The other day I did a Facebook Live video on race plans. If you missed it Click Here to watch it or you can read on to to learn more if you prefer. 

If you are spending countless hours training for your next race, but failing to make a race plan then you are doing yourself a huge disservice. It’s like packing your bags for a trip, getting in the car to go and not knowing how to reach your destination because you didn’t map quest the directions or put the address into your GPS. 

If you want to run a successful race you have to have a race plan! 

Race plans don’t have to be complicated or complex. In fact I think they work best when they are simple, realistic and flexible. Just create three different plans that correspond with realistic and acceptable goals for your desired outcome of the race.

The A Race Plan

This plan corresponds to your top desired goal but should be be realistic with your current abilities. So even though your half marathon PR might be 1:50, if you are not trained to that level, then your A plan should be reflective of what you realistically can run, not what you wish you would run. The A race plan can, however, be built around a stretch goal.

To create your A race plan you will need to determine what splits you will need to run each mile based on your goal. It is important to take into account any hills on the course that might affect your pace as well as the weather conditions. You can be detailed with specific splits or give yourself a range to hit. This will really depend on your race goal. Do you want to hit or break a specific time or do you want to finish within a certain time range?

The B Race Plan

Having a Plan B or a backup plan is important! Don’t skip this step! The reason you must have a back up plan is to keep you strong mentally. Let’s face it, there are some races we just don’t have it all together for whatever reason. Maybe the weather stinks, maybe you take a fall, or maybe you ate something that didn’t agree with you. Having a B race plan allows you to quickly make adjustments in your head, shift gears, and shoot for a new revised goal. When you have a plan B to fall back on, you will not feel as disappointed in your race and in fact you may find that you are congratulating yourself for not completely falling apart and still pulling out a decent race.

The create your Plan B, set a finish goal that you will still find acceptable if you are unable to hit your A goal. Give yourself some grace and flexibility with this goal and its plan. Then determine what pace and splits you need to maintain to achieve this goal. Flexibility is important because depending on the race distance you may not even switch to plan B until several miles in. You may also have to do some calculating on the fly while you are in the race to determine what your split times or your pace should be. 

The C Plan

Hopefully you won’t have to implement the C plan, but it is still important to have it as part of your tool kit. The C plan helps you keep yourself together mentally when you start to fall apart mid race. Knowing ahead of time what you will do and how you will react if you have a bad race can actually keep you from a total disaster or even worse dropping out. When you give yourself permission to slow down and regroup, you make a choice to focus on what you can do instead of what you can’t do.

Creating the C plan entails the most flexibility. Decide before the race what is acceptable if the other two plans don’t work out. From there you can determine what pace or splits you will need to maintain to get there. The most important thing about the C plan is to realize you are not a failure if you have to implement it. If anything the you will learn more from your race and be a better runner because you had a plan in place to prevent a complete disaster.

Leave a comment below and share what kind of strategies you implement for your race plans? New to race planning, then share your take aways from this post and how you will implement them in your next race.