This past fall, my girlfriend Jess asked me to help her tackle her goal of breaking her 5k personal record from high school. Jess might tell you that I coach her, but I think of it more as providing training guidance for the volumes, intensities, and structure. The training wasn’t very complicated, generally consisting of an interval session, something up-tempo, a long run, and a gradual build in mileage with an occasional down week built in for recovery. After a summer of longer efforts and a couple of very solid 50k runs, she was already fit and strong. What she needed was to translate all that fitness into a quicker turnover at a sustained, high-intensity effort.
Somewhere in the midst of the training, Jess asked me if I thought good running performances were more a matter of people having a “magic of race day” experience, or putting together the pieces of things they had worked on in training. I told her that I thought it was the latter.
Jess putting in the work for race-day magic. All photos courtesy of Zach Miller.
Magical Performances
It’s easy to get excited when we see good performances by runners we aren’t familiar with, or runners we are familiar with racing distances we don’t normally see them do. When someone puts down a good performance that we aren’t expecting, it can feel like it came out of nowhere. We become surprised and impressed all at once, and perhaps we sensationalize things.
Trail running magic.
We may create a dialogue in our head that says this person had magic on their side — likely some sort of genetic trait or superhuman ability. Sure, there are some astonishing performances in sport, ones that we might describe as magical, but this is magic in the sense of being wonderful, exciting, and mysterious, but probably not truly supernatural. To think of such performances as supernatural can be detrimental to those of us who would like to aspire toward a goal. It gives us a convenient excuse as to why we think we can’t do something: The stars will never align for me, I don’t have that kind of luck, therefore, I don’t have a chance.
Aligning the Pieces
To explain sport as magic also seems unfair to other athletes. Sports have an eye-catching, mind-boggling element to them, but these jaw-dropping displays of athletic prowess aren’t the result of some mystical force, but rather the result of the hours, days, weeks, months, and years of preparation. Had I told Jess that I thought great performances were the result of some sort of mystical force, I think her 5k goal would have seemed harder yet. It would have suggested that on the day, she didn’t need to just be well-trained, but that she would need to summon some sort of race-day magic. How on earth do you ensure that happens?
The magic in sports comes from putting all the pieces from training together.
I still like the idea of sport having a sort of magical element to it, but it’s not magic in the sense of making something out of nothing. Instead, the magic is in aligning the pieces. Training is collecting and refining all the elements: threshold, endurance, strength, cadence, fueling, and rest. Racing is when you take all those things and try to put them together. The magic is when all the pieces fall into place.
Race-Day Magic
When Jess lined up for her 5k time trial this month, it wasn’t about summoning something that wasn’t there. That would have been very intimidating. All she was doing was putting the pieces together. She got out a bit fast. I, as her pacer, take the blame for that, but then her strength kicked in as she locked into a more appropriate pace. In the back half, she fought her way through the wind and dug deep over the final stretch to bring it home strong. In the end, she beat her high school PR by almost a full minute!
Zach and Jess at a recent Turkey Trot.
Looking back, Jess’ 5k was a solid display of hard work, fitness, and determination. It was also a great reminder that big goals and performances aren’t about big magic. They are about putting in the time and effort to work on a lot of little things that can then be put to use on one big day. If all aligns, that day can feel like magic, though it’s probably not. The magic that you feel is the culmination of the work and the boldness to pick up the pieces and put them together.
Call for Comments
- Have you felt magic in your own race-day performances?
- What other elements do you work on when preparing for a top performance?
