marathon can get it spectacularly wrong because they just don't judge the marathon properly. So you do need to do a certain number of hard training sessions that are close to or if they're shorter distances faster than what you're aiming to do Just so you get used to the idea of what a speed feels like If you can't run, let's say 10 kilometers 40 minutes in training You're not gonna be 35 minutes in a race, but many runners actually start at that pace They do the first kilometer in three and a half minutes and then they end up doing about 41 or 42 So and they've been better off starting at four minutes per kilometer Now, I used to train for marathon pace on the track because I knew the distances and I'd build it up to that. I'd start off with 300s at race pace, which felt really easy. And then I went up to 600 at race pace, 900s at race pace. And I would end up with something like 10 times, 1200 at race pace with 200 meters in between, which is a really, really hard session. But you're just learning what does the pace feel like. Incidentally, I was doing that training session one day and Kelly Holmes, who won two gold medals in the Olympics in 2004, she appeared on the track, the same track, and her training was 1,400 meters as fast as possible and 1,600 meters as fast as possible. And that was her whole training session. So what you're training, yeah, that's all she did. And then when I told her what I was doing, she was like, wow, I could never do that. Well, it's not really that fast, but it's a lot. So you've got to get used to the... the distance for the speed and you've got to restrain yourself as well. That's why I did it on the track, because I knew I need to do every 300 in whatever, you know, in a minute and that was the right pace. So, um, now the good thing about using races for training is that they, they reduce the psychological load. So I'm going to talk, I know I'm talking a lot about psychology, but This is not like people have to worry about the psychology. This is kind of what happens in your brain without you realizing. You reduce the psychological load a lot by running in races for training because they will have accurate distances. So you're not worried about is my GPS giving me the right distance? You know, it's going to be 10 kilometers or half a marathon. You have markers on the side of the road, usually telling you how far you've gone. So you can check your watch to see are you on pace? the course is probably traffic free. So when you go running training on the roads and there's lots of traffic, you can get, it can make you nervous and that puts you off. But usually races are traffic free. So you don't have to worry, am I going to get knocked down? And refreshments might be provided during the race. So they might have water or something. So you don't have to worry about carrying water. So by using shorter races as training and sticking to your planned pace for the marathon or the half marathon or whatever it's going to be, that can really help you. develop the skill you need. And there's two skills you're developing. One is just running at a certain pace, but the other one is being disciplined and that it's not a race, I'm in a training run. So you can't race training. You have to know it's training and I'm gonna do this, but I'm using the race situation to get me ready for the race and to prepare my mind and to make it, like I say, psychologically easier than I'm not worried about. traffic and distances. Now, like I said, the most difficult race to prepare for is the marathon because it's not like it's two half marathons. It's not like doing a 32 kilometer run and then an extra 10 kilometers on the end. It's totally different thing. The fuel problem in marathon is so big that it's not like preparing for any other distance. For good runners, an often equation we use is we get half, best half marathon time near the marathon, double it, and then add on 10 minutes. But that probably is a bit, you know, you probably would have to add on more for recreational runners. But the problem is, of course, that the fatigue you get in the last 10 kilometres of a marathon means this doesn't always really work. And ultimately you need to do a lot of runs that are longer than 30 kilometres, no matter what speed they are. to get used to being on your feet for that long and to know what it feels like. In the actual marathon, you talked about going slower, yeah I would err on the side of caution. Definitely don't go fast in personal best pace in the first half. You can always make up a little bit at the end. If you start off, you know, if you start off a little bit conservative, like I say conservatively, you probably will, it doesn't have to be massively conservatively, just a little bit below your pace or... Um, exactly at your pace, your target end pace should be fine. Um, but it's, it is really difficult for the marathon. It's the most difficult one to pace properly. Yeah. And like I say, sometimes it's the battle of attrition that you, why you need to add on so many more minutes from the half marathon, you can't just double the half marathon because you're, you're facing the conditions of attrition as well. Um, but I want to throw a few factors at you because. We talk about even pace. We talk about even effort is desirable if everything's remaining consistent. Um, you did mention sometimes the courses and always flat. Um, but