How to race

Spring time means the summer racing season for triathlons - and many other sports - is just around the corner, and along with it the hopes and aspirations of great racing and good results. But what about the people we all know of who train like machines but bomb when it comes to racing; what's going on there? Greg Norman was known for choking playing golf, but how does it happen in an endurance sport? How do you race well when you need to?

A race performance does not just start and finish on race day. It starts days and weeks before, and finishes in the days following the actual event. Thus a race is not a discrete event, it's an on-going commitment to performing at your best level, especially when it counts in the heat of competition. A better racer will often beat a better athlete just on the basis they know to race, and as they say, you're only as good as your last race!!

Any performance is a combination of three aspects - physical, technical and tactical. Physical relates to your physical fitness and conditioning for the demands of the event. Technical relates not only to your equipment, but also your skill execution level (eg, someone might be a very fit cyclist, but have poor Mtn bike skills). Tactical relates to your emotional control, as well as your race strategy. A great race means you're in control of each of these aspects in the context of the event you're racing.

The key to a great race is being able to control the controllables, but the difficulty in a race is there are so many uncontrollables...top of the list being other competitors, closely followed by the weather. Depending on your aspirations these things can / will have a different degree of impact on you. If you're racing for a placing then you need to respond to the actions of your competitors, whereas if you're racing for a goal time (or to finish) then the weather might be your biggest issue.

Either way, the vast majority of things that contribute to your performance are within your control, so let's look at how you can use these to race well.

Physical Race Preparation
Training for an event is a huge topic, and the subject of volumes of books. However for the purposes of maximising the effectiveness of your current training there's things you can do right away, including the following:

• Know yourself. Understand how your body performs, responds, adapts and more. The more you know about your body in every different kind of scenario you encounter - good and bad - the better prepared you'll be for the uncontrollables on race day. Learn from training.
• Also, know your strengths, weaknesses, capability and current fitness. This will help to plan your tactics for the race.
• Prepare for the demands of the race. Your training in the immediate weeks (and months) pre-race should be more and more like how you expect to perform on race day in terms of terrain, intensity and duration (in key sessions). Think specificity.
• Rest. There's simply no excuse for turning up to a race tired. A race is a race, not a training session, so treat it with the respect it deserves otherwise save yourself the cost of the entry fee. Even if you’re not at your fittest, you can still race to the best of your ability on the day and take something away from it. Don’t waste the opportunity.
• Know the course and the likely weather conditions. Know what the swim course is like - salt vs fresh water, deep water vs beach start, single vs multi-loop, river currents or waves, etc. Know the bike course - the profile of hills, protection from wind and sun, nature of road surface, corners, etc. Know the run course – exposed and/or sheltered, hilly or flat, aid station locations, type of surface, etc.
• Warm-up before the race…just like you do before any other hard session!! Sure, modify it for the nature of the race and the scenario, but warm-up to get your body, mind and emotions on the right track.
• Know the race schedule, location, parking, services, etc.

Technical Race Preparation
This aspect includes a range of items, including the following:

• Know your equipment, and have confidence in how it works, it’s suitability and reliability. NEVER use something new on race day.
• Be self-supporting of your equipment and avoid reliance on others. Eg, know how to fix a puncture and carry spares. Of course, there will be things you can’t plan/cater for, eg, broken chain. In that case you are at the mercy of others…
• Make sure you have the necessary skills to compete at the level you aspire to, in the conditions you expect on the day...they might range from cool and dry, to hot and windy, or wet. Being skilful both improves your performance, your safety, and the safety of others in the race.
• Knowing the race rules and requirements for competition is critical for how you participate in the field of play.

Tactical Race Preparation
This aspect is perhaps the most complex of all, as it relates to what goes on in your mind and how you actually execute your race - these things are directly in your control. They include the following:

• Visualising the course, and your journey around it. Being able to see yourself at points throughout the race, from the first-person rather than third-person point-of-view, will help you to be ready for the physical demands of the course, the corners, the conditions, your competitors and more. Familiarity is the key to preparedness.
• Visualising your physical state during the race. Thinking about how you want - contrasted with how you expect - to feel at points around the course is key to race execution, and is closely tied to pacing. Know that at the start you'll likely feel some nerves and anxiety, over taken by the rush of adrenalin as the gun goes, then the initial surge of fatigue after the first minute or so...and later in the race the burn you'll feel and the associated fatigue. Your race will be marked by many physical highs and lows, so visualising what those feelings will be like help you to plan you race execution so that it works out that way.
• Visualising your emotions during the race. As with your physical state, your emotions will fluctuate during the race and the better you can anticipate - and subsequently manage - your emotions the better you'll be able to execute your race to plan. Emotions include your motivation and arousal for the race ahead...it's hard to race well if you're not excited by the prospect of the event.
• Having a race plan. Taking into account various visualisations, having a plan for how you want to execute your race in terms of pacing, dealing with the various stages of fatigue, emotional variations, using your equipment and more, will help you to execute your race with greater certainty than if you make it up as you proceed. Having a race plan will also help you to better deal with variations to the plan, eg, flat tyre, because you'll have greater mental capacity available than if you're making up your plan as you go.
• Planning your race tactics, whether you're racing for a win, to beat your mates or to achieve a goal time. Having a tactical plan is like scenario planning, where you consider various scenarios that might occur during a race and decide what is the best thing to do - or how to respond - if/when that situation actually comes to fruition in the race.
• Being able to respond when things become desperate and/or when your race does not go to plan. This situation is the most the telling sign of great competitors, when you're forced into unplanned or unexpected territory. This might be because you're reaching new levels of intensity in a highly competitive situation, through to grovelling from extreme fatigue. The athlete who keeps their nerve, concentration and relaxation are the ones who will prevail best when things are not to plan...and these are also times of greatest achievement, satisfaction and learning.
• Review the race afterwards - what was good, bad, average or expected about your performance. How good was your physical preparation? Your technical preparation? How did your tactical planning and execution go? Learning from what you did provides valuable input for your future performances.

Racing is a lot of things, where a lot of variables are exposed which may affect your performance. The key to racing well is planning ahead to manage these factors as best you can, and then being ready to change your plan if/when variations occur. These cover physical, technical and tactical aspects that make up a race performance. But even once considering those, there is a further 'X' factor that changes a good race performance into a great race performance - this is personal and is the secret weapon each person must find within themselves. Each race is practice for each of these things. Race hard and race well.