Time & Perspective Quote by Michael East

Pace is a form of ego management, and Michael East is warning you what happens when ego wins. "If you go too soon" isn’t just tactical advice; it’s a diagnosis of the most common race-day delusion: the belief that early aggression is bravery rather than borrowing. The phrase "come unstuck" is doing quiet work here. It’s blunt, almost domestic, the language of something that looked secure until it suddenly isn’t. No melodrama, no hero talk - just the ugly moment your body stops cashing the checks your brain wrote in the first lap.

The image of "50m left" sharpens the cruelty. That’s close enough to taste the finish, far enough to suffer a public undoing. East isn’t describing failure in the abstract; he’s describing the particular humiliation of decelerating while everyone else accelerates, of hearing spikes and breathing behind you turn into bodies "going past you". The "guys" phrasing keeps it locker-room real: not faceless competitors, but peers, rivals you’ve sized up all season, now reclaiming you like you misread the whole situation.

Context matters: middle-distance and distance racing is choreography between physiology and psychology. Go early and you risk lactate, panic, and that familiar tightening spiral where form collapses and time stretches. East’s intent is conservative in the best sense: respect the clock, respect the closing stages, and understand that the finish isn’t where you start proving yourself - it’s where you reveal whether your earlier choices were actually sustainable.