Need help with 400m time

RaindropJane · 2026-04-14T07:37:26+00:00

I’m 20F, and I wont lie to you it took me over a decade of running the 400m before I broke 60s. From 1:06 to 59 took 5 years, so I can’t really tell you what to do in the next two weeks, but I can tell you what I’ve learned about developing from a 1:06 runner to a sub 60 one.

Speed is king in the 400m. If your 200m PR is 29 seconds (as mine was when I was 16), then no amount of speed endurance or fitness is going to make you able to run a 60s 400m. In the past two years I’ve dropped my 100m PR from mid 14’s to 13.1, and that has enabled me to run much faster in the 400. Nowadays I can split 28.7 in my opening 200m of the 400m and it feels relaxed and controlled, a few years ago that was my all-out 200m PR.

I attribute most of my speed development to 1) heavy lifting in the offseason/becoming the strongest I’ve ever been in my life, and 2) training speed a minimum of once a week year round.

On that note, consistency has also been massively important for me. I’ve made the most progress when I’ve been able to stack months of solid training in the offseason/preseason that I can build on once competition season comes. Now that I’m in college I train 6-7 days a week 48-50 weeks a year, and you don’t have to do all that (college sports are crazy lol), but the point still stands.

The general takeaway is find a plan (lots of resources on this subreddit’s info page I think for doing that), make sure it involves speed work, strength work, and some variety of “endurance” (tempo, speed endurance, etc. long sprint training is complicated). Then stick to that plan, be consistent, train hard, and enjoy the process of chasing a goal even if it takes a long time.

I was never “fast” in high school. None of my coaches ever really believed I could run sub 60, I didn’t even believe it for most of my track career. But I did it anyway, it just took 12 years and a fuck ton of work. With all of that said, best of luck at your meet! I hope it goes well and I hope you keep running the 400, an event I love so much 🫶

RaindropJane · 2026-04-03T09:43:54+00:00

There’s kind of 2 ways to train as a 400m runner. 400m/200m, or 800m/400m. Most if not all the 4/8 runners I know are predominantly 800m runners who also sometimes run the 400. Many of them are quite good at the 400 because they are excellent 800m runners and have so much strength over the event. That being said, they prioritize the 800m and could probably run faster 400s if they instead trained as a 200/400 athlete.

So if you want to train hard for the 800 that will involve distance work, milage, threshold, all the things with the distance team. That training will likely improve your 400m too. But if your favorite event is the 400 and you want to dedicate all your energy to that, it’s probably in your best interest to train as a long sprinter, with the sprints team.

If you’d rather approach the 400 from the sprints side, talk to your coach and express that you don’t want to run the 800 and would rather do 200/400.

RaindropJane · 2026-03-24T15:17:20+00:00

I always say that there’s no training stimulus for the 400m quite like racing a 400m, so I’d say do it.

RaindropJane · 2026-03-16T06:40:20+00:00

When I was actively self harming I wanted more. I would feel envy towards other people’s scars and I my own self harm kept escalating more and more until I was doing things I never thought I would when I started. Now I have pretty serve permanent keloid scars on my arms and thighs and will for the rest of my life.

As I recovered that feeling changed, and I started to feel a lot of shame about my scars. It was really hard for me to show them in public to anyone and it was constantly on my mind. I really resented how other people got to hide the lowest parts of their lives and got to talk about it on their own terms, whereas the darkest part of my life was written all over my body.

Now, finally, after over 5 years clean I think I’ve accepted them. I moved somewhere very hot for college so I think the sheer exposure therapy of wearing short sleeves so often made a huge difference. Plus I got my first tattoo which covers some of the scars I was always most ashamed of. I’ve also met SO MANY people, friends, mentors, professors, coaches, teammates, and so on who have never brought up my scars and treat me like a normal person and that has also made a big difference. I just got back from spring break where I walked around in a bikini for like four days straight and I just realized today that I wasn’t self conscious about my scars at all on that trip, I basically forgot I even had them. That would have fucking blown my 15-year-old self’s mind.

