In the 400 meters, I made a classic theoretician’s mistake—I calculated everything too well. I decided to start “conservatively,” to keep a reserve… and in doing so, I missed the point of no return. On this distance, it exists very concretely: if you overcautious at the start, you simply don’t have time to realize your momentum, no matter how much you want to.
It was precisely here that I understood, in practice, what coachability really means.
At a heart rate of ~180, the brain officially switches into survival mode and temporarily loses its capacity for analysis. All the elegant models you built before the start shut down like unnecessary processes. At that moment, the coach’s voice from the sideline becomes your external processor.
The command “Work! Now!” it’s an interrupt signal, a forced algorithm switch when your own sensors are already failing. Result: overtaking the entire pack at the finish and earning a second-class ranking.

Having accumulated plenty of experience with how a poor pre-race breakfast can end, this time I approached nutrition with maximum discipline. Past races had made one thing abundantly clear to me: on competition days, diet is not a matter of taste, but a matter of survival. In theoretical physics, we sometimes allow ourselves to neglect friction.
In running, you cannot. When the body switches into anaerobic mode, it shuts down everything nonessential—including digestion. Any food that hasn’t yet been integrated into energy metabolism turns into dead ballast, competing for blood supply precisely when muscles need it most.
This time, the system was calibrated correctly:
no syrniki, no surprises—no emergency evacuation required.
And still, 800 meters is an honest and unforgiving distance.
It was my first start at this distance, and the experiment turned out to be unexpectedly successful: a second-class ranking. It was hard—very hard—but already controllable. Not a catastrophe, but a predictable excursion of parameters beyond acceptable limits. The conclusion remained the same: biological laws are just as strict as Kepler’s laws. They’re simply tested faster.