The 600 Mile Marathon

Starting at the fin­ish line

I ran the Banff Marathon on Sunday, June 19th. I fin­ished in 4 hours and 11 min­utes, but the race was the cul­mi­na­tion of a train­ing ef­fort that took months. It was the most dif­fi­cult thing I have ever done.

Table of Contents

Starting at the start (or why I did this to my­self)

I grad­u­ated a se­mes­ter early, so I was search­ing for some­thing to fill up my ex­tra time. Having just sub­mit­ted my grad school ap­pli­ca­tions in December, I de­cided to run a marathon, an am­bi­tious un­der­tak­ing that is fre­quently com­pared to a cer­tain other one that I re­cently com­mit­ted toWhy do I want to do a PhD?.

A nat­ural-born ath­lete, I am not. I was on the track team in high school, but as a pole vaulter so I could min­i­mize the amount of run­ning to about 60 feet at a time. I tried and failed to pick up dis­tance run­ning as a hobby mul­ti­ple times in the past. Being a run­ner was some­thing I had al­ways as­pired to, but never ac­tu­ally achieved.

I wanted to run be­cause it seemed like a cheapIt turns out run­ning shoes are not cheap., healthyIt turns out it’s pretty com­mon to get in­jured run­ning. activity that I could do any­where. But more im­por­tantly, I wanted to run to prove to my­self that I could. I fig­ured the push to a marathon fin­ish would yield some amount of self-dis­ci­pline and other use­ful lessons I could take with me as I started my PhD in the fall.

The jour­ney, not the des­ti­na­tion

Having ex­plic­itly de­cided to run a marathon as a char­ac­ter-build­ing ex­er­cise, here are the char­ac­ter-build­ing lessons I learned in the process (in no par­tic­u­lar or­der):

  1. There will al­ways be bad miles. It’s im­pos­si­ble to run a lot and feel good about every mile. The bad runs — the ones that were slow or painful or just felt harder than they should’ve — are in­evitable. Just ac­cept it and look for­ward to the next run.
  2. Take time off to re­cover. I was guilty of not do­ing this enough in my train­ing block, which re­sulted in the knee in­jury I’m hob­bling around with now. It’s tempt­ing to stick to the sched­ule, es­pe­cially when there’s a set dead­line, but that can lead to worse in­juries and worse per­for­mance in the fu­ture.
  3. Be con­sis­tent, but be flex­i­ble. I trav­eled a lot in March and April visiting grad schools. My sched­ule was all over the place, and I fre­quently had flights on days I was sup­posed to run. This meant I had to shift my train­ing around to ac­com­mo­date. That can be dif­fi­cult be­cause I was lean­ing heav­ily on a set train­ing plan to make up for my lack of ex­pe­ri­ence, but it also meant I got to go on some very scenic runs in Switzerland and Ithaca and Berkeley (with lots of hill run­ning).
  4. Run your own race. I’m a com­pet­i­tive per­son, and I feel the strong temp­ta­tion to pass peo­ple, but I had to learn to run at my own pace. Getting a run­ning watch helped me to keep my own time, but I also learned to ac­cept that every­one is train­ing at dif­fer­ent lev­els. I set a time goal I’d personally be happy with and fo­cused on that in­stead of com­par­ing my­self to oth­ers.
  5. Lean on your sup­port net­work. Having (and find­ing) a com­mu­nity also helped me a lot. My friends helped me so much with en­cour­age­ment and gen­eral en­thu­si­asm for my plan, and the broader run­ning com­mu­nity is so sup­port­ive and will­ing to share knowl­edge with run­ners at all lev­els.
  6. “Just keep run­ning.” When push came to shove and I was feel­ing all sorts of pain at mile 24 of the race, I knew I had to just push my­self to run to the fin­ish. For the last 2k of the race, I kept re­peat­ing to my­self the mantra of “just keep run­ning”. Focusing on putting one step in front of the other, I tried to ig­nore the pain. Eventually, I rounded the cor­ner and the fin­ish line came into view.

Finishing past the fin­ish line

Crossing the fin­ish line, I felt such an over­whelm­ing sense of re­lief that I burst into tears. The race did­n’t just span the 26.2 miles I had run that day, but the 600+ miles I had run in the months lead­ing up to it.

Within an hour of fin­ish­ing, though, I al­ready found my­self think­ing about the next race I wanted to run. So here’s biggest les­son I learned in this whole ex­pe­ri­ence, and one that I did­n’t un­der­stand un­til the very end: there is al­ways go­ing to be the next race.

I have a habit of get­ting into ob­ses­sive sprints: two days to code a web­site, six months to run a marathon, a year to fin­ish a pa­per. Even when I was train­ing for an en­durance race, I ap­proached it with a fix­a­tion on a sin­gle, short-term goal: fin­ish the Banff Marathon in June.

That ap­proach has aligned closely with my world so far, which was one de­lin­eated by quar­ters and se­mes­ters and fi­nal ex­ams. But look­ing into the fu­ture, the ter­mi­nal points are be­com­ing less clear, and short ob­ses­sive bursts of en­ergy ei­ther won’t be enough or will cause me pain in the long runHeh. Get it?.

Facing this re­al­ity is scary, and I’m sure in­ter­nal­iz­ing and ad­just­ing to it will be hard — maybe the most dif­fi­cult thing I have ever done. But I’ve learned a lot about run­ning long runs and do­ing dif­fi­cult things in the past few months; I feel con­fi­dent now that I’ll learn plenty more in the years to come.