How do you feel at the end of a race? “If I am still standing at the end of the race, hit me with a board and knock me down, because that means I didn’t run hard enough“, so said the great Welsh runner and former world marathon record holder, Steve Jones.
Obviously, the idea of a race is to try as hard as we can, and if we do this to the optimum, we’ll have nothing left to give after we cross the finish line. For the very short distances this doesn’t really apply because they are about ultimate running speed rather than endurance, but our potential running times over anything further than a couple of hundred metres are limited by our energy reserves. Or, more specifically our capability to maintain energy expenditure over the given distance.
Typically, a 5k race will show runners speeding up considerably over the last lap to utilise the short-lasting but powerful alactic energy system. This will mean that the runners’ energy is left behind them on the track rather than still available in the body.
Anyone who has raced will know what it feels like to have given everythingl. Whether it’s a mile or a marathon, few runners would feel like doing anything more immediately after crossing the line.
However, occasionally we are taught the lesson that what the brain tells us about our body might not actually be correct. This was demonstrated in marvelous fashion recently by Lopez Lomong.
Lopez was running a very quick time at the Payton Jordan Cardinal Invitational. In fact, he’d just run nearly 3 miles at sub 4-minute-mile pace. He then put in a final lap of just 53 seconds. The trouble was, it wasn’t really the last lap. When he crossed the line and eased up, the crowd urged him on ‘one more lap to go!’ Lopez then had to bring himself back from the dead to complete the race before the rest of the field caught up — and he did it. What was even more amazing was that he’d actually managed to run the fastest 5k of 2012 and certainly given the other Olympic hopefuls something to think about.
So, the next time you feel like you have absolutely nothing more to give, remember, it’s just a feeling and there could be more left to give than you think.
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