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I was one week out from running my second marathon when it happened. I messed my pants. This is, of course, one of the great fears of any marathoner. In the process of pushing your body to run 26.2 miles, it might push back – in some cases, by locking up your quads, or, in more devastating instances, by releasing your bowels.
Fortunately, when gastrointestinal revenge came for me, it wasn’t on the big day, in front of thousands of people, but alone on what should have been a casual eight-mile tune-up, eight days before. It was also the morning after the first night of a wedding weekend, in which I’d had more than a handful of boozy IPAs.
Which begs the question: Why didn’t I just sleep it off and skip the run? I had 13 of 14 weeks of training behind me and was already well into the “taper” (the final three-week period leading up to the marathon where, after increasing your mileage for most of the training, you run less and less to let your body fully recover). It was early October, and I’d run 301 miles since July. Another eight was not going to make a difference. But the truth is that when I ran my first marathon, about three years ago, I learned a powerful lesson, which is that completing a marathon is not easy, but it is simple – and it basically all comes down to consistency.
If running 26.2 miles sounds bonkers to you, it did to me, too. Growing up, running was mostly a way to stay in shape for sports or a form of punishment during practice for said sports. But, in 2018, on the cusp of turning 30 and feeling totally fine, not at all panicked, and in no need of proving I wasn’t washed, I decided to try to run the New York City marathon.
This is when I discovered the delightfully appealing – and somewhat addicting – linear progress that is marathon training. It is one of the few things in life where you get out exactly what you put in. You find a program, you stick to it, day after day, week after week. Three months later, if you have the good fortune of staying healthy, you find yourself, miraculously, running farther than you ever thought you might. It’s a powerful experience.
So when Nike reached out to me earlier this summer to ask if I wanted to be on their media team for the Chicago marathon, I said yes, thank you, I’ll have another. And when the training program they designed (specifically, by incredible Nike run coaches and delightful humans Rebeka Stowe and Jes Woods) said that I should drag my hangover out of bed that morning, that’s exactly what I did. (Though I can attest that both coaches would probably have advised me to listen to my body instead.)
Now, I know that there are few things more obnoxious than a marathoner evangelizing about running a marathon and that being the guy who messed his pants does not put me in a position of authority. With that aside, let me say: if you’re considering it, and maybe even if you’re not, you should definitely run a marathon.
Every person I’ve talked to who has done it – and again, we love to talk about it, so it’s a rather large sample size – has been changed by it. But, as I learned my second time around, you’ll be even more deeply changed by it if you have access to proper coaching (and gear, and a training plan). I wanted to share some of the things that helped me in my second marathon in Chicago that I wish I’d known when I’d run my first. My hope is that they might help you, whether you want to run a marathon or not.
Thanks to picking up a copy of The Art of Running Faster, by Julian Goater, I learned about ways to (surprise!) run faster that I somehow had failed to learn in my first thirty-two years of having and using legs. For instance, when running up a hill, you can shift into a lower “gear” by keeping your cadence the same (the rate at which your feet hit the ground) but shortening your stride. Or that faster arms mean faster feet, so, if you want to accelerate, instead of focusing on your feet, concentrate on “pulling” your arms back, as if trying to elbow someone behind you.
The most befuddling of Goater’s tips is also the most useful, which is that you can simply choose to not run out of breath when you’re exerting relatively intense effort. “You can breathe slowly and deeply in circumstances where you would have thought it impossible,” writes Goater, a former Cross Country national champion. “I know a lot of people say they can’t. If they’ve just charged up a hill, for example, or done some fast repeats, they have no choice but to heave and to pant. There’s a panic in the way they feel when they’re out of breath. They think if they don’t gasp, they might pass out from lack of air. The panting is a reflex; it’s involuntary; it’s just what the body does when it needs oxygen.”
If you think this sounds insane, or like total bullshit, I thought the same. And then I tried it. Goater suggests timing your breath to your steps: inhale for three steps, exhale for three steps. But because he also explains that it’s the exhale that matters more than the inhale because it clears room for fresh air – another revelation for me – I modified his recommendation slightly, exhaling for one more step than I inhaled. Remarkably, it worked. When I started to feel like I was getting out of breath, the moment when ordinarily I’d start gasping, I just focused on inhaling for two steps and exhaling for three. It definitely wasn’t comfortable, and I could feel the reflex to pant, but so long as I stuck with the two-three cadence, I could keep my breath even for much, much longer than I had anticipated. A much more experienced runner than I used a nice metaphor to illustrate the dawning of this epiphany. It’s like realizing you’re a slack rubber band, he said. As you stretch yourself, you’ll realise you can stretch further for longer than you thought.
