At a cross-country start, you can go out hard and risk fading or go out easy and risk regret. Pick on purpose.

Neither of those options is free, which is the useful part. Going out hard can cost you the last mile; going out comfortable can cost you a question you cannot answer afterwards. The real failure is drifting into one of them without noticing you chose. A bad race you picked on purpose teaches you something; a bad race you fell into teaches you nothing at all.

Write your first mile plan down before the gun. Then hold it through the opening four hundred metres, which is exactly where it will feel wrong either way.