Pace your life like a marathon
Consistently good is better than occasionally great
I think endurance events are fascinating, as they are so different from any shorter events. Running a short race, you basically just push as hard as possible until you cross the finish line.
In endurance events, you need to have a different approach. Let’s take a marathon as an example, 42.2km (26.1 miles). My last marathon time was 3 hours 24 minutes. At some point, I want to run under 3 hours. How do I shave over 24 minutes off that time? Sprint the last 10km as fast as I can? No.
Let’s say I run at 5min/km the whole race, but for the last 5km I speed up to 3min/km. That would be a 15min/5km pace, which is super fast. As a reference, the 5k world record is 12:35.36. It’s safe to say this would be impossible for me, but let’s go with it in this example.
So with the 5km sprint, I would “improve” my time by 10 minutes, compared to the 5min/km pace. Even if I sprinted the last 10km, it wouldn’t be enough.
So what I need to do is think about the pace throughout the whole race. Increasing the pace by ~15 seconds/km would improve the time by 10 minutes. Is that more manageable than all-out sprinting the last 5km? Absolutely.
For those interested, I need to run at a ~4:15 min/km pace to finish in under three hours.
We face the same things in our normal lives on a regular basis. We want to lose weight, get rich, learn a new skill, etc. Often we are looking to sprint to the finish line, when we actually should think about it the same way as the marathon. Forget about the two-week fat loss camps, the get-rich-quick schemes, etc. Instead, think long-term.
Being consistently good beats being occasionally great.
