Optimal Pacing of 400m and 800m Races: A Standard Microeconomics Approach

Richard Watt () and Philip Gunby

Working Papers in Economics from University of Canterbury, Department of Economics and Finance

Abstract: The optimal way for an athlete to run 400m and 800m races has long been debated by athletes, coaches, and more recently by physicists and applied mathematicians. These two particular running events are different from both shorter and longer races, due to their emphasis upon an athlete’s lactate system. If the first part of the race is run either too quickly (in which case the fatigue that is generated makes the second half of the race both slow and painful) or too slowly (in which case even though the second half will be fast, it cannot make up for the time lost earlier on),2 the total time for the entire distance will not be as fast as it could otherwise have been. In this paper we discuss this choice problem in a standard microeconomic setting, and we solve for the optimal “split” times for the first and second half of the race.

Keywords: constrained optimization; microeconomics; athletics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2016-03-01
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.canterbury.ac.nz/cbt/econwp/1612.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cbt:econwp:16/12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Canterbury, Department of Economics and Finance Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Albert Yee ().