in the chapter, they also talk about weather and. Especially for a marathon because marathons usually start morning. Um, and it just gets warmer as the day goes on. And if you're expecting like a four or five hour marathon, it's going to be significantly warmer than it is at the start of the race. So how do we factor that in as well? Yeah. the best conditions are where it's cool, so between five and ten degrees celsius you've got no wind, you've got no precipitation and you've got cloud cover so there's no sunshine but the chances of getting that are really low all of those things to happen, normally something will not work out, I remember running a twenty mile race in the snow and the snow just stings your eyes if nothing else so that's the best but... we rarely get that. I think Kipchoge for a sub-2 hour managed to get everything because it was all planned for a certain place at a certain time. So the more we move from being cool and no wind and no rain and so on, the worse it's gonna be. And we have to take this into account. So if it gets hot, we have to consider pre-race cooling. Now the more elite athletes will have ice fests and all these kinds of things, but even... If you like recreational runners, what I used to do was get my singlet and my running vest and put in water so that even if it was a relatively cool day, the vest is already cool and cooling you down. I'm making sure to get enough water on our bodies. I think a big mistake people make is that they spend too much time drinking water rather than cooling their bodies. what i mean is when you when you if you just drink the water it takes so long for the water to get into your body to go around your system and then come out of sweat you know you you're getting hotter not all that time where's the best thing would have been just to pour water on your over your head and over your body and this is why they have sponges as well because rather than waiting for the water to come back out of sweat you just poured over your head and that could cool you down and i think a lot of people underestimate sweat it's the number one way of cooling down because the conversion of uh... the water into steam if you like takes heat from your body if you can speed up that process by just getting the water over your body rather than going into your mouth then that does help uh... of course you might want to drink some as well if you're relying on drinking water to keep you cool it's not going to work and i know in australia you have a lot hotter conditions than we do when it's your summer Now if it's something like it's windy, yeah running behind others can help, but sometimes athletes deliberately don't run behind other people because they actually want that wind to help cool them down. Light rain can help if it's going to get too hot, but if it really rains it's going to slow you down. So sunlight, if it's particularly sunny, you get that radiant heat so it's better to run if you can in the shade. And sometimes the problem with doing these things is that they add a little bit of distance on. if you expect to run, let's say 10,000 meters for the 10k race, you maybe will run maybe up to 100 meters or more than that by having to deviate for shade and hiding behind other people if it's sunny or if it's windy. So people need to mentally adjust their planned finishing time when they see the weather conditions because otherwise they're going to be disappointed I think because race conditions are rarely ideal. And I think heat is the, can be the biggest problem, especially for recreational owners. Like you say, if you're taking four or five hours to do the marathon, even if it doesn't get that much hotter, you are going to get a lot hotter. And I definitely think that the water over your head, um, that I used to use it all the time is something that people need to think about because drinking it is just not going to help. Yeah. I'm already thinking of a couple of scenarios to say like, I'm picturing myself running a marathon and then. Cause it's usually like in one direction, it's usually like in some sort of loop or doing like laps of something and just picturing like, if it is a bit windy, there will be moments where you do have a straight on headwind, but then you'd turn around and it's on your side or on your back. So focusing, if there is a headwind, that's when I need to find someone to run behind. And then, um, throughout facing all other directions and it'd be, you know, ideal. Well, not as ideal to hide behind someone, but then like you said, if it's quite sunny and there's like shade on the other side of the path or on the other side of the road, maybe it's worth, um, making sure you don't deviate too much, but maybe it's worth running in the shade. Um, going back to the, the water over the head thing, it makes a whole lot of sense. And me watching the triathlon on the weekend, um, they take, I saw them take a little bit of water and then just dunk the rest over their head, um, from a cooling perspective, that makes a whole ton of sense, but down the end, like towards the end of the race, especially for a marathon or an ultra or something. Um, do we run a risk of like dehydration because heat wise, it's cooling us down, but we might pass out at the end of the race if we're not taking in too much water. Or is that, I have also found there's evidence that like, dehydration isn't really that