How to Run the 400 Meter Dash
400m Track Workout
How’s it going my friends? Today, we are going to talk about how to run the 400. I apologize for my track. It’s a little bit bootleg, but I am not an art major, so my bad. I think we can get the basic idea. Start/Finish line, 200 meters in, 300 meters in.
Now before I begin, I would just like to take a moment to give props to, and everyone should thank KB and Chanelle. I hope I said your name right. I know what it’s like when people botch your name. It’s very insulting. I know when people put two Fs at the end of name when they email me, it hurts my feelings. Don’t make that mistake or else I won’t respond to your email.
You guys gave such good New Jack City Pookie references. I promise I’ll get this video this week. So let’s talk about how to run a 400. Of course, you can always have your own opinion. If you disagree, by all means, respond below in the blog and we will address the best ways to go. But this is how I tell athletes how to run a 400. I think once we get to these longer sprint events, having a race plan is crucial. I don't know how you can send a kid in and run a 400 with no race plan. That’s just like asking the kid – that’s like saying, “Do you know what? Why don’t you go throw up after this 400? I’m gonna have you vomit, because I’m not gonna give you a race plan.”
I’ll give you a quick example. I was talking to a kid the other day and the kid who’s training overall, not even responsible for, but he had no race plan. So he had a season best of 52.3 and a lifetime best of 52 flat and we sat down and we talked about how to run the race. He had some big competition coming up this weekend. Just by putting a race plan together and talking about the things that I’m going to talk about today, he went from 52.3 seasonal best, hand time, immediately ran 58.9 at his next meet. So that’s what a good race plan is and I think this is a good way to run the 400, particularly a free developmental runner.
So let’s break it down. The first thing we talk about when we run the 400 is that the first five steps of the race. I always instruct my sprinters to go out as hard as you can for the first five steps. I’m a firm believer in the idea that it’s easier to maintain pace than it is to try to get it back later, especially in an event where we’re talking very much about conserving energy and all these things. We don’t want to have to come back here on the backstretch to try to make up ground, but we’ll get to that.
So the first five steps, one, two, three, four, five, I’m telling athletes to go out like it’s 100. You’re not gonna get up to full speed in five steps, I hope, or a weight room should probably be something you should focus on more than anything else. But this is gonna get us into the rhythm, locked into that rhythm and pattern that we want so that we can relax on the backstretch and try to put ourselves in a good position, as opposed to having to grind to catch up or make up a stagger that we’ve lost, etc.
I know it’s especially important to teach this, especially for you developmentally sprinters, because kids go into the 400. They’re thinking about how much it’s going to hurt. You’re all anxiety-ridden. I know that’s how it was for me. So it’s really easy to get out real lazy and passive in the beginning of the 400, because you want to try to conserve yourself so you don’t die hard at the end of the race.
I’ll tell you this, and if you’ve run the 400 enough times, I think you’ll agree with me, even if you get out slow, once you get here, you get to 250 to 310, whether you go out slow or you get out at a good clip, it’s gonna hurt the same. That pain is still gonna be there. The end of the race, it’s still gonna hurt the same, whether you go out and run a slow time or a fast time, but let’s be realistic. Running the 400, training for the 400 – not fun if you’re not successful at it. I hated the 400 until I got good at it and then, all of a sudden, I developed an appreciation for it.
So these first five steps are gonna be really important. I can tell if an athlete is going after a race and going to run a good time, just by looking at the beginning of their start. So really harp on that. Harp on getting your athletes out up to speed. So that’s the first thing we focus on.
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From there, I’m concerned about this first 50 meters. I want athletes to get up to pace, get up to race pace, the pace that they’re going to sustain, at least for the first 200 meters, by the 50-meter mark, so halfway around that first turn. So again, if you’re doing practice, especially once you get to end of special prep, competitive-type period where you’re doing more race-modeling and race-specific training.
We’re gonna do a lot of work the first five steps and the first 50 meters, so they know what it’s supposed to feel like and they get locked into that rhythm around here, because this is gonna set things up. So that first 50 meters is really important, that we really focus on athletes being able to get there, whether you’re timing that or any of these things later on in the season.