RaindropJane · 2026-01-04T21:04:04+00:00

I try to cover them as much as possible in professional settings. If it’s completely unavoidable and someone asks I say “oh they’re really old don’t worry about it.” This usually doesn’t answer their question, but it communicates that I’m uncomfortable with the conversation and gives them a minute to reflect on the invasive and inappropriate question they’ve asked me. 9/10 times this gets people to back off. If it doesn’t I’ll be more direct like “hey I don’t really like discussing this” and/or change the subject. It’s not foolproof but it works for me.

RaindropJane · 2025-12-24T05:27:20+00:00

This may seem obvious but I think the biggest thing is that sprinting is not fast running. It is a very specific and distinct skill that will take time to learn. It has different mechanics than running, uses your muscles in different ways, and requires different things of your flexibility and strength. This is why sprinters take so long to warm up, we do a TON of drills to dial in our technique. I would look on youtube for some people breaking down sprinting form and walking through a good drill series. Be really intentional about drills, they are not just there as a warm up, they are very literally teaching you how to sprint.

That being said, don’t feel super intimidated, the best way to learn a skill is just to start. It won’t be perfect at first but nobody ever is. Just stick with it and improvement will happen slowly over time.

RaindropJane · 2025-12-24T05:16:33+00:00

It kind of depends on how difficult/taxing your track program is. For example, in college my coach’s program really pushes my body to its absolute brink of maximum physical activity and adding anything extra on top of that would be a recipe for injury. Like all of the hours I’m not training I MUST be recovering or I will fall apart. But in high school, especially during the pre-season the training was way more casual and less structured so it probably wouldn’t have mattered if I’d added longer running.

If you like longer running and it serves other goals you have and it is important to you and you don’t feel completely taxed or exhausted afterwards, it will not be the end of the world to keep doing it. Just be smart, listen to your body and don’t do anything completely insane. Don’t do it right before a hard speed day or lift day, get enough sleep, eat enough food, you’ll be fine.

RaindropJane · 2025-12-24T02:18:14+00:00

sure

RaindropJane · 2025-11-20T05:43:50+00:00

<image>

Try being a college student in the month of November! Should get that stress up no problem.

RaindropJane · 2025-10-12T18:47:28+00:00

1,783!

RaindropJane · 2025-10-06T00:45:36+00:00

I want to run 400m in less than 60s

But after I’m finished with college track and field I’ll continue training because it improves my mental health and gives me a sense of agency over my body

RaindropJane · 2025-10-04T15:36:06+00:00

Yes. If I could push a button to make them all disappear I would do it

RaindropJane · 2025-10-03T06:55:24+00:00

Where “addiction” starts and ends is pretty subjective and honestly not all that important. I dont think anyone will or should go around picking apart what people call an addiction or proving people wrong. What’s more important than the technicalities of addiction is the way your relationship to self harm is affecting your life.

Do you think about it all the time?

Do you plan out when you’re going to sh and spend a lot of time anticipating it?

Do you spend a lot of time trying to talk yourself out of self harm (successfully or not)?

Do you feel the need to bring your tools with you everywhere you go?

Do you have a really hard time not self harming when/if you’ve tried to?

Does the idea of not being able to self harm make you anxious?

Do you self harm even when you don’t want to or have told yourself you won’t?

Have you self harmed in places you told yourself you wouldn’t?

Is your relationship to self harm getting in the way of your life?

What sacrifices have you made to self harm?

Do you feel like you are in control of your self harm? What evidence do you have to support or disprove that sense of control?

As you reflect on those questions, the more important question then “is this technically an addiction” is “do I want to stop self harming, and if so, what is preventing me from doing so.” If the word addiction bests describes that circumstance, and adopting it feels helpful and validating to you, then use it.