common in marathons. But so what do you have to say about that? Uh, well, you see if you. It depends on what the marathon set up is. If you think, I mean, actually quite a few of those British athletes who won the gold medals, they're my students. Often those kinds of races, they'll have the opportunity of energy drinks. And what the athletes will do is they'll focus on being hydrated, if you like, using the energy drinks rather than using the water. So that's... that's slightly different. If you look at the elite marathon, let's say it's the London marathon or New York or something, the elite athletes will have their special drinks and they will drink them and then the water, they won't drink that as much, they pour it over their heads and over their bodies and keep cool. So they're getting they're using the energy drinks, that's part of their hydration, which is why they don't become dehydrated towards the end. If you're, if you're, when I did the London marathon, you know, I didn't, I wasn't getting my special drinks so... we were getting a special sports drink that sponsored the event and I made sure when I was training for the, you know, when I was doing 22 mile runs for a 26 mile race, I put the, um, this, I bought that specific drink and I put it by the side of the road and I would do loops around and I drank it at the same time as I would get it in the race because I knew where I would get it in the race. Um, and I didn't have, you know, loads of water to drink because you're not, you're not going to get that. You're going to remember as well. people entering a marathon for the first time, suddenly there might be a water station every kilometer or every few kilometers, and suddenly they're drinking loads of water that they didn't drink when they were in training. And you know, you can become bloated and actually sick from drinking too much. So I'm not saying don't drink water because yes, you can become dehydrated, but you've got to factor in the weather conditions. I see a lot of people drinking loads of water for quite short races. And it's like... Why are you drinking that? It's not really going to benefit you. The race is too short for benefiting. So in a marathon hot conditions, yes, of course you should drink some because you will lose weight from sweating. Um, but just don't overdo it. I think is the main, is the main thing or don't rely on that to cool you down. It's a different, it's a different kind of thing is what I'm trying to get across. Yeah. Just make sure you don't mix up your drinks and, um, have an energy drink to throw up your head. Um, okay. So. other conditions or other factors that we want to consider. They mentioned in the book also, or you mentioned in your chapter about following a pacer and you did mention the psychological load, making sure our psychological load isn't too much as well. Perhaps we talk about a pacer, why a pacer is so important and then maybe hone in a little bit more, highlight the, that psychological load and why that's so important. Yes, so pacemakers, you know, they can help with shielding from the wind. But we talked about wind a bit earlier. The reality is that unless you the wind is really, really strong or you can get really close to the person in front of you, you don't get that much of a benefit. Actually, like we said, the real benefit of pacemakers is that they take the cognitive load and what we mean is they have, they have to do the thinking. Um, but the problem with pacemakers is that like because they have to do the thinking this makes it hard it's not easy to get a pacemaker even in the elite races who actually runs the right speed often they go way too fast or way too slow and this is why they've brought in the wave light technology don't know if you've seen that it's where the they have green lights and the athlete follows the green light and if they do that then they're running at the right pace once again showing just how important it is to have an even pace or in the sub 2r marathon attempt they had a car going at the right speed I don't know if you remember the 2003 world record, it's now been eclipsed, but Paula Radcliffe ran a world record in London in 2003. And she had two male pacemakers with her the whole race. Now she said afterwards, I wasn't behind them, I was running against them, I was racing them. But she was trying to say that she didn't get any benefit from the wind because she was beside them. But she could have got an enormous psychological benefit. capable of much faster times, they were doing all the thinking. She just had to follow them. What we have is that, back to psychology, what people do is they follow a principle of adopting the least psychologically taxing strategy. What this means is you're going to do whatever causes you the least brain pain, whatever causes you to think the less. That's what you're going to do. And this is not just in running, this is in everything. It's like following the path of least resistance. So a good example would be a lot of athletes, they don't really wanna think about how they're gonna race. They want the coach to tell them, you're gonna do the first lap this speed, you're gonna do the next lap that speed, and they go, okay, that's what I'll do. It's not because the athlete is stupid or can't do it for themselves, it's just that when you're running, you don't wanna have to think very much because it uses up