Are You Racing Too Much? The Case for a Smarter Race Calendar
There is a version of this problem that shows up in high school running all the time. Two meets a week, a packed schedule, races stacking up because the calendar demands it. But I see it just as much with adults. Three races a month, a marathon every couple of months, something on the calendar almost every weekend. And at some point, the racing starts being what limits our progression and holds us back from taking the next step.
When Fitness Starts to Slip
One of my favorite athletes I’ve ever worked with is a guy named Anthony. Recently we had a really good winter season. We did a lot of races, some indoor track meets, and we got into a groove of racing a lot. Some of the turnarounds between races were quicker than we would have liked, but there were good races we wanted to get into and we were really fit, so we kept going.
At the end of it, Anthony told me something I’ve heard in different versions from a lot of athletes since then. He said, man, I don’t know what it is, but some of these threshold workouts feel a little bit hard, even though I’m racing faster. He was setting PRs, racing out of his mind. He said there’s no way I could be getting in worse shape, right?
Actually, in a way, that happens all the time.
When you’re racing frequently, you’re not able to run as much mileage or do as much threshold work. That part of your fitness can go down even while your race-specific sharpness is going up. And the thing about race-specific fitness is that it has a short shelf life. It’s great until it isn’t. The base underneath it is what keeps the whole thing going, and you’re not building the base when you’re always racing.
Racing Costs More Than Money (And Also Money)
Most people don’t realize how different a race is from a workout. They see the same mileage on the watch and assume the impact is similar. It isn’t.
There’s the obvious physical toll. But there’s also the travel, the logistics, the emotional energy of getting to a start line, the adrenaline, the emotional fatigue of competing. Even if you’re technically training through it, there are always small tapers before races and soreness afterward. Volume comes off. Freshness comes off in a way that’s different from training fatigue. There’s a specific kind of freshness that only comes from not racing for a while, and you lose that when the calendar never lets you rest.
And yes, entry fees add up. Especially for the majors. Racing constantly is not cheap, and that’s worth factoring in too.
But the deeper cost is this. I was listening to Mack Brown, the former University of Texas head football coach who won a national championship, do an interview once. He was talking about what it takes to build a team that can actually win it all. An older coach told him that one of the things you need is to be way better than seven of the eleven teams on your schedule. The reason is that a team cannot play to their emotional peak eleven or fourteen times in a season. There are going to be games where you have to win on talent alone because you just cannot get emotionally ready that many times. It sounds strange, but when we’re talking about peak performance, it’s true.
The same is true of racing. There are probably only four to eight times a year that we can really reach our peak and get close to our ceiling. We have to be thoughtful and strategic about when we ask for that. If we’re asking our body to get there every weekend, we’re essentially asking our body to never actually get there.
How Many Races Is Too Many
It depends heavily on the distance and your goals, but here’s what I’ve seen work well.
For the marathon, two a year tends to be where I’ve seen athletes perform their best and train most effectively. I’ve also seen it work with three. What I’ve found much more difficult, both from a training and performance perspective, is trying to do more than that. If you’re on the schedule of running all the majors, that’s a situation I see often, and it creates real challenges.
The shorter the distance, the more frequently you can race. 5Ks, 10Ks, even miles can stack up more because the recovery demands are lower. For shorter events, a couple of practice races actually helps because you need to feel that effort before you can run it well.
The Chronic Marathoner
I’ve coined a term for a specific type of runner I work with: the chronic marathoner. Someone who runs four or more marathons a year, sometimes many more. Speed is something these athletes really struggle with and something that really suffers, because when you’re always in marathon mode it’s hard to do the specific work that builds a faster top end. Over time the body adapts to become almost ultra-runner efficient, really dialed in at getting through long slow efforts. Which is useful for marathons but makes it hard to develop any real gear above that pace.
What I’ve found really helpful for these athletes is replacing some of those marathons with 5Ks and 10Ks. Getting down to two marathons and mixing in some shorter races puts speed back into the system in a way that can actually help marathon performance. Having different speeds in the mix is fun, it makes you appreciate the marathon a little more, and working on speed in shorter races pays off when you get back to the longer stuff. It gives you more room to train in between and those events are a little easier on the body.
A and B and C Races
The most useful framework I’ve found for helping athletes think about their calendar is sorting races into three categories.
Your A race is the one that actually matters. Everything is structured around it. Your training blocks, your taper, your peak. You’re going into it as prepared as you can be.
B races are the ones you use on the way to the A race. You’ll be in shape but not peaked. They serve a purpose. Maybe a tune-up, maybe a chance to practice racing at an effort you’ll need later.
C races are the ones you’re doing because they’re fun and you want to be there. No expectation of shape or performance. They just happen to fall on the calendar and you’re going to enjoy them for what they are.
The problem most over-racers have is that every race feels like an A race emotionally, even when the calendar doesn’t support it. You can run a lot of races if you’re honest with yourself about what category they’re in. The trouble starts when a C race becomes a B race and a B race becomes an A race and suddenly you’re trying to peak six times a year.
The Harder Conversation
Sometimes athletes come to me with a really specific goal, like qualifying for Boston, and when we start working together there’s a race almost every weekend on the calendar. When I try to explain the tradeoff, occasionally the response is that the races are more important than the BQ. And that’s completely fine. There’s no judgment in that. But it means the stated goal and the actual goal are different, and figuring out which one is real is where the conversation has to start.
There’s no right or wrong answer here. Some people are genuinely in it for the energy and the community and the experience of being at events, and that’s a great reason to race. But if you do really want a specific goal, it’s worth thinking about what you’re asking your body to do and whether the calendar you’ve built actually gives it a chance to get there.
