I ran track for one year, and I had played basketball, so I wasn't exactly starting from scratch, but my coach was also my psychology teacher, so he played up the 'building your internal discipline to match your physical discipline' angle to convince me to try it. First meet I was great as a 'rabbit' during the first half of the race and then I finished dead last, LOL. I ended up running the 200, but I ran the 800 in practice to build for the 200. So in short, play it up as a strength thing, because in my mind, that is the hardest race. Anything beyond 800, you are running different, but 800 is really the threshold between sprinting and distance...