energy and you're better off just focusing. And this is what the pacemakers do. Now, like I said, sometimes the planned pacemakers get the pace wrong. or the others just don't follow them. So the men's Olympic 10,000 meter race, the Ugandan went off in the front. He was expecting the other two Ugandans to follow him. They probably should give him the final result, but they got it wrong. If you've got a recreational runner and you're following somebody else and you might not even know them, you're gonna make sure the person you're following is someone you trust that they're running at the right speed. just go back to race walking. I know a lot of people won't be race walkers but it is a good example because it's distance event as well. But there's an athlete competing in this 8th Olympics over 50 kilometers, his name is Jesus Angel Garcia from Spain. And I know athletes who will follow him for more or less the whole race because it's his 8th Olympics, he's done so many world championships, he's got world championship gold, he's had a world championship, he's just like a metronome. And other people will follow him because they trust him. They don't mind not even know him, they just know this guy is somebody who knows how to pace. So just running alongside another runner isn't always going to achieve a fast time because like I said, if you don't know that person or you don't know them very well they just happen to be running at the speed that you want them to run, you don't know whether they're going to get tired or they're going to speed up. And my research on half marathon running showed that athletes often get locked into personal battles even near the back of the field and they don't run their best. end up focusing too much on, oh I'm going to beat the guy in yellow I've been running with for, you know, 30 kilometers. That's my aim now. And they forget about the overall goal. So pacemakers can reduce the load, but if you like unintentional or just coincidental pacemakers sometimes can mess things up. Did you know you can jump on a free 20 minute physio chat with me to see if you are on the right track with your rehab and running endeavors? This is a free service as part of today's sponsor, the Run Smarter physiotherapy clinic, which is my own clinic where I help treat runners both in person and all over the world with online physiotherapy packages. I always encourage runners to invest in their own knowledge first, but sometimes it's nice to have a helping hand and a second opinion. So I'd love to jump on board as your coach and physio if you require tailored assistance. Just head to runsmarter.online to see your available options. Once again, if you're still unsure if physiotherapy is right for you, we can schedule a free 20 minute injury chat with me, which you can find as a button on my website or in the podcast show notes. This will take you to my online calendar and you can book in a time. And I guess why are we trying to reduce the cognitive load? Have you found that if someone... Like in a scenario, if someone goes out unwilling of what pace or they're constantly focusing on their pace per kilometer, they're constantly thinking, should I, am I going too fast? Am I going too slow? Should I have some water here? Have I had too much water and they're constantly building on that psychological load, has that let, would that lead to like a negative, um, sensation or like a, would it affect your RPE? Would it affect fatigue moving forward? Like what are the, why are we trying to make this, um, as easy as possible? Yeah, I think you can't overthink it. I know I've said all these things, but you can't overthink it. I used to coach a female athlete who was actually quite good. And sometimes if I was doing a race as a training run, she would pace off me. And one of the things she did was she never wanted to know what the time was. She wanted me to worry about the time. And... even when we run past people and they shout her number she tried to block it out she didn't she never wanted to know whether she was behind schedule or ahead of schedule she just wanted to be able to follow somebody so my job was knowing the time and knowing we were doing the right speed and actually I used to know she was slightly better than she thought so if she was aiming for let's say 85 minutes for the half marathon I knew she was able to do 82 or sub that and we did that in a race actually in Nottingham where I knew we were ahead of the splits every time but I knew she was going to be okay. But she didn't know anything. She didn't know anything. In terms of picking up the water stations, I was picking up the water. I was taking the time to go over, pick up the water and give it to her. And, you know, that's just an extreme example, if you like, of reducing cognitive load. She wasn't thinking about anything apart from following me. And that's what the elite athletes are doing as well. They're not thinking about, am I doing the right speed? I'm just following that guy there because that guy is paid to run at that certain speed. That's not going to work for the recreational runners. I think you can, if it's a large city marathon where there's loads of people in it, you can start quite slowly just because there's so many big crowds and people can kind of panic a bit and go, oh, I'm way behind schedule, I've got to speed up. And you don't because what will happen