Racing Wisely

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Race wisely to achieve your personal best.

You’ve trained for your peak race for months. When the big day comes, how will you perform? All the training in the world is useless if you can’t execute your race plan and cope with unforeseen events, and subpar training can be overcome if you approach race day with the right attitude.

Whether you are new to racing or have been frustrated by underperformance or setbacks, Racing Wisely gives you tools—from the practical to the philosophical—to perform to the best of your ability. You’ll learn how to:

Choose the right race for your personal strengths
Test yourself in training to identify the right race pace and effort
Write a race plan that helps you feel calm, prepared, and in control
Manage your energy in the week, days, and hours before the race
Warm up properly to race at your best
Pace correctly for races of every distance
Race for a personal-best time, or race competitively for place
Recover physically and mentally to set up your next personal best

Coach Sage Rountree provides concrete tips and pacing tools for athletes racing endurance events including open-water races, bike races, track, road, and trail running, multisport races, and adventure races. Learn to plan and execute perfect pacing as you race to your personal best, and gain tools to make the best of whatever situation emerges on race day.

Learn to race wisely: to use your experience to grow stronger, to move faster, and to come through when it really counts.

Praise

“Sage Rountree has made a career of filling the gaps in guidance for endurance athletes, and she has done it again with this comprehensive and practical guide. Whether your usual race goal is to finish or to win, Sage’s collected wisdom will give you a huge boost toward consistently performing at your personal best in competition. Whatever is holding you back from racing as well as you could, you will find a way through it in these pages.”
—from the foreword by Matt Fitzgerald, author of 80/20 Running and Life Is a Marathon

“Unfortunately, we don’t always put in the same dedication to planning a successful race as we do planning our training. Racing Wisely provides that often missing ingredient of race preparation and will help runners put all their great training to good use when it counts—the race. Sage Rountree understands performance, and this guide will prove invaluable for goal-oriented athletes.”
—Greg McMillan, coach, McMillan Running, and author of YOU (Only Faster)

“Racing Wisely delivers exactly what you hope for from a smart yogi-runner-triathlete: thoughtful insight about goals, intentions, and actions told in an engagingly conversational, down-to-earth style. I love that this book offers practical and philosophical advice for the whole spectrum of athletes, from serious goal-driven competitors to more experiential but just as passionate casual athletes. A great addition to the thinking runner’s library.”
—Tish Hamilton, former executive editor, Runner’s World

“In Racing Wisely, Sage Rountree delivers the clearest truths and best secrets of training and racing endurance sports. First timers and veterans will benefit from the wisdom and excellent writing, which combine to allow every reader access to their best athletic performance and best self.”
—Ian Murray, USA Triathlon elite coach

“The title Racing Wisely doesn’t do justice to this book, a comprehensive, accessible guide to choosing, training for, and performing your best in any endurance race. Whether you’re doing your first 5K or your fifth Ironman, you can benefit from Sage Rountree’s smart, holistic perspective.”
—Dimity McDowell and Sarah Bowen Shea, another mother runner, authors of Run Like a Mother and Train Like a Mother

“In Racing Wisely, Sage Rountree compresses a life’s worth of personal and fellow athlete experiences, mistakes, and successes into one reference. Coaches and athletes now have a manual at their fingertips that will prevent them or those they’re working with from making calamitous race-week and race-day mistakes. What’s more, even if you believe you’ve got a successful strategy in place, this guidebook steers even the best teacher and student toward a more effective and efficient game plan.”
—Ian Torrence, ultrarunning coach, McMillan running; finisher of more than 175 ultramarathons