What actually matters on race day

You cannot get fitter on race day.

True. And it is where most race day advice stops. Sleep well. Eat something familiar. Don’t try anything new.

All fine. All defensive. And it misses most of what is actually available to you.

Three things can gain you time on a race day. One physical, one psychological, one tactical. Everything else on the list is damage control.

Worth knowing which is which.

The physical one is caffeine. There is only one, and that is it.

Three to six milligrams per kilo, an hour before you race. For a 70kg athlete, 210 to 420 milligrams. More is not better. It just makes you feel worse.

The response varies enormously between people, so the dose gets found in training and at meets that do not matter. Not at the one that does.

It has a cost. A big dose leaves you wired and sleeping badly afterwards. At a two day meet, or a meet with heats and a final, that matters, because you need the same trick again tomorrow.

The psychological one gets played constantly at the top of the sport.

Carl Lewis used to run his heats far faster than he needed to. Rome, 1987: 10.05 in a preliminary, 10.03 in a semi. Times that would win most finals, run in rounds where the only thing on offer was a lane in the next round.

The times were not the point. What the times did to the seven other men reading the board afterwards was the point.

You do not need to be running 10.0 for this. It happens in the same way at a county championships, and most of it has nothing to do with times. Who you talk to while you are waiting, and who you do not. How you warm up, and whether people can see you doing it. How long you take settling into the blocks.

Some of your rivals will be doing this to you already, whether they have thought about it or not. It costs nothing to do back.

The receiving end matters more.

Ben Johnson’s answer to Lewis lighting up the early rounds was to not play. Three metre lead in his Rome semi, shut it down, cruised home in 10.15. His line afterwards was that Lewis was setting him up, and that the time to do his running was in the final.

Then, in the ninety minutes between the semi and the final, he went to sleep on the physio’s table.

You will not stop people trying to unsettle you. You can decide, in advance, that it does not touch your race.

Johnson went into Seoul the following year with rumours flying that he was injured, that he had flown home, that his father had died in a hurricane. None of it was true.

The tactical one is rounds.

The cost of rounds is not fatigue, or not mostly. Think of it as muscle tone. Every warm up raises it. Every race raises it.

Arrive at the final with tone too high and there is not enough fibre left to contract for your best run. Too low and you have no elastic response to get out of the heats at all. You are managing a quantity across a day, and the final is the only place it needs to be right.

Once you see it that way, coasting stops looking like laziness. It is why a good athlete wins a heat by two metres and no more. Johnson shut down at 30 metres in his Seoul heat, jogged the last twenty, won in 10.37.

Although the quarter finals were then drawn on heat times. That easy heat put him next to Linford Christie and Dennis Mitchell, and he lost it.

So coasting is not free either. Every round is a decision about how much you can afford to give away, made with incomplete information. If you are running a heat and a final on the same afternoon, that decision is yours too. Do enough to qualify comfortably and not a stride more.

Now the damage control, which is most of the day.

Start with the night before.

You will probably sleep badly before a race that matters. That is normal and it is survivable, and for a single sprint it costs you far less than the worrying does.

Where sleep genuinely does damage is across a trip. Travelling the night before, a strange bed, an early start, three days at a championships. That accumulates in a way one restless night does not. If you are going away for a meet, the fix is logistical rather than psychological. Get there early enough that the strange room has stopped being strange.

For the single Saturday race, the useful answer is not about sleep at all. Pack the night before. Kit, spikes, blocks, numbers, food, by the door. You sleep better when there is nothing left to decide.

Food is the same shape. For a single race it cannot help you. A sprint is too short to deplete you of anything, so there is no fuelling strategy that wins a 100m. All food can do is sit in your stomach and ruin your afternoon.

Anything substantial, four hours out. Anything inside an hour, small, three or four hundred calories. And nothing on the day that you have not already eaten before a hard session.

Across a day with rounds it changes, and fuelling becomes active rather than defensive. Under an hour to the next round, drink your carbohydrate rather than chew it. One to two hours, something light and familiar. Three or more, eat properly.

The rest is basic and I would still do all of it. Warm down as soon as you finish. Sweats on before you cool. Then a full warm up again for the next round, which is where everything I wrote in May about the eight minutes before the gun comes round a second and a third time.

One rule sits over all of it.

Helsinki, 2005. World Championship 400 final. In the warm up, Tyler Christopher tells his physio his right hamstring feels tight. Christopher has a long history of hamstring strains, so that is not a small thing to hear with the call coming.

The physio checks him. Everything is normal. He leaves it alone.

His reasoning: if you cannot answer why you are intervening, you do not intervene.

Christopher ran 44.44 for bronze and a national record.

That goes for everything on the day. New spikes, a new breakfast, an extra set of starts because you feel flat, a massage from someone who has never worked on you. If you cannot say what it is for, leave it.

So, on the day itself. Get the caffeine right. Decide in advance that what anyone else does is not your problem. Manage what you spend across the rounds.

The rest of it is just staying out of your own way.