From here, and again, there’s a couple of ways to look at it and we’ll digress on your options here. Again, a lot of it is just depending on your athletes. I like to have my athletes at 50, from 50 meters to 200, to get into their float, but oftentimes, I’ll say, “Let’s run the first 100 and then get into our float on the backstretch.” The reason why I like to have our – or really recommend that you have your sprinters get up to top speed by 50 meters is that when you’re in lanes here and everyone is – man, I’m terrible at this sort of stuff – but you have this weird stagger. Just pretend that you know what I mean here. If you’re in Lane Two and you see people on your outside as you’re coming around the turn, once you get to the 100-meter mark and you can see where you are on the stagger, this is a good opportunity for you to get a sense of where you are, because once you cross the 100-meter mark or the start of the 300-hurdles, you’re gonna be able to see where you are in terms of the stagger. If everyone is crossing that line and you’re behind, then you know that they’re moving ahead of you and you’re in a position where you don’t want to take yourself out of the race.
So I’m a big fan of getting this 50 meters up to pace and then you can position yourself, and if you’ve gotten out well, you’re gonna be in a good position. You’re either going to start making up the stagger on the outside runners or pulling away, which you won’t be able to see, on the inside runners, but the main thing is, let’s say your in Lane Three on a six-lane track, if you see four, five and six starting to move away from you, well, you’ve gotten out too slow and you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage as you go through.
So here, at 50 meters, I want people to really be focused on looking about where they are and making sure that they’re at least even with the rest of the pack. Once we come through here, on the backstretch, this is our float – not a float like we’re doing a fly 30, because you’re never getting up to speed in a 400. If you do, well, good luck finishing, because that’s gonna be terrible, going back to the vomit thing that I talked about before.
This whole race here, coming out here, 100 meters on the backstretch, up nice and tall, chin up, chest up, stepping over the knee, driving down, nice and relaxed, big arm action. Here we need to be – this is our relaxation point. This is our safe spot during the 400. This is where we’re waiting for the grind to start that starts roughly around 200 meters. So if you’ve gotten out well in that first 200 meters, first five steps at pace at 50 meters, understand where you are in the stagger here. So here, in this backstretch, if you know you’re getting worked, you can pick it up a little bit. If you know you’re way out ahead, you can get caught up right in that pattern, but I’d rather see you get stuck in a nice pattern here than have to make up for it.
Again, what pace is that? I call it running just on the edge of insanity on a 400. That’s part of the skill of running a 400. You have to be able to figure out that fine line between not gonna finish, gonna rig up, and going out too slow and having to try to catch up to five, six or seven people on the last 100 meters.
So here, in this backstretch, this should be relaxation time, nice and relaxed. Face relaxed, palms in. One thing you want to teach your athletes not to do, because a lot of them do it, is start doggy-paddling those hands. Nice and relaxed. That’s the first 200.
Now once we get to the 200-meter mark, this where I have athletes re-accelerate or reinvest in the race. I base that, really, just on my own personal experience. I know, for myself, and this is especially the case in the indoor 400, because you’re doing two laps, at the 200-meter mark, for me, if you’re getting out at a good pace and you’re actually trying to win and you have good competition, that’s the part where I’m going, I hit that 200-meter mark and right when I cross that line, I say to myself, “Oh, man. I don’t want to do this anymore and I cannot maintain this pace for another 200 meters. This is gonna hurt too much.”
So the only way to do that is to really dive into your Jedi mind tricks here – and I won’t do my Yoda impression yet. Get to the 200-meter mark and reinvest and re-accelerate, just like, I usually say for 20 meters, just really re-accelerate at the 200-meter mark, because that’s where you start to stave off that deceleration. If you have an inexperience 400-meter runner of a weak 400-meter runner or if you’ve got a 200, 100 person that you’re moving up to the 400, and you know that they’re gonna bail out on you, this is where, when I’m coaching, a lot of times, if I can roam, I’m standing right here at the 200-meter mark, because I’m probably getting splits, but also because I’m gonna start screaming at people, because they need to here my voice, that Coach Thomas is gonna get on people, because I’m not gonna let them break down.
Reinvest at the 200-meter mark. That’s the crucial part here, so that you don’t start slowing down. We gotta focus. There is a point in every 400 and it’s a split second, you may have a step or two where you have to make a choice. You have to make the choice between saying to yourself, “Not today,” and falling off, or making the choice and say, “The pain’s coming. Give me some more pain,’ and eating it up. But it’s a split second. You have to make it, but if you lose it, it you fail, if you break here, somewhere in this range, 200 to 250, if you break, you’re gonna be done and you’re not gonna be able to get it back, because you’re decelerating too fast and your body is breaking down, too much lactic acid build-up. You reach the lactic threshold and all that. So you gotta dig here.