eventually is the crowd dissipates and you get back quickly to your planned speed. So Yeah, I think you can overthink it. I think in some ways there are too many gadgets. Personally, when I ran the marathon and I didn't have a watch on me at all. I would use it in training, but not in racing. Or from pacing somebody, I would use it, but never in a race, because I like to just go with what was happening, but be restrained. So I think that if you have a heart rate monitor and a GPS and all these things, I think you can stress a bit out a bit and... GPS people seem to stress out a lot because what will happen is that the system will tell them they've done a certain distance and the marker on the side of the road will tell them a different distance and they start to get nervous about it and why is it different and you know you're just worrying about things you don't need to worry about. So I would actually, a stopwatch is the most I think people should have when they're competing in a race. I don't think you need anything more than that. It adds to the worry if you know what I mean. That's the amount of information going on. Yeah. And now that we know the positive impacts of trying to keep things, trying to keep a pace equal or level, you did mention in the book as well that females have been found to keep an even pace and even split more consistent than males can, but didn't actually explain why that's the case. Do we know why females are better at? maintaining an even pace? Yeah, so this is true, yes. A good example is my, I know it's not recreational runners, but my research on at least marathon runners showed that women had more even pacing. They were more likely to have negative splits, as in they were more likely to speed up in the second half, and they were less likely to drop out. There was much lower numbers of them were dropping out. Now there's different theories with this. Some of them are psychological, and some are physiological. So the psychological ones, mainly revolve around that women are more cautious at the beginning. They're less likely to take risks and because they start slower they're less likely to run out of fuel, they're less likely therefore to drop out and they're more likely to run this negative split. So that's the sort of psychological thing about mostly about risk taking. The physiological ones are that women have a greater proportion of type 1 muscle fibers and these are the aerobic ones, these are the long distance running ones. and it's actually not unusual now to find in ultra distance running that women are beating men so there are these two theories i think also if you look at big city marathons uh... you know women can benefit from men being in the race with them because uh... the somebody to pace themselves off once again go back to paula radcliffe she couldn't get two women to run with her the whole way for the for that world record attempt because she was the fastest woman so she needed two men to run with Now we did a survey for one of our studies on risk-taking marathon runners with about 4,000 responses and what we found was that actually the women said they were as likely to take risks as the men but the evidence from the races doesn't show that. A good example is the 2017 London Marathon that I actually analyzed biomechanically and it showed the women started off really slow in that one and the men started off really fast. And actually by the end, in the last sort of part of the race, the women, the top women were nearly as fast as the top men. So what's happening, I think the women are getting the pacing right and the men are getting it really badly wrong. There's no worse pacers than the men at the start of a marathon. They go off way, way too fast relative to their ability. And... often i think this gets missed because you if you watch the olympic marathon or something like that they all look really fresh at the beginning in the first five ten kilometers they all look great and it looks like what's happening is that the guys at the front they're just getting faster and faster and dropping the other ones behind that's not what's happening they're all getting slower all the men are getting slower it's just that some of them are getting slower quicker than others whereas the women often speed up towards the end and it's because they've conserved the energy in there so i don't know if it's a risk-taking thing or they're more cautious or they're just more sensible but definitely yeah women are that your pace was then meant. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the topic around, um, the central governor theory, how we have this internal perception, this internal pace that we create for ourselves based on effort and based on how we think we will survive throughout the race. And I have done episodes on this in the past around effort and how we perceive effort and because you're so, you talk about the even balance between like the physical side of things, the physical demand and then the psychological demands. Um, keeping that in mind and keeping like a pacing strategy and still on the, on the same topic of tactics. Um, are there any other ways or any other strategies that we can employ knowing that it is quite psychologically driven and effort is pretty much like a brain perception. Um, how can we take advantage of this? Yeah. So, I mean, you mentioned the central governing theory, which