Even pacing makes you fast and terrible at winning medals

The most efficient way to run a distance is almost never the way a final gets decided.

Run the second half slightly faster than the first. It is the standard advice, it is correct physiologically, and if your goal is a personal best on a flat course in good conditions, follow it. Nearly every fast time is run that way for good reason. Going out too hard raises the rate at which you burn through carbohydrate, drives an early rise in blood lactate that you then carry for the rest of the race, and puts you in a hole that even pacing avoids entirely.

Now watch a championship final. Almost nothing about it is evenly paced. The race sits, drifts, someone throws in a hard lap in the middle to break up the field, it slows again, and then the last eight hundred metres get run at a speed unrelated to anything that came before. The winner is generally the athlete who could absorb two or three surges and still change gear.

That is a different physical capacity, and I do not think most distance programmes train it.

The mechanism is repeated recovery from a hard effort inside an ongoing hard effort. It asks you to accelerate, tolerate the accumulation, and then bring your systems back down to something sustainable while still running fast, over and over. An athlete built entirely on threshold work and even paced intervals has a beautiful engine and no experience of that. They can run twenty seven and a half minutes on a good night in Belgium and finish ninth in a slow championship race, and everyone will call it a bad day rather than a training gap.

The fix is not exotic. Sessions with deliberate surges inside continuous efforts. Reps of uneven length where the last two hundred metres of every third one is run substantially faster. Races entered specifically to practise responding to somebody else rather than to a schedule. Group training where the coach tells one athlete to attack at an unannounced moment.

What gets in the way is that these sessions look bad in a training log. The average pace is unimpressive. They do not produce a satisfying number, and in an era where athletes upload everything, sessions that photograph badly get quietly dropped.

If you want a medal, learn to be uncomfortable at an unpredictable moment. If you want a time, run a metronome. Very few people can build both in the same season, and pretending otherwise is how good runners end up with fast bests and empty trophy cabinets.