200 to 300, 310 meters, I always tell athletes to attack that third 100 meters, attack the turn, because, again, you’re starting to decelerate and decelerate rapidly. Here’s where you can break people. If you have athletes here, in a 400, you can hear – one thing I always try to pay attention to – you can hear your competition breathing. Right? So you can hear them breathing. If you can hear that they’re laboring and they start to get this head roll, this thing that it’s going back and forth, the head comes back, that’s for me, that’s my sign. That’s what I’m gonna come after and really shut them down, because they don’t want to feel you making a move or if you start to pull away, you will break people.
The same reason why in four by four’s, my kids know that if somebody passes them in a four by four, they’re gonna hear it, because you always hold people off in a relay and break them. If somebody makes a move on you in a four by four, the first time, and you hold them off, they’re gonna think twice about doing it again. If you hold them off twice, nine times out of ten, you’ve broken them and they’re not gonna pass you. If they try to make a third move on you, I respect their hustle, because that’s not easy to do.
Run this third 100 like you’re running uphill. Again, because, hopefully, if you live in an environment that is conducive to this kind of thing, you’ve been doing hill work early in the season, so again, when you say run uphill, athletes actually know what that means. But really focus on driving down, starting to over-exaggerate the arm action a little bit, because you’re tying up, but really work this third 100. If you work this third 100, you’re gonna be in a better position to stave off that deceleration that comes at the end of the race and you’re also gonna be in a position where, hopefully, if you’ve kept yourself in the race early, you’re gonna be in a position where you can actually make a move on somebody or open up or really work to open up and run for time, if you know you have sprinters that are just better than everybody else and everything is just sort of a glorified time trail.
So work this turn hard and then 300 meters or so, 310, because somewhere along here, generally speaking, from 220 to 280, this is where rigor mortis sets in, where you’re standing back and you’re watching people run the race and you’re like, “Ooh, that was the spot. Somebody get the trashcan, because they’re coming.”
So how do you coach the last 100 of a 400? You don’t. You don’t coach the last 100 of a 400. You come off that turn and you say to yourself, “How is possible that the 400-meter mark, that start-finish line is actually getting farther away than it was at the beginning. That last 100 is truly not very fun. You’re running and you’re like, “I just wanna go to sleep and never wake up.” Pray. Pray to whatever god you believe in. If you don’t believe in God, make something up.
The last 100 of the 400, there really is no coaching it. It’s just who is the mentally toughest athlete in that race and also who set himself up early, but just like drive phase or anything else we talk about, top speed, speed maintenance, speed endurance, it’s all about how you set up your drive phase. Where you’re at here and the position you’re in here and the amount of energy you have left here is really going to be dictated, in large part, in this first 50 meters, even the first 100 meters, because if you get out slow here and you let everyone get a way from you, you’re gonna have to work really hard during that period of time when everybody else will be celebrating and you’ve lost the opportunity to take advantage of the energy that you have here. So you want to get out and be aggressive in a 400, work this third turn and pray for home.
The main thing you have to coach, if anything, with your sprinters, when they’re running that last 400, is to over-exaggerate the arm action, because I tell my athletes to make it as big as possible. In your minds, make it ludicrously over-exaggerated. It’s not really gonna be happening in real life, but because everything is shortening up, because they’re tying up, the stride length is going to shorten, stride frequency is going to slow down, range of motion is going to go down, so if we can maintain that and stick with that pattern over the first – because we have good arm action, we over-exaggerate that arm action, it’s gonna feel like we’re over-exaggerating, but really, it’s gonna be normal.
Then, of course, really focus on stepping over and drive down and try to get some degree of lift off this last turn. Now it’s gonna be difficult to do, but if athletes start to let that stride length shorten up and they’re not getting any knee drive anymore and they’re taking little baby steps and running heel-to-toe, that’s when you really start to drop off in time. You can run a really great 300, 320, but if you poo the bed that last 80 meters or so, you’re gonna lose a lot of time that way. I’ve seen, obviously, many races lost by people that rigged up hard or lost focus this last bit of the race.