has been dropped to a certain extent by some research and pacing recently. The problem is the brain can be really poor at judging how fast you're running in the early stages of a race because the feedback it's receiving from the environment is not indicative of what's going to happen later. So for example, in the first few kilometers of a marathon, you know, the athlete will feel fresh, they're excited to be in the race and the brain just doesn't think, you know what, in 40 kilometers of time I'm going to be really, really tired so I should slow down. It just doesn't work like that. So you kind of have to, if you like, tell your brain, tell your brain it's wrong, you put in it, but you know, you have to think, hang on, I've got to remember, I'm gonna be really struggling out in the last 10 kilometers of this marathon, because I know the realities are that I'm gonna run out of fuel. So you kind of have to control yourself and ignore your perception. So when I used to run, I used to have a... way of thinking that was, if you think you're too fast at the beginning, you're definitely too fast. If you think you're doing the right pace, you're probably still going too fast. And even if you feel like you're going too slowly, you're probably still going too fast. Because it feels so easy at the beginning, you just don't realise how fast you're going. And actually in the labs, remember the race walkers, we'd have them walking over say 50 and they would set off and we'd say, you went way too fast. And they said, no, that's my normal speed. And we said, no, that was world record pace. You know, we knew that. They couldn't judge it at all. People just cannot judge when they're fresh how fast they're going. So, you know, in a race, you're running with other athletes. This can be a huge advantage. Running with other people is a big advantage because they can help you to do better, you know, because running on your own is quite hard. But other people can also be your worst enemy. Because the reality is they're most likely making mistakes about how fast to go and you're copying them. And I think, you know, the strategy of simply ignoring everybody else, especially people you know is so important. And I say especially people you know because I think what happens a lot of the time, especially in a small race when you maybe have a few club mates or something or somebody from the same gym, and you know, I'm better than him or her. and that person goes off really quick and you think why is that person ahead of me? That person shouldn't be ahead of me, I'm better than them. And you run really fast trying to catch up with them because you think, well, I should be up there because I'm better than that person, but the reality is they've probably gone off way too fast. So you, and this is, this is like I mentioned the 20 kilometer race walker, she was able to ignore all that and come through really strongly at the end. So getting real meaningful feedback. like a split time, like I mentioned the stopwatch over a short distance. So if you know the first kilometer is way faster than it should have been, you've got to slow down. What a lot of people do is they do the first few kilometers, let's say the first five kilometers of a marathon in a really fast time and instead of thinking I've gone too fast, they think oh I've done a really good time, I'm going to smash my PB. You know, you're using the feedback incorrectly. So I think you just got to... you really have to train yourself to ignore the environment. It's really hard to do. The easiest thing to do is do what everybody else is doing. But if you can ignore that and just say, I've got to just restrain myself, I've got to restrain myself. So that... because I know what's coming. Because if you don't, you're just gonna do what everybody else does, which is go too fast, slow down, and then we're all crawling towards the end. So, yeah... The brain is not a good guide. Sometimes perception is a bad guide. I thought that way. Perception of effort is a bad guide to how faster and at the beginning of a race. Um, because I want to like, change my thoughts on a lot of things as well. You casually just said at the start that like the central governor theory, there's a few people that have dropped that when you say dropped, do you mean they've disregarded it or they're, they've found other theories that convince them otherwise? Um, what's, what was the idea behind that? It's just other theories. You see, there's different, you know, the early pacing research, a lot of it was on cycling and rowing, because you might know what cycling is, they have all these power meters and everything, and they study pacing a lot. So a lot of early research was on those things. And the very, very first studies on pacing and athletics were mainly things like... the 800 meters look at the first half of the race, look at the second half, oh they all slowed down, okay so the best way to run a race is to run really fast the first half and then slow down the second half. But over time and it was only really after 2008 that really useful data came out of athletics and actually we wrote about this in a in a in a literature review we did whereby we said that yeah there was a great review done in 2008 on pacing. really good studies of data came out on athletics. So we needed to re-evaluate, I think what was happening in athletics. You cannot look at