The Surprising Pacing Patterns of the World’s Best Distance Runners – Runner’s World

On Friday evening,the men’s 10,000 meters will be the first medal event at this year’s IAAF World Championships in London. The big story line, of course, will be whether Mo Farah can extend his championship unbeaten streak in front a frenzied home crowd.

How will the race go down? A few years ago, a group of pacing researchers led by Jos de Koning plotted the splits of finishers from the 2008 Olympic 10,000 meters. The pattern was pretty chaotic, with lots of pace changes and group behavior as the runners tried to match each other—quite different from what you’d see if each individual runner was simply trying to minimize his time.

Similarly, running researcher Andy Renfree tweeted a plot of the pacing pattern in the men’s 10,000 race at the U.S. championships in June. As he pointed out, all the competitors, despite widely varying abilities, ran identical splits until rapid acceleration in the seventh lap shattered the pack.

So, in anticipation of Farah’s bid for glory, I decided to plot the splits from the last world championships in 2015, when three Kenyan runners, led by Geoffrey Kamworor, made a concerted effort from the start to break Farah. How did the rest of the field react to this grueling pace?

RELATED: How and What to Watch on Day 1 of the World Championships

Here’s the picture:

Alex Hutchinson

The vertical axis is their pace in minutes per kilometer, so lower values correspond to faster pace. When a line goes vertically to the top of the graph, that means this runner dropped out.

I’ve highlighted the line corresponding to 28:00 pace for 10,000 meters. Of the 27 runners who started the race, all but two had previously run under 28:00. These two were no slouches by any means. Tanzania’s Ismail Juma had some impressive road performances, and went on to run a 1:00:09 half marathon earlier this year; Uganda’s Moses Kibet had a 28:05 best, was a former junior medalist medalist at the World Cross Country Championships, and was fresh off an 8th-place finish at that year’s world cross race. Still, these two guys were, somewhat predictably, the first to drop out of the race.

Note, though, that they didn’t try to run their “best sustainable pace” to see how high they could finish. They ran with the pack until they couldn’t anymore. And, in fact, that’s what pretty much everyone in the race did. You can see all the lines cluster together at the beginning, then one by one (or, more often, in clusters at the points indicated by arrows) drop off the back.

In Ed Caesar’s description of Nike’s Breaking2 race, he has a lovely description of the moment when Lelisa Desisa, in similar circumstances, lost contact with the leaders: “he separated from the pack like he’d been thrown off the back of a speedboat.” That is, indeed, what it looks like when you’re simply going all-out to stay with your competitors until you break.

Everyone knew that was the premise of the Breaking2 race, where the goal was to run two-hour marathon pace for as long as possible. But it’s less appreciated that, in practice, that’s also how a lot of long-distance championship races play out. The same thing was observed in an analysis of pacing at the World Cross Country Championships a few years ago.

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What, if anything, does this mean?

It’s always tempting to wonder why more of the mid-pack finishers don’t ignore the hijinks of the front runners and simply run an even pace and hope to pick off the stragglers when they fall off the back of the speedboat. The best example of this from recent years that I can think of is Desiree Linden, who in major marathons often seems to be falling back then catching up over and over—but is actually just running a steady pace while ignoring the leaders’ surges and feints.

In practice, though, very few runners seem to be able to pull that off successfully. For one thing, it’s hard to run alone when everyone else is in a pack. But perhaps the bigger factor is that few runners show up at the world championships dreaming of a well-paced 13th place. They’re going with the leaders and hoping that today will be the magical day when they sneak onto the podium.

In the 2015 race, the top five finishers were between Farah’s 27:01 and Galen Rupp’s 27:08. In the pacing chart, you can see that none of those five runners blew up: they maintained a fast pace, then sped up at the end. Sixth place? Way, way back in 27:43. Only ten runners broke 28:00.

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If you held back at the beginning of the race in order to run a more conservative pace, you’d have a good chance of notching a top-10 finish, but you’d never catch up back up to podium contenders. In the end, that’s the game theoretics of distance racing. If 25 runners decide to stick with the leaders at any cost, most of them will blow up, but a few (and it’s not always predictable who) won’t. So to be in the hunt for a medal, you have to run as “irrationally” as everyone else.

If this is how racing plays out in the real world, is it worth sometimes training this way too? That’s a question I’ve been pondering for a few years. I tend to value even, sustainable pacing and making sure you finish what you start. That is, after all, how the pros approach races when they’re chasing records or PRs.

But if you’re preparing for a race when place matters more than time, which is likely to play out as a “time to exhaustion” challenge, maybe you should run some workouts that way too, picking an unsustainable pace and holding it for as many reps as possible—until you fall off the back of the boat.

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