To me, that’s the best way to run the 400. The important thing, again, is being aggressive, getting out up to pace early, not too fast, not too slow. But, again, this all comes back to how you progress your training phases. During the general prep phase, you’re going to be focusing on the base building, the hill work, the traditional developing basically, the skill of running. You get into special prep phase, that middle four or so week chunk of the season where you’re trending more toward specific training. Then you’re gonna start to do a little bit faster stuff, some things that are a little bit more specific, not quite race modeling, but at a faster pace or a faster intensity with some spring stuff at the end, so that when you get to this point of the season, if you tell your athlete, “All right, I want you to go out and six flat for the for 50,” or whatever it is, they’re actually gonna know what that feels like.
If you do race modeling at the end of the season, before your major championship meet and say your goal is to go – you want your sprinter to go 24 flat, 26 flat in the 400 to get 50 flat, if they’ve never done any rhythm running, where you’re doing, even at tempo pace, different intensities, where they’re actually in a position to know what “Okay, we’re going to go out in 24 flat,” to know what that feels like, if you’re never done anything that approximates that or teaches them the skills to do that, it’s useless to tell them that. It’s useless to say, “Get out to race pace at 50 meters,” if you’re not practicing that early.
If you’re not working on blocks and drive phase and working in the weight room and teaching them how to run a turn, you can say, “Get out in the first five steps,” but it’s going to be useless for them. If they don’t know what step, overdrive, down means and they don’t know what arm action should look like or feel like, that’s not going to have any value when you try to get them to do it, because they don’t have the skills to go through those range of motions.
So, of course, it’s about putting all the different things in place, but of primary importance, get out the first 50 meters, make up the stagger, make sure you want to try to be even or ahead or made up a stagger. My goal always, at 200 meters in a 400, was to have made up the stagger on the outside – my outside runners by the time I hit 200 meters. So if I’m in Lane Four and I’m in an eight-lane track, five, six, seven, eight, when I cross the 200-meter mark, I don’t want them to be at their 200-meter mark yet. I want to be even with them, say on Lane Five. I want Lane Five to be next to me or slightly behind me when I cross that line, because I run to win and you have to expect your athletes to run to win. I’d rather tell my athlete, “You’re gonna try to shoot for first place today and come in second than shoot for second and come in second,” because that’s not how you’re gonna develop champions.
So that’s how I think you should run the 400. There are, of course, nuances that you could change or disagree with based on the training age of your athlete, the experience of your athlete, the physical strength of your athlete, the competition, the weather, all these things, but generally speaking, if you break it down into these parts and have your athletes focus on that, you’re gonna be in good shape.
But for me, this segment there, this is the most important part for me, from a mental strength standpoint, because somewhere around 200 to 250 is where athletes break a lot of times. So when you’re young or you’re first learning, if you’re at a dual meet or something, you can get to the inside of the track, I’m over here yelling and screaming to make sure they bear down and focus, because mental toughness is really the key a lot of times in the 400. Who wants it the most? So run to win. Be aggressive. Attack. Good technique. That is how you run the 400.
So, of course, people are gonna have questions or want to know what to do in specific situations. That’s why we have it here on the blog, so by all means, leave a reply below and I’ll do my best to get back to you. But this is how you, very simply, run the 400. If you have your sprinters run it like this or something similar to it, I promise you, they will run PRs their next race, just simply for that fact that they actually have a specific series or progression that you’re going through. When you start introducing this early in the season, there is actually more of a plan, the 400, so kids don’t feel like they’re just running out there crazy, because your inexperienced – if you have kids that don’t have race plans, every time they cross the 200-meter mark, they’re gonna be at a different split. I want my athletes to click off times like it’s their job, if you want your athletes to win titles.
That’s how you run the 400. Hope I got some good information out, some tips and techniques that you can take to practice for your next meet. But, again, of course, if you have any questions, comments, want to disagree, I guess I’ll allow that. Post your comments below. Until next time – actually, not until next time, but on Monday, if you’re a track person, which, obviously, you are if you’re watching this, I’ve got an interesting announcement that I think will be very relevant to your coaching, training and track experience, so be sure to keep an eye out for my email on Monday.
But for now, here’s how you run the 400. If you’ve got a meet this weekend, you’ve got athletes working on your Friday race plan, you always take your sprinters the day before their dual meet, championship meet, take them for a track walk and explain the race plan. Ask them what they’re trying to do. You’ve got to get kids involved in their training. They’re going to run a lot harder if they feel like they’re actually involved in it, as opposed to just out there doing whatever they’re told.
So that’s how you run the 400. Best of luck for those of you who have meets this weekend. I’ll be back on Monday with some more good information.
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