2Young2bald- Has he run a 400 in a time trial / tryout / race before? If so, the most common advice I heard is to take his best 400 time (actual or reasonable estimate), add 5 seconds, and target that for the first 400 of his race and then try to hang on. (so if he has run a 65 second quarter, try to go out in 70 and hang on). I think Koby is a 800 guy though so maybe he can chime in and give some better advice. I was a miler in high school so when I got tapped for 4x800 duty I just went out like a bat out of hell and tried to hang on.
No. He ran the 70, 100 and 200, winning every race but one as a middle schooler last year and took up cross country last fall running an 18:45 in his last race. The HS track is still covered with snow, so the boys have done all of their workouts indoors so far. He did not play a winter sport, so he has been in the gym doing mostly strength and core all winter and did the optional indoor workouts since the first of the year. He is running with 3 of the top 5 boys from the cross country team and he was talking with two that are seniors yesterday about pacing (he just found out that he was running the event yesterday btw), Both basically told him to go full throttle and try not to puke after. The boys will have today and tomorrow to work on hand offs, but he has never run of an indoor track. He has an excellent coaching staff so I am sure they will coach him up fine, I just can't resist looking for a nugget or two that might just make him excel even more. His cross country times started dropping when he let me start planning split times and running to the mile markers and yelling out where he was according to plan. He was holding back early on, I think, because he wasn't aware of just how much running talent he had.