New research shows that pacing in running races is controlled primarily by the subconscious brain. Throughout each race, your brain calculates the fastest pace you can sustain without endangering your life and uses feelings of fatigue and reduced electrical output to your muscles to ensure that you run no faster. The more experience you have as a runner, the more reliable these calculations become. Everyone agrees that nothing can prepare you for the fatigue you experience in the final miles of your first marathon. But after you have had this experience, you are better able to pace yourself effectively in future marathons. Most of this learning happens on a subconscious level. Your brain-body makes its way through your second marathon with a better sense of how you should feel at any given point in the race.
2. Set Appropriate Time Goals
Because the marathon distance is so extreme, few runners are able to effectively pace their way through a marathon entirely by feel, as they do in shorter races. You have to hold so much back when running a marathon that the early miles feel very easy--so easy that you could run five or ten seconds per mile faster or slower and it would not feel noticeably harder or easier. But a pace difference of just five or 10 seconds per mile in the first half of a marathon could make the difference between hanging on and falling apart in the second half. So choosing an appropriate time goal, which in turn gives you an appropriate target pace, is very important.
3. Train hard
Like marathons themselves, but to a slightly lesser degree, hard workouts serve to calibrate the teleoanticipation mechanism. Hard workouts expose your body to fatigue in ways that are similar to how marathons do, so they teach your body how fast and how far you can go before fatigue will occur. This internalized feel for your limits will help you pace yourself more effectively on race day.
4. Run the First Half by Time, the Last by Feel
The marathon distance is so extreme that it somewhat exceeds your brain's calculative powers. Consequently, as I suggested above, you can't pace yourself entirely by feel in a marathon as you may do in shorter events. Instead you need to pace yourself initially by paying attention to actual pace data. Only after passing the halfway mark can you safely go by feel, running the remaining distance at the fastest pace possible and using pace data only to monitor your pace rather than to actually control it.
5. Know the Course
Even pacing is not the same thing as an even distribution of energy. Even pacing becomes a very poor pacing strategy for the marathon when keeping an even pace requires sharp fluctuations in your rate of energy expenditure. Hills, of course, are the complicating factor here. When you're running uphill you have to expend much more energy to hold the same pace you were holding on the level terrain that preceded the hill, and when you're running downhill you can go faster with less energy than you can on level terrain.
By Matt Fitzgerald
