In a week’s time I will run a marathon. It’s not my first, so the nervousness is mitigated a bit, and even though it’s been a while I know I’ve trained enough to finish and have a reasonably enjoyable time doing it. Nevertheless it is still a challenge, a mountain to climb, and it still takes some willpower and mental stamina to follow through…
It happens that for this one (my fourth) I am returning to home ground, running in Berlin where I ran my first one 4 years ago. And following the thread of my thoughts recently, I am remembering what that was like… besides, I mean, the obvious – fun, exhausting, exhilarating, fulfilling. And, let’s not beat around the bush, painful. Not enough so to override the positives, but there is some pain involved.
The two best pieces of advice I can give to someone considering such an endeavour are very simple (it’s probably better to turn to someone more knowledgeable than I for specific advice on running technique and so on – these are more general, philosophical musings that apply to other things in life besides running):
First, the best way to start the process is simply to sign up for one and pay the race fee. It’s amazing what taking a solid step like that can do to your motivation and focus on a task. The great explorer and mountaineer H.W. Tillman was once asked at a lecture what a young person interested in climbing mountains should do to move towards that goal, he replied (somewhat curmudgeonly, one imagines): “Put on your boots, and go”. Life is not always that simple… but sometimes, it is.
The other piece of advice is this: if you don’t stop, you’ll finish. This seems clear enough, but there are moments, usually in my experience around 30 to 35 km, when stopping begins to seem like a seriously attractive option. The legs become increasingly urgent in their requests for rests, walk breaks, slower pace, lying down, anything. Fighting these off becomes more difficult, and fatigue makes the quite reasonable motivations for doing this in the first place seem vague, insubstantial, borderline masochistic.
But if you don’t stop, you’ll finish. And finishing, for some reason that is hard for me to put my finger on exactly, feels better than stopping – even when there is no immediately appreciable benefit to having finished, and in fact considerable consequence in the form of tired, sore legs. Our brains are simply wired to want us to finish stuff we start, and to regret the things we didn’t manage to finish for quite unreasonable spans of time. And we seem to be wired to be really happy and proud when we finish things that were challenging or daunting beforehand.
So the trick is simply to not stop. I mean, stop if you’re having radiating waves of pain in the chest, or if every step becomes existential agony. Otherwise, keep putting one foot in front of the other. It’s a lot of steps, but it’s a finite number.
And if that fails, think about comedian Eddie Izzard, currently running around the UK raising money for the Comic Relief foundation. Pretty much a marathon a day, with occasional rest days. This is not a professional athlete, not someone with a history of such feats of physical exertion and stamina. A professional comic, and a very good one to be sure, but… a marathon a day? Have a look at his blog, follow him on Twitter, sponsor him if you can spare a bit, and most importantly, remember: if he can keep going, what’s your excuse?
