Pacing in endurance sport (>2min) is one of the most essential aspects of performance. Regardless of your ability, if you start the race beyond your level of fitness you will slow down at the end. The severity of how much you slow down (blow up) will depend on the race duration and how far beyond your ability you went at the start.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that the longer your event is, the more important pacing is. In an ultramarathon or Enduro MTB, your potential to overpace at the beginning is high and the consequences can be drastic. Understandably, when you begin your A-race, you are fresh and ready to go, which makes the initial phase (or stage) feel that much easier. However, going out even slightly too hard can have you losing minutes by the end. In the case of an ultramarathon or ironman, if you have to resort to walking, you can lose anywhere from 6–10 min per kilometre. In an MTB race, a lack of concentration could have you over the bars and not moving at all! By slowing down by a few Watts or 30 s–1 min per kilometre at the start, you may be able to avoid your drastic demise.
We talk about the science of pacing and how you can pace yourself to perfection.
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Dr Will O'Connor and Dr Matt Miller (A.K.A MTB PhD) are sports scientists who work with a plethora of endurance athletes from professionals to amateurs.
They talk about common issues athletes encounter during endurance training and how to avoid or remedy them with the help of sports science.
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Webinar Series 1 | The Science of Pacing For MTB, Cycling and Running
From the Performance Advantage blog · Performance Advantage · 2020-10-18
This podcast episode was the first one of a six part Webinar series. The topic for this episode is all about pacing; the what, the how, the why, and the nitty, gritty bits that you either might not know, or wanted to know more about.
Why does pacing matter?
As humans, we can only exercise at a high workload for a short amount of time. That kind of high power can be compared to a car's nitro boost / nitrous oxide (NOS). That super fast burst of speed could only be sustained by the car proportional on the amount of NOS that they have. When the car used up all of its' available NOS, the car will continue on its' normal speed because the NOS was an add-on in a sense to the car, and not their main fuel.
However, human bodies cannot sustain that speed, and will eventually need to slow down, maybe even stop, because of other factors not just the body's available energy fuel like fatigue, the heat, or the difficulty of the terrain of your sport.
Once a human body begins working above some sort of aerobic threshold (e.g. FTP, Critcial Power, Aerobic Threshold, etc.), it begins burning carbohydrates and thus accumulating byproducts of glycolytic metabolism. We can keep goin for a while, but eventually all the PCr is used up (in the case of a sprint), or we start to run out of carbohydrates.
