Breaking Through the Running Wall for the First Time
How I Hit the Wall During the Lockdown and Broke Through It
I started running seriously in March during the first lockdown. I needed a way to escape the house because it had become my life; I would wake up, work, eat, sleep, workout, repeat — all in the same space.
Before that, I was training at the gym 3–4 times a week, but I found that the online gym sessions after lockdown were not the same. I wasn’t getting the same workout, and I had lost motivation.
Over the previous 12 months, I had lost around 120 pounds through diet and exercise. My daily calorie target was about 1800 calories, and I felt that I ate well with three solid meals a day and snacks. I had lost 2 pounds a week, and I wanted to keep this up during the lockdown.
Starting with my running routine
I found starting incredibly motivating; each time I went out, I found I was running faster and improving. I couldn’t run a full 5K when I first started; I would be able to run about 2K then walk and run the remaining 3K.
Even walking and running was difficult, and I would count the number of steps. I aimed for 100 steps of running, followed by 100 steps of walking. Each time I went out, I tried to increase the number of running steps and reduce the number of walking steps until I could eventually run the full 5K without walking.
I measured my pace on longer runs, the first 10K that I ran my pace was 8:16 per km, and it quickly improved. By the end of the first month, I was down to 7:10.
I felt so confident that I entered the virtual Comrades half-marathon in June. I had heard about the Comrades Marathon in the audiobook Rise of the Ultra-Runners, which I found to be exceptionally motivating as a new runner. It was my first race, and I figured that I would have plenty of time to improve and train.
I was attempting my first half marathon.
By the time the race came around, I had improved significantly. My time for the 10K had come down to just over 1 hour, and a few weeks before, I completed it without walking for the first time. My weight had also continued to drop, and I had now lost 150 pounds in total while sticking to my daily calorie target.
My 5K time had also dropped, and I ran my first 5K under 30 minutes before the race.
Everything had been going well, I had increased my distance to around 30km per week and felt good going into race day. I planned my route and nutrition for the race, with a few gels and drinks every 5K.
I expected to have to walk, but I didn’t realise how much the wall would impact my time and the next months of my life.
And then I hit the wall for the first time.
I first discovered the wall about 10km into the race; it was new territory for me as I hadn’t run more than 10km in my training sessions. I had started well, just under 1 hour 10 minutes in and I felt on track for my target of under 2 hours 30 minutes.
I decided to walk the next km because my legs were starting to feel a bit tired. After the next km, I was able to eke out another 3k of slow running, but then my body didn’t want to go anymore.
Every time I tried to run, I would take five steps and start walking again. I had hit the dreaded wall, and my body didn’t want to go. Even the nutrition that I had planned didn’t help.
I resigned myself to walking for the rest of the race and managed to finish in 2 hours 41 minutes. Well outside of my original goal of 2 hours 30 minutes. Little did I know that it would set me back months in my running journey.
A long road back to normal
I felt pretty good the next day after the race, my legs didn’t hurt too badly, and I had a personal training session planned in the evening. The lockdown restrictions in the UK were starting to lift, the weather was good, and I felt fine.
We did a gruelling whole-body circuit that evening, with shuttle runs, kettlebells and squats. Even the following day, I still felt pretty good and decided to have a rest day before going back into a run the next morning.
From the start, I knew that something wasn’t quite right, the first two kilometres felt good, but then I hit the wall again. It was just the same as it had been on the race day, I could run for a few steps, but I was suddenly back to walking again.
I took a few more days off, but when I tried again, I got the same result.
The lost month
I am generally stubborn and determined, and I think that my running training had shown that until this point. Something had gone very wrong after the race though, and over the next month I saw the same pattern, I could run 2–3KM but then my body would not go any further. My 10K times had gone almost entirely back to where I started, and I was left walking to the end.
My training sessions were going well enough. I found that I ran into the same wall a few times during particularly challenging circuits. However, we had seen some small improvements in strength, and I was getting back to where I had been pre-lockdown.
A warning sign was that I was starting to have problems with my diet; I was generally sticking to 1800 calories, but I would have days when I couldn’t stop eating. If I bought bread, then I would want to eat the entire loaf in a single day. My weight loss had also slowed to a crawl, and I was feeling lethargic.
After a month, I decided I had to do something different; I hadn’t told my trainer about the issues during my runs or that my weight loss had stopped. When I finally confided in him, we discussed everything from run frequency to nutrition.
The eureka moment
When we got into the number of calories, I was consuming, that was when the light bulb went on.
At the start of 2020, I had aimed to increase my training frequency from 3–4 times a week to 4–5 times a week. During the lockdown, I had generally been doing five sessions a week, sometimes six. However, I had not changed the amount I was eating.
“You need to feed the beast”, he said. We agreed to increase my calories to 2200 per day for two weeks and see what would happen.
That was the eureka moment, within a week of increasing the number of calories I was feeling a lot better. It took me another three weeks before I could run the full 10km without walking, but I started making progress again.
I have recently run my first 10km under 1 hour, with the second half of the run faster than the first. The eating binges have stopped, and it is clear that my nutrition was the problem.
In hindsight, the half-marathon was the straw that broke the camels back. I was running on minimum because of the calorie restriction and how long I had been doing it. Combined with the increase in exercise, it pushed me over the edge and left me completely drained.
Today I am getting back on track, but I felt like I lost around two months of progress because of a simple nutrition mistake. People talk about the wall in running, but for me, it was much more insidious and revealed an error I was making.
I have now lost over 170 pounds, and I am starting to get into a healthy range. So my next challenge will be to increase my calories again and maintain my weight.
