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What I Wish I Knew Before Running Marathons
Every run is just one step in a lifelong process.
While working a full-time job as a teacher and attending night classes in law school, I was able to run a 2:35:40 marathon in the fall, which is 5:56 mile pace for the entire marathon. I felt like I had broken through a wall, and it would be a seamless, linear path to self-improvement as a runner from there. However, even with that big breakthrough, I still have bad days, bad workouts, bad races, days I don’t feel like running at all given my other life commitments.
It took me a long time to learn that running is more about the process than the outcomes. This might be a cliche, but it’s especially true of the marathon. It took me a long time to learn I wouldn’t get better at the marathon unless I ran a lot of miles over a long period of time. So much of training is about control — controlling mileage, workouts, effort, or injury prevention efforts. But there is so much of the marathon that is outside of those same elements of control — the weather, race day logistics, the difficulty of the course, that can make all the preparation and training go out of the window.
Running marathons is a unique challenge. A lot of my writing about running marathons is on the more technical side — ways I tinkered with my workouts, mileage, nutrition, and…
