Help I Can't Race

What do you do if you can’t race?

Races are a great way to give your training a focus, to bring variety to your running, raise money for charity, meet new people and measure your fitness. But what if you feel you can’t race? The answer is that there is no need to panic. Yours is a common feeling that is easily fixed with the right approach.

   1. Accept your position. Runners coming back from illness or injury, people just getting into the sport and those returning after a break may have ideas about what they expect to achieve. It can be disappointing if you don’t live up to that first time out. But you have to accept that this is your starting point and that this is the point you need to move on from.
   2. Be patient. If it didn’t go right yesterday the key is not to try again today. It takes time for your body to recover from the exertions of a race and to build up fitness.
   3. Think about it. Why do you feel you can not race? Is it psychological, is it a lack of speed or is it a lack endurance?
   4. Do something about it. Look to target whatever the problem is and address it. This may mean including some faster work in you training or building up your mileage. Either of these should only be done gradually. If it is psychological this too can be addressed.
   5. Don’t go mad. Patience really is the key. By building up your mileage or faster training gradually you are able to make sustainable changes to you fitness. Often people feel they are not able to race as they have increased the training radically and are perform no better. This is usually because they have increased their training by too much too soon and just tired themselves out.
   6. Don’t freeze or fight it. On race day people who are negative about their performance often fall into one of two traps. They either freeze, panic and tell themselves they can’t do it. So they never really try, or their head is so full of negative thoughts they are exhausted from this before they have run a step. Or they are so determined to succeed they battle to hard, they strain rather than running smoothly and have run out of adrenaline and energy early on in the event. Go into the race determined to do your best, do all the right things, put yourself in the right place, run at the right pace and then accept the result.
   7. Keep at it. Runners sometimes talk about how things fall into place. If you follow points one to six this will happen to you. Life is not so simple for it to happen next time out, or the time after that. But one thing is sure, if you do the right things the results do come.

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