A two-hour run!
Are you Serious?
Why would you run for two hours?
Are you crazy?
Yes, the answer is yes. Yes, I am serious. Yes, I am crazy.
I decided to run a long run on Sunday. My long runs are usually determined by the distance and not so much by the time. There are two sorts of targets you can choose for yourself. You can decide you want to run a particular distance or that you want to run for a particular time. I am typically a fan of distance goals. Because it sounds so good to say I ran 10km and to describe it as the length of the third mainland bridge. It is also about the way I think when I am running. I tend to think about the distance I have to cover a lot as I run. When I start a 19km run, for instance, I spend the first 10km thinking about just running 10km because I know I can run 10km. At this point in my running journey, 10km is a leisure run. I can do it in my sleep. When I run 10 km and I have 9km left, I start thinking about how achievable it is for me to run 9km. I tell myself stuff like
Yup, I can run 9 more kilometres
And with each kilometre covered, I think about how I can run what I have left. I seldom think of long runs as one whole. I am seldom thinking about running 19km as running 19km. I am thinking about it as running a couple of 1km and I can run 1km easily. The same idea goes for time runs but with less pressure. With times runs, I am thinking in 30 minutes chunk. I can run 30minutes, that’s easy peasy. As the run progresses and I get more tired, the chunks reduce. 10 minutes? That’s child play, I can do child’s play. And before you know it. I have run for 2 hours. But I am hardly thinking, as I take each stride, about the long run. I am just thinking about the next stride and how good it looks. Enter Metaphor 1.
Looking down instead of straight ahead
This describes where I look when I am running, which is at the floor in front of me instead of straight ahead. I only look straight ahead when I am about to finish because then I can see the finish line. 500 meters into a long run, there’s no finish line in sight. all you can see is how long you have to go and that can be really daunting. It can be so daunting that you feel overwhelmed and quit. Looking at the floor, I concentrate on how good each stride looks. I think about my form instead of about how much running I have left to cover. This is one of those ideas that I adopt in real life because a lot of things in life are long runs and not sprint. You are probably going to be doing certain things for a really long time before you can get any reward out of it. You have to learn to enjoy the moment of doing the thing instead of thinking of how far away you have to go before things payoff. You have to look at the floor in front of you and ensure that each stride looks great rather than look straight ahead and not seeing any finish line in sight. When the finish line is close, you can enjoy every minute of that final km because you know you’ve already done all the work. Here’s a good time for metaphor 2.
I have come a pretty damn long way
This is what I think at the beginning of a long run and more frequently at the end of each new groundbreaking run (and I have had a lot of those recently.) On the one hand, it’s because I have literally just come a long way. On the other hand, it’s because for me to finish the run I just finished, I have had to finish 100s of other runs. I have taken 198 runs on NRC and many other runs that have gone unrecorded. I think that when I tell my non-running friends (and even my running friends too) about the new milestones I cross, they don’t have the context of how much work I have put into it to get to where I am. So when I started this run on Sunday with the knowledge that I was definitely going to finish it, my mind drifted to my first 1km run 10 years ago and my many 4km runs around unilag and some of my best and worst moments running. All those runs bringing me to be exactly where I am today: starting a two-hour run. “I have come a pretty damn way”, I thought to myself as I started the first minute of a 120-minute run. I loved every bit of that run and it was because I could have that thought in the first minute.
When you don’t expect, you exceed your expectations.
I expected absolutely nothing from this run. In fact, I expected little. I expected it to be a slow-paced run where I broke almost no records except the longest time. What happened was I ran my fastest half-marathon by cutting the time by 6 whole freaking minutes. Mind you, the last personal best shocked me because I had no idea that I could run that well for that long. This run, this run pushed me over all my expectations without taking any effort whatsoever. I ran a pace of 5:02 per km and I never run that good on long runs. The pace of my top two 10km are 4:48 and 5:01 respectively, Running a 5:02 for 23km really shook me because I did not see it coming. It was an even bigger shock because I didn’t track the run. I didn’t know how fast I was running or how far I had run till I finished (because my target was a time.) Stopping the run and seeing those numbers made me so incredibly shocked at myself and also incredibly proud.
And the best part of breaking all those records and exceeding my expectations so remarkably was that I wasn’t trying. I was actually just having fun and enjoying doing the run. Seeing those results was so pleasing at the end. I don’t think I should have to break down the metaphor in that.
You can add me on Nike Run Club (NRC): Abomeke Isu
Back to that questions about being crazy.
Are you crazy?
I think Serena Williams answered it best…