cycling and rowing and swimming and say, this is what you should do in running because it's totally different things. So we started off with only been able to look at halfway splits in the marathon. A lot of the early studies are just how, you know, what did they do at halfway? What did they do for full distance? But that's completely inadequate. But it was all that was available. Now more and more and more we're getting more and more and more better splits so we can understand the pacing profiles much better about what's happening and I focus mainly on championship racing actually and it's you know we've started to be able to model these things using current data and we can see you know where is the anaerobic energy being used up why can't they do a sprint finish. It's not as simple as saying, oh, they were tired, or they just weren't good enough. You've got to be able to analyze that. So we've got more information now, more evidence to be able to say what's really happening in these races, why isn't it happening like that, and how do we coach the athletes. Actually, there's an Olympic athlete from Australia competing, and her coach emailed me about some of the ways I was talking about how championship races are run, because it's not like world record attempts. personal best attempts or these diamond league grand prix's. It's totally different. So I think there's lots of different theories as to how we pace. I'm not saying the central governing theory is wrong or anything like that. It's just that there are other ideas coming about how people pace themselves. And like I say, we've got more data now to be able to base our recommendations on. Yeah, cool. And so if I was to try and recap, this whole tactics and strategies for pacing strategies for a marathon. We're talking about like during your training, um, getting enough experience or doing a couple of marathons to get some experience and doing some race pace. A lot of race pace within your training to establish what your actual pace during the marathon should be. Then on race day, we want to try and find even splits while the strategies to try and be as even as possible if conditions allow. Then we're factoring in things like hills, we're factoring in things like cooling down as much as we can and wind and shade and with those factors in trying to make sure that our effort is equally distributed. And then aside from that, trying to reduce the cognitive load by trying to make things as simple as possible, trying to make your strategy as simple as possible. And that might be taking cognitive load away from you and onto a pacer or onto a friend or another runner. Um, is there any other factors or any other strategies or something that we haven't discussed yet that you think, uh, we might need to know? Um, I think, uh, in terms of, if you're like analyzing a race and then preparing for the next one, I think, you know, there's an interesting phenomenon in psychology that I studied called fundamental attribution error. What this is, it's to do with whether you attribute success or failure to, or if you're right or wrong if you like, to someone's disposition, to their personality or their circumstances, because that's the situational part. So the error occurs because what people do is, if I do, if me as a person, I do something wrong, what I will do to protect my ego, if you like, is that I will say that was because of the situation. It was... I was late for work because the bus was late or because the alarm didn't go off or it's not because I'm a lazy person. But then if I'm in my work and I'm teaching a student and the student arrives late, I'll make the error of not saying, oh, it's because the bus was late. It's because they were lazy and they couldn't get out of bed. Yeah, so this is what the fundamental attribution error is. We protect ourselves by saying it's not because of me, it's because of something external, whereas with other people, we blame them and not. situations we reverse things. Now this happens in running so a good example is we might run a personal best in a 10k race let's say and we'll say well that's because I did such good training I'm so talented and I had great tactics we won't but if we don't do the PB if we do a bad race we don't say well it's because my training was bad or I'm not that good or we'll say oh it was the hills it was the weather it was something it's always something else when you know, we do badly. If you take the example now of these, a lot of people running really fast times, especially on the track, we don't say, we make the same, we make the error, but in reverse, like I said, we don't say, oh, it's because they train so hard or they're really talented. We say, well, it's the super shoes. Or they had a pacemaker, they had wave lights, they had something else. So when we did our survey of the 4,000 marathon runners, What was amazing was we asked them a qualitative question just to type in. We said, why do you think you slowed down the second half? Because most of them did. I would say 90% blamed hills, weather, all these kind of things. Only 10% or less said, I ran out of fuel, which is nearly always the main cause of people slowing down the marathon. So many people blamed the hills for some races, especially in America, but I looked at the course profile and found it wasn't that hilly in the second half at all. um... they just felt it was uh... one