Breaking Through The Wall After Three Years of Plateau
A marathon personal best reframed my expectation of what is possible
This past week, I ran a 2:35:40 marathon in Harrisburg, which was a four-minute personal best. It was 5:56 minutes per mile pace for 26.2 miles and around 3:42 minutes per kilometer pace for 42.2 kilometers, for reference.
This is not a big deal to athletes who are better than me, but I’ll give some context and history on why it was such a big deal to me.
For the past three years, the marathon has been the source of significant angst and has not been going well. I have run seven marathons since my last personal best in the 2021 Philadelphia Marathon of 2:39:59 (6:05 mile pace). I did not run a personal best in any of them — in fact, I only ran worse. I only came within three minutes of my personal best in the best one, and the rest went horribly. I would have muscle spasms in the middle of the race, blow up, and have an excruciating second 13 miles. In the 2024 Boston Marathon, my calves and hamstrings seized up so badly that I had to walk large portions of it. In a local marathon in Maryland in 2023, I went the wrong way for over a mile and then had to flag down a stranger to call my friend to come pick me up.
