Pacing has also been observed in many different species, including in migratory birds travelling across continents or when a cheetah hunts for prey.
In many sports, the athlete will require some type of pacing strategy in order to reach the endpoint of a race in the fastest possible time, while maintaining enough metabolic capacity to prevent premature fatigue.
In order to establish, maintain, and alter a pacing strategy for a particular event, the brain must process an enormous quantity of data from the external environment and from the different physiological systems of the body.
These data are used to calculate whether an athlete’s power output and associated current metabolic capacity are appropriate for the distance of the event still to be covered in the prevailing environmental conditions.
Pacing therefore represents, and is part of, the brain’s control processes regulating the function of the body before, during, and after an athletic event.
Many runners attack the 400 meter dash at the full 100%, but by starting with a medium to high running pace such as 75%, it then works up to all out, to about 100%.
This is typically seen as a conservative racing strategy, but in distance events, many world records have been set with a slight negative split.
Examples of this race plan are Michael Johnson’s former World Record of 43.18 in 1999 and Cathy Freeman’s Olympic Gold Medal in 2000,[15] both 400 meters runners who benefited from this type of pacing strategy.
An analysis of world-record performances in these events shows a clear pattern: relatively even pacing throughout most of the race, and a slight increase in speed in the last 1000m of both the 5000m and 10000m.