Finish Strong Points
There’s an interesting idea in the latest Runner’s World that they call finish strong points. If you’re running a race and care about the best results you can achieve then you clearly want to wind it up feeling like you don’t have any energy left. This probably won’t be achieved by everyone using the same tactic (go out strong and try to hold on, progressively work your way up to a fast finish, or something else) or for the same distance, but the article describes tabulating these points by starting to keep track at the 2/3 point of a race and then gaining a point for every person you pass and deducting a point for every person who passes you. Regardless of specific splits, this should help you understand whether you were more or less able to sustain whatever you were trying to do in the race than other people in the field.
I know at my last 5K I was hoping to finish at a sustained pace of faster than 6 minute miles. I hit the first in about 5:55, the second in 6:00 flat, and when I saw my watch in the third at about 6:14, I felt discouraged and started to not care as much about the remaining leg. So clearly, I slowed, but I don’t think I was getting passed by tons of people, so maybe I should have felt more satisfied on the whole. Or maybe if I’d paid closer attention I would have realized I was getting passed, and then I might think that the next time I’d be better off starting at or above a 6:00 pace. In future races where I’m trying to race hard, I’ll try to pay attention to this.
Also - this isn’t about the kick at the end of the race. I’ve learned over the past year that whether you outkick or are outkicked has a lot more to do with whether you (or someone else) put forth a consistently hard effort leading up to the finish and also your mental state about the finish and doesn’t provide enough information to really be meaningful toward analyzing the race. It is, however, the a great indicator of whether and how awesome you’ll feel about yourself after the finish!