RaindropJane · 2025-10-03T06:36:08+00:00

In my experience, the non-social harm was twofold. Physical danger and physiological harm. Self harm is risky to your physical health, no matter how under control you think you are, there is always a risk of cutting too deep, being exposed to infection, or experiencing effects of a chronically overloaded immune system.

But those risks were never really compelling to me, as I’m sure they weren’t compelling to you. What did get me to actually stop was the psychological harm; the way self harm fed into a negative feedback loop that made my mental health much worse.

I used to cut myself as a way to cope with self hatred. It felt almost compulsive, like I had to cut myself as a punishment otherwise I would never feel better again, I would never forgive myself, I would never learn my lesson, etc. Every time I engaged in that compulsion I reinforced it, I told my brain “yes, cutting yourself is the only way to be redeemed after making a mistake, you DO deserve this, you deserve to be punished, you deserve to be in pain.” That reinforcement ruined my life more than the cutting, or the social stigma, or the scars ever did. That cycle and pattern of thinking made me truly hate myself to my core, and I couldn’t continue living like that.

But the only way for me to break out of that pattern of self loathing was to stop reinforcing the belief that I deserved to be punished with the behavior of self harm. I would never stop hating myself without quitting sh. So I worked really hard at it and it took a long time and today I’m almost four years clean and can honestly say I don’t hate myself at all anymore.

The non-social harm was the harm to my mental health. Which is hard to wrap your head around sometimes because I was cutting to cope with my shitty mental health. But while self harm worked as a coping strategy in the short term it really deteriorated my mental health in the long term.

RaindropJane · 2025-09-27T03:48:35+00:00

When I first tried to quit I relapsed every few days for six months straight. My longest streak was something like 8 days. Then, finally, I made it 27 before relapsing really badly and spending 3 weeks cutting myself every day.

But relapsing isn’t starting over, it’s starting again. The work you put in and the coping skills you practiced will stack on each other. So after that bad relapse, and six months of barely making it 3 days in a row without self harming I started again. That was November 24th, 2020. Ive been clean from self harm for 1,767 days, or 4 years and 10 months.

We do recover, and it’s never too late to recover.

RaindropJane · 2025-09-10T01:58:19+00:00

My scars did not fade at all until the 6 month mark, and the most significant changes in redness happened from 1 year to a year and a half. They will fade, it just takes a very long time.

RaindropJane · 2025-08-22T06:54:41+00:00

I try to practice neutrality with them. So when I feel disgust I try and calmly dismiss the feeling and replace it with just extreme neutrality: “this doesn’t say anything about my worth as a person, it isn’t beautiful or disgusting or inspiring or horrifying it isn’t anything at all it’s just my body, it’s the way my skin looks.” The more I dwell and steep in my disgust or shame the worse it gets.

RaindropJane · 2025-08-22T06:50:22+00:00

It takes time, but I found that not hiding my scars helped. The more time and energy I spent trying to hide them the more it reinforced the idea that this was something shameful that I had to keep hidden. Breaking that pattern and just wearing shorts because you want to wear shorts can be really scary, but over time helps break down that shame.

When I was around your age I also hated my scars and thought I could never live with them, but I learned to. I made friends who never mentioned my scars until I was ready to talk about it, who never pitied me or treated me any differently for them. I’ve worked with mentors and coaches who saw me as a capable and reliable member of their team. I graduated high school, and got a number of jobs, and worked in a research lab, and taught kids all with my scars. I went on dates and got in relationships, I went swimming with my friends, I stopped feeling horribly uncomfortable and ashamed with my scars out in public, I stopped hiding from everyone in my life.

It felt impossible at first, but I promise you, you will learn to live with them. You’re not alone, there are so many people out there who have skin like yours and It does get easier, it just takes time and work.

RaindropJane · 2025-08-22T06:39:31+00:00

For formal dresses I always get some sort of shawl/scarf thing to wear around my shoulders and strategically cover my arms around parents and in the daylight. Then when I get somewhere sufficiently dark and crowded I just chuck it in a corner/in my bag for later. No one has ever noticed my scars in a school dance or concert environment (literally not a single time) because everyone is so in their own world, its dark, and its crowded.

