I have a hard time coming up with a reason why a completely fulfilled and well-adjusted person might voluntarily sign up (and pay!) to run 42 kilometres. And of course, it’s not just the 42km on race day, it’s all the running you do before you even get to the start line. When I signed up for my first marathon last year, I (maybe naively) thought that I didn’t find the race itself intimidating. Yes, I respected the distance, but I suspected that I’d be carried by the excitement of the day. No, what really seemed like a gargantuan task was the training block. Four months of running for several hours every weekend. I’d had people close to me train for a marathon before, and it always seemed to take over their lives. Marathons are extreme, so it makes sense that the kind of person who would undertake this challenge would also be a little intense.
Running is an Acquired Taste (kind of like when you start drinking beer, you suffer through it to seem cool, and next thing you know, you’re craving it on a sunny day)
Growing up, I despised running; I would come up with ridiculous excuses to avoid running the mile all throughout middle school1. In the spring of 2020, something changed. Stuck at home, I figured I would give it another go. I had tried to get into running before, but it never stuck for more than a week. I took any excuse to get out of the house, and as someone who lacked the focus or discipline to get through a Chloe Ting ab video, running was the perfect solution. No matter how tired or bored I got, I still had to get home somehow. I worked my way up to a 5k, and whenever the runner’s high hit I’d say that one day I wanted to run a marathon. It felt like a distant goal, something for my future self to tick off a list before turning thirty. After running a couple of half-marathons, I realised that I needed the pressure of a looming race to get me to hit the pavement. With more and more people around me running marathons, it suddenly seemed more achievable2. I told myself, what’s five hours of pain for a lifetime of clout?3 Last year, when I was riding the high of running my second half4, I made the endorphin-fuelled decision to sign up for the Amsterdam Marathon. I loved the idea of doing something that was just for myself. Throughout the course of my training, I’d tell my friends that I wasn’t taking things “too seriously.” It was maybe not the fairest assessment, but when I saw people uphauling their entire lives to optimise performance with routines that rivalled those of professional athletes, I felt like my casual-paced runs fuelled by entire bags of Skittles paled in comparison. I didn’t follow elaborate fuelling strategies, splurge on carbon-plated shoes, or decline invites to the pub. I felt like a bit of a fraud. I avoided talking about running altogether (and if you’ve ever met anyone who’s training for a marathon, you know how we love the attention) because I felt like I didn’t quite fit the profile. I wasn’t going into this with any time goals and expectations. My only focus was enjoying myself and trying to get through the next four months without hating running in the process.
What I Learned from Running Little Laps (Marathon Training)
Perspective is everything
Once you’re running a half-marathon (or more) every weekend, 12km starts to look like a casual mid-week distance. I did a lot of my long runs around Regent’s Park, which meant losing count of how many laps I had done (and farming for local legend status on Strava in the process), so by the time I was running in a farm field on race day, I was used to making do with the distraction of the greenery and the voices in my head.
Celebrate the little wins along the way
On the previous point, it’s easy to get caught up in training (or in other projects) and to focus so hard on the big picture that you forget to celebrate the small wins. I am guilty of always wanting to move on to the next big things, but I’m learning to slow down and acknowledge that present me is doing so many things that past me could only dream of.
(Some) things are only as dreadful as you allow them to be
I don’t think everything is about mindset. Some things just objectively suck. However, as the queen of procrastinating long runs on the weekends, I’d come to realise that whilst running 30km is objectively hard it’s not the dreadfully Sisyphean task I had made it out to be in my head. I’m always thinking things are going to be so awful that I’m perpetually putting them off, which just makes me even more anxious. I need the reminder that it’s probably not that bad
Knowing when to stop is just as (if not more) important than knowing when to push
I hate running fast. I don’t see the point of suffering through feeling like your legs are going to fall off or holding back the urge to puke. I like running long distances because the distance itself is the challenge, I don’t feel the need to go fast as long as I finish. I managed to get through my entire training block without any injuries, something I largely attribute to not pushing my body too far. If I got tired, I’d slow down, if I needed to walk, I’d take a break. It’s not that I didn’t take this marathon seriously, but I reminded myself not to take things too seriously.
Have goals that are [almost] entirely in your hands (if you couldn’t already tell, I’m a bit of a control freak)
This past year, nothing went according to plan. I graduated in the middle of a recession and I’ve applied to hundreds of jobs. For once it felt nice to do something where the result felt fully within my control. Writing on Substack has given me a similar sense of control. Whilst I’m still pitching other publications, it feels nice to be in control of what I put out (whether or not people read it is a different story though).
Full disclosure, I wrote everything you’ve read so far before actually running the damn thing. I did the best I could with my training plan and was feeling pretty excited. In school, I used to say that the best feeling was walking into an exam room feeling prepared, sure, there are always things that can affect your performance on the day, but as I walked up to the start line, I was feeling pretty confident. It helps that I went in with no specific time goal, my only goal was to enjoy myself (or at least that’s what I was telling everyone5). Making my way into the Olympic stadium, I told myself the tough part was over, this was the victory lap (but a veryyyy long one at that)
What I Learned from Running a Big Lap (Marathon Day)
Trust yourself and trust the process
I did whatever my Runna training plan told me to, and on race day, I told myself I’d just go with the flow. Turns out everything worked out, and I was feeling pretty good throughout the 42km.
Making friends is the key to success
My friends are one of my biggest sources of support, and have carried me through some of the hardest times in my life. Making friends on the course was also the key to running faster and stronger than ever. I caught up with a pacer at km 16 and chatted with her until the half-marathon mark. At km 24, I met my guardian angel, an insane French guy named Romain who was doing his 45th marathon and was my unofficial videographer, coach, pacer and motivational speaker for the remaining 18km.
Have Fun
I was running for a good time and a long time. I kept expecting to hit the wall, to get to the point where you say I hate this, but I was having a good time throughout. I high-fived every kid sticking out an arm, took candy from strangers6 , face-timed my mom from the middle of a farm field and stopped to hug my friends along the way.
A special thanks to Jet and Popo who travelled to Amsterdam to cheer me on, and my brother who woke up early on a Sunday, kept my family updated and got the best finish-line video
I know this is pretty different from what I usually talk about here, but I need to milk this marathon, and I also feel like a lot of what I learned these past months is applicable in other areas of my life. If you enjoyed this piece, I also recommend checking out this NYT Opinion piece on Long Distance Running and Writing.
I still hate running fast and subsequently avoid short distances like the plague
It also felt like a cool members club and I wanted in
Clearly I got into this for all the right reasons
I was also violently sick after running in the heat, so maybe it wasn’t the endorphins and I was delusional and suffering from severe dehydration
And then the night before the marathon I admitted to my best friend that if everything went perfectly my dream time would be 4:45, but I didn’t want the pressure (I ended up finishing in 4:44)
which is a bit of a Russian roulette in Amsterdam