Online Running Log

My suggestion is don't worry about it.  Just go out and train and race.

jaynaedmonds wrote:

thank you :) thats what i was hoping to hear

you are the first person to ever say that to him!

My coach use to say that too. The emphasis is on racing more aggressive during the first two miles. If there's anyone around you or ahead of you, you could probably pick those runners off before it's time to kick. When coaches say that it's most to motivate a runner to race harder in the early part of the race and not literally to make yourself too weak to kick. It's early in the season, you might want to go into a race focused on passing as many runners as you can.

you use different muscles to sprint than you do to run your 5k so regardless of how hard you go in your race you will always have some sort of kick at the end. 

yeah i was thinking of trying to distribute my "kick gas tank" throughout the race in different places to keep my overall pace up

jaynaedmonds wrote:

my coach tells me that i should be running my 5k so hard that i dont have a kick at the end of my race. but i have always had a kick no matter what, and it has always been very powerful and fast, so how can i run so hard that i cant sprint anymore? it seems that up until the last 300m of the race i want to die of exhaustion and then i come around that last turn and i feel like a new person! the only time i havent had a kick was at the end of an open 400 last year...i dont know what to do!

The reason you are able to kick at the end is because throughout the race you have been using mostly your aerobic system and when you kick you switch on the anaerobic system which hasn't been fully tapped yet. Even if you feel like you have nothing left at the end you can almost always find a way to kick. As long as you're still improving and not underperforming in races, I guarantee you that your coach won't hold it against you if you kick.

Tell him that's not what Dean Karnazes' coach told him and to STFU



"In junior high, Karnazes met Jack McTavish, a track coach who became Karnazes’ mentor and introduced him to the appeal of long-distance running. McTavish's basic running instructions were simple: "Go out hard and finish harder." Using this motto as a basis, that season Karnazes won the one-mile (1.6 km) California State Long-Distance Championship held on the Mt SAC track. At the end of the race, Coach McTavish commented: "Good work son, how'd it feel?" To this Karnazes replied: "Well, going out hard was the right thing to do. It felt pretty good." The coach replied: "If it felt good, you didn’t push hard enough. It’s supposed to hurt like hell.""