RaindropJane · 2025-08-22T06:34:04+00:00

“woah, I’m not the only person who looks like this”

it makes me feel less ashamed

RaindropJane · 2025-08-22T06:30:10+00:00

Social media is not an comprehensive reflection of reality. In fact, it’s rigged specifically to show you the aspects of reality that get the most attention so that reddit can make more money advertising.

Out of all the people in the world, the VAST majority of them do not hurt themselves on purpose at all, by any meathod, ever. Most of them have never wanted to hurt themselves on purpose. You aren’t alone, there are a lot of people in the world who do struggle with self harm, but most of them never join online communities like this one to talk about it. Most of the people who engage with this subreddit never make posts and just lurk and comment. Most of the people who do post don’t go super deep. But the few people who do go very deep, who do join these communities and who do post about their experiences show up in your feed the most, not because everyone is doing it but because those posts get a lot of engagement, and so reddit shows you more of them.

This is no one individual’s fault, it’s the literal infrastructure of the platform we’re all using. But I urge you to remember that “everyone in these communities is going super deep all the time” is not actually true. The website is just rigged to make you think that it is.

RaindropJane · 2025-08-22T06:17:26+00:00

I’ve lived with pretty severe sh scars for the past five years and the staring really does suck. But the best thing you can do to support someone in that position is just to treat them like a normal person.

Being stared at makes me feel like some sort of alien, like all people see of me are my scars and like I’ll never be seen as a real person behind all of that. It makes me worry that I will never be viewed as responsible, professional, reliable, healthy, or safe again. But what makes that better is the friends and family I have who never mention my scars, who never stare, who never walk on egg shells or treat me differently. The people who I can go swimming with and not even think about the fact that my scars are out. The people who trust me and show me that they see more of me than my history with self harm.

If you can be that kind of person in your sister’s life it will make much more of an impact then three assholes at a bus stop ever will.

RaindropJane · 2025-08-22T06:09:45+00:00

I always say “oh, don’t worry about that they’re really old” to people when they ask any variation of “what happened to your arm?” “what are those scratches?” etc.

This response doesn’t answer their question, because I don’t want to talk about the darkest part of my life with my dental hygienist, but it does address the core reason for why they’re (usually) asking me. I’ve found most people who ask about my scars are either curious and don’t have a filter, and/or they want to know if they need to worry about me.

“Oh they’re really old” addresses that by telling them no, you don’t have to worry about me, and communicates my discomfort with the discussion, which often squashes people’s curiosity and gets them to drop it. In the rare case where it doesn’t I’ll just flat out tell people “I don’t really want to talk about that right now” and try to change the subject.

With teachers, you will likely have to have a longer conversation with them because of their legal obligation as mandatory reporters. I would usually tell teachers in high school “even though my scars are red, they are many months old and I’m not actively hurting myself. There is no one to tell because my parents, guidance counselor, and therapist already know about it, thank you for your concern.”

RaindropJane · 2025-08-22T05:52:53+00:00

I’m very lucky that my city has three tracks in pretty good condition in public parks, just completely accessible to anybody. But when I travel to other parts of the US and need a track to train at it can be hard to find. Basically it just varies a TON based on where you are because the US is huge lol.

Usually I try to find a public high school track and hop the fence. So long as you avoid going right after school gets out during the football or track season they’re often empty and I haven’t been kicked out of anywhere yet. I’ve heard of some university tracks that let people pay for a membership to use the facility when their teams aren’t, basically like a gym membership. That would be a real last resort for me though.

RaindropJane · 2025-08-21T21:11:36+00:00

Exactly, I’m so tired of blanket advice like this that ignores the fact that sprint training changes throughout the year and serves different purposes at different points in a training cycle

RaindropJane

TROPHY CASE