I ran the New York Marathon in 3:44, which breaks down to an average mile pace of 8:33. For Chicago, I wanted to break 3:30, which would put me at 8:00/mile pace (on, it’s worth mentioning, a much faster and flatter course). In order to run faster, I’d have to train faster. Which, as the Nike 14-week training plan helpfully laid out, meant doing speed work: running at much faster than marathon pace for short bursts of time, with limited recovery in between. At the beginning of training, this looked like running 3 sets of 400 meters (one lap around a track) at about 7:15 mile/pace (so about 1:50 per lap), with one minute of recovery between laps. By the end of the training, I was sustaining that 7:15 pace for 5 sets of 10 minutes, with about 90 seconds rest between sets.
What’s surprising, though, is that you only do this once a week, and never for very long. And in order to make sure your body is prepared for that fast day, all of the rest of your training is done at much slower than the marathon pace. So for the other two days of intermediate distance (usually around 6 miles), and the one long run (working up to 22 miles at its peak), I ran slower than my goal of 8:00/mile pace. This means the vast majority of the running I did in the lead up to the marathon was done much more slowly than I hoped to run my race in. It’s an odd sensation – but it works.
This June, right before my marathon training started, I was lucky enough to get to talk to Molly Seidel, who would go on to win the bronze medal in this summer’s Olympic marathon. “Training is less about running at a certain pace to be able to train your body for that pace,” she said. “It’s teaching your brain to be okay with running these paces: I didn’t die this time. So it’s going to be okay next time. I know I can run 13 miles at this pace, even though it hurts like hell.”
This is what speed work does. It doesn’t just make you faster by upping your aerobic threshold, it’s using those short bursts of speed to Trojan horse in some confidence, to teach you that you can stay in that place of discomfort for longer. Prior to training, if you’d have asked how many 7:15 miles I could run, I’d have said maybe two – three at the absolute max.
But on the day I had to run 5 sets of 7:15 for 10 minutes, I maintained it for almost fifty minutes (even hitting 6:48 on one of those sets). The next week, on a 12-mile run, I ran my last mile at 6:11 pace. (It’s worth mentioning that this was also the first time I wore a pair of Nike’s Air Zoom Alphafly Next% shoes, which Nike gave us to wear for the marathon and which feel like running on pogo sticks.)
On the day of the marathon, when it got hard, I drew on both of those training sessions, realizing that, as Seidel said, I could keep running even though it hurt – because I’d done it before. I ran the 26th mile in 6:58, and finished in 3:26, four minutes ahead of my goal.
There was another trick I used to get through the pain of the final miles of the marathon, one I took from Oksana Masters, a cyclist who won two gold medals in this summer’s Paralympics. She said that when it starts to get painful during her races, she just counts to 10, over and over and over again. Somewhere around mile 20, I started thinking, I don’t need to make it to the next mile marker, I just need to make it 10 more steps.
Taking it 10 steps at a time, I made it six more miles. This works on a larger scale for all of the marathon training. At the beginning of the training, it will likely seem daunting in aggregate. But you don’t need to do it all – you just have to do whatever you need to do for that day.
It teaches you the power of taking small bites out of huge projects. There’s a wonderfully understated line from polar explorer Erling Kagge, who has walked to both Poles and summited Everest, that nicely captures this. “The secret to walking to the South Pole,” he writes in his book Silence, “is to put one foot in front of the other, and to do this enough times.”
While training for my first marathon, I always ran for miles. But Nike often had us running for time, instead of miles.
Somehow, running for one hour seems a lot less psychologically daunting than the 7 or 8 miles it usually amounted to. Which had the added benefit of making the miles add up a lot more quickly. I was shocked when, at the end of September, I looked at the Nike Run Club app to see I’d logged over 120 miles on 16 runs.
On my most intense week, when my training peaked at four runs totalling 39 miles, I was only running for five and a half hours out of the 112ish waking hours of the week. So while there is no shortcut for getting miles under your feet, you might be delightfully surprised how quickly they add up.
Something else Masters shared that stuck with me: she says she approaches a race as just another day of training. “If that means that today, I’m dead last, then that’s okay, I know where to start tomorrow,” she says. “Or if I’m going to finish and it puts me on top of the podium, I have a new start line.” Because you’re training for – and thinking so much about – the looming race, it can turn the marathon into a Really Big Deal. This, in turn, creates a lot of pressure.
But taking Masters’s words to heart, I tried to approach running as you might approach meditation or yoga: as a practice. Once I did that, the stakes weren’t as high and it made my motivation intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic. Ironically, it’s the first time, in fifteen years, I’ve ever felt like a runner (as opposed to someone who runs).
There was something joyful in that switch. Instead of approaching this training cycle as something to get done, a way to cross “run a second marathon” off a bucket list, it became a way to deepen my running practice.
It gave me structure but took away the seriousness. In other words, it felt playful. Ultimately, I think that’s why I hit my goal – which will be my new starting point when I begin training for my third marathon.
[Via GQ]
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