person even blamed the crowd for being too noisy that's why they didn't do a good time one bc have some obscure ones one person other a false leg and lost ten minutes changing the legan halfway you know you get all these reasons why people don't run so well but very few in the reality is nearly everybody slows in the second half of the marathon because they run out of fuel or they get tired or it gets hot like you said nobody wanted to say ran out of fuel or I didn't have enough. It was always blaming something else and I think what happens is that if you do that too often and it could be true that was a hot day or it was a hilly course but if you blame it too often, then you never go, you know, maybe my training wasn't good enough or maybe I got my tactics wrong. Maybe I should have run slower at the beginning. So I think if you, if you, it's not, this fundamental attribution error thing is a normal thing in human existence. It's not exclusive to runners. It's everybody makes this mistake because it helps like I say protect us from feeling bad about ourselves but if you can be objective about how you ran and instead of saying okay it was a bit harder that you can say okay you know what I did start the race too quickly and I should learn from that so if we can be objective we can learn from our mistakes and our successes and then run better the next time so we can learn we said talked about experience is only good if you if you learn from it if you always blame the outside facts why didn't do well they're always external factors are always going to be there. It's always going to be slightly hilly or slightly hot or whatever. So you won't improve. So you've got to really, uh, like I say, um, just be aware that you will. Sometimes attribute things wrongly and you've just got to be a bit objective in your running at least and say, okay, I'm going to improve the next time. And this is what I'm going to do to try to improve. And that way you will eventually being a running physio as well. I can extend that out to people who get injured and will blame other things. They'll blame their shoes. They'll, they'll blame. something else rather than a training error that might've happened. Um, yeah. And 75% of injuries are from training errors, not from, not from slipping or, you know, it's, it's from making a simple mistake of too much exercise or too much too soon. As you'll know. So yeah, it's exactly the same thing. I'm a big fan of that self-reflection and I guess as a, um, recommendation, just trying to detach from that ego driven. Um, trying to protect yourself because if you are honing in and just like very narrow focus, trying to protect your ego, like you said, you're not going to learn from it. And we want to learn from all our experiences. Same with our injuries. We want to learn from what brought us this injury in the first place. And so we can do something different next time, do something safer next time, do something smarter, do something better tactical next time. And so that's a really nice strategy. And like I said, like looking at runners, they have, maybe they've done like several marathons before. Hopefully they're all learning from each, each marathon. And, um, we've all got a whole bunch of experiences in the past to learn from, which is a wasted potential. If you're not, if you're so narrow-focusing, you're not using all that experience, um, to build up your wisdom, then, you know, you're not going to see any improvement. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think it's a big, it's a big thing, but it's, it's hard. But I think the best runners do it or they, or they'll get the coach to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Brian, um, this was a lot of fun. Uh, uh, really wrapped it like the topic itself. I find it really fascinating. And I know a lot of people that there's a couple of situations where a runner would want, they want to overcome their injury. They want to decrease their risk of injuries. But the other one is they want to increase their running performance. And usually that comes in a race. They want to improve their race times. Um, and I would, I would. guess that most of that's around a half marathon or a marathon, those sort of distances. And so a lot of people are going to really benefit from this. It's very practical information, really easy information to implement, and it can have a lot of positive impacts moving forward, something so simple that can really be of benefit. So I really thank you for coming on. Thank you for all the research you've done. And thanks for sharing us your knowledge today. Thank you. Thank you very much, Bodhi. And that concludes another Run Smarter lesson. I hope you walk away from this episode feeling empowered and proud to be a Run Smarter scholar. Because when I think of runners like you who are listening, I think of runners who recognize the power of knowledge, who don't just learn but implement these lessons, who are done with repeating the same injury cycle over and over again, who want to take an educated, active role in their rehab, who are looking for evidence-based long-term solutions, and not accept problematic quick fixes. And last but not least, who serve a cause bigger than themselves and pass on the right information to other runners who need it. I look forward to bringing you another episode and helping you on your run smarter path.