The runner who slowed down

Ask a group of students to run a distance as fast as they can and watch the first hundred metres. Most set off far too quickly, slow painfully in the middle, and finish well below what they were capable of.

This is not a failure of fitness. It is a failure of pacing, and pacing is a skill that can be learned faster than fitness can be built. A runner going out two per cent too fast pays for it several times over later, because the effort required to hold a pace rises steeply rather than smoothly as you approach your limit. Slightly too fast is not slightly worse; it is disproportionately worse.

Experienced runners solve this with external information rather than feeling. They use split times, a watch, or a companion holding the pace, because the internal sense of effort is unreliable in the first minutes: adrenaline makes a hard pace feel easy for about ninety seconds, which is precisely long enough to ruin the rest.

The same shape appears in exams. Students who begin at a speed that feels comfortable in the first two minutes are frequently going too fast, and they discover it in question nine.

The remedy in both cases is the same and feels wrong both times: set the pace with a number rather than a feeling, and hold it when the first part feels too easy, because that is the only part where holding back is possible.