Possible answers: A) Testosterone. B) Ego C)Both.

Practicing at the proper HR is one thing, but keeping my male ego in check on race day is something else, entirely. Try racing your own race, and ignoring that guy 100 yards ahead of you, even though you know you can pass him. Reward yourself during the last two miles of the run by going after that "other guy" and squashing him like the bug that he is.

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Mr Ed
Triathlete with one horsepower

Unless you have the high-tech stuff like HR monitors and power measuring devices, you will always find it hard to find the right pace on race day. That's not to say it can't be done, by any stretch of the imagination. We did it for years without it, but it usually took a lot of trial and error. The best thing I can recommend, if you don't have that stuff, is that you need to do some race-rehearsal type workouts in training, where you either swim-bike or bike-run at your target distance/time paces. Pay very close attention to RPE during these workouts, as well as the ambient conditions. These will give you very good feedback for racing. If you go out too hard in training, then you know to back that pace off a bit for the race. If its too easy, well, speed up. On race day make adjustments for any change in conditions (cooler/hotter, calmer/windier, etc) and stick to the distance/time pacing that you've worked out in training. The beauty of this method is that its usually slightly conservative and you enter the last 1/2 or 1/3 of the run with a lot left in the tank that you can burn up and pass a bunch of people in the last part of the race. Overall your time is going to be about what you could manage if you were slaving away to a PowerTap or Polar because you'll usually negative split the racing. But you HAVE to go HARD in those race-rehearsal workouts. You can't go conservative and say, well I went easy there so I can probably manage another 1/2 mph on the bike or another :30/mile on the run. Go hard in training and the racing is "easy"!

sing the song 'physco killer' by the talking heads to yourself. practice pace on the track and learn to sing it at diffrent tempos depending on pace. sing faster to run faster. sing slower for a slower pace. don't laugh it works for me.

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customerjon @gmail.com is where information happens.

There are three ways to find your pacing and indelibly mark in on your brain and body:
1) Repeats
2) Intervals
3) Ladders
...and lots of 'em. You won't know what your race pace is unless you repetitiously test the engine at various speeds beforehand. You do have to pick the right distances, though. 200m interval runs really don't have nearly the impact on a marathon runner that repeat 800's and miles do. A triathlete doing sprints/olys, on the other hand, should absolutely throw some short stuff into their workout regimen, same as a 5k, 8k, or 10k runner. If you don't learn the pace at which you blow up in practice, you won't know come race time until it happens.

It is really tough to pace yourself on the swim. No heartrate monitors. No timing that means anything in open water. The only thing that has worked for me on the swim is to smile and enjoy myself. This is really tough to do in the midst of flying elbows, but you have to find a place in your mind to do it. Concentrate on trying to find a draft rather than pushing the pace. At least for me, the amount of time I save by pushing on the swim is negligable.

Once I hopped on the bike, having a HR monitor helped me a lot this weekend. My HR was sky high coming out of T1. I eased off on the bike for the first couple of miles doing maybe 19 mph, then was able to average over 21 for the rest of the way with the HR under control. Then I was able keep the HR under control until the last couple of miles on the run. No rocket science here, but this was the first time I didn't blow at the end of an Olympic distance race.

It all begins on the swim. You need to relax. If you blow up there, the rest of the race is trashed.

Now I just need to learn to pace an IM. Best of luck to both of us.

I think that PART of the pacing problem in the general sense, is an over reliance on Heart Rate Monitors in training and racing. I came of age in running and triathlon at a time when they were just a dream out side of the lab. I never used one. I learned what paces where. How they felt physiologically and kinesthetically.

I suggest more training focused on pace.

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog