The Mental Fortitude of Marathon Training
Reflecting on the worst run I've ever ran... and why this experience will matter on race day.
In high school, nearly every time I crossed the finish line during a cross country race, I either threw up or almost threw up. This, I was told, was a good thing. If I’m throwing up at the finish line, then I left all of my effort, all of my training, all of my everything on the course. I crossed the finish line with no regrets.
The underlying narrative is that of pushing through the pain. There came a point in the race where I wanted to give up, but I needed to keep going. I had to win the battle of willpower in my mind to keep running.
Another moment that comes to mind is my 8th grade cross country championship race. All season I had been dealing with horrible shin splints in my right leg. I had to wear a compression sleeve and I was popping lots of ibuprofen to deal with the pain. Despite all my physical pain, I still ran in the race. A little over halfway through, though, something happened. The pain from the shin splints worsened. Unable to hold my position in the race, I limp-ran along, wanting to get myself across the finish line. Some guy in a golf cart asked me if I wanted to stop and I told him no. I could do it. And I did.
Within a few days, I learned I had a stress fracture in my right shin bone. I ran the race with a crack in my leg.
The moral of this story is not “push through the pain.” The moral of this story is “know when to quit.”
I probably should have quit running that day, and I didn’t.
A couple of weeks ago, I ran 23 miles and I wanted to do nothing else but quit. It was the worst run I’ve ever had, and that’s including the race I ran with an unbeknownst-to-me stress fracture.
To start with, I had to do the run a day earlier than anticipated because of an incoming hurricane. Then, I woke up two hours before my alarm after having only slept four hours. Then, I stepped out at 5:00 AM to the wettest, hottest day in a month — and it was pitch black. And then it started raining. Oh yeah, and the run was 23 miles.
All of those things by themselves are bad enough, but then put them all together and oh my god, it’s so sucky.
I thought about trying to be more eloquent in my description of the situation, but “sucky” perfectly encapsulates just how bad it was.
When I started running, I did my best to think positive thoughts. As we all know, we can’t power-of-positive-thinking our way out of a bad time, but we can certainly try to feel a little bit better. For a while, this worked. At about the two hour mark, however, things went downhill.
After running in the hot, sweaty dark for two hours, I was over it. Despite applying a ton of Body Glide, I had chafing spots all over my body, I smelled terrible, and every single podcast I tried to listen to was annoying. In the hazy morning light, I looped back to our porch — where I keep a cooler with all of my stuff — and restocked. I looked down at my watch. I had covered about 7 miles and I was still on track to complete the run by my estimated finish time.
And things got worse. Between miles 7 and 20, I wanted to quit so much. Never before had I felt such an overwhelming sense of wanting to give up, and I struggled to keep going. It was like there was a brick wall in my mind and I kept running straight into it, hoping that it would eventually break. I didn’t have an immediate breakthrough, so I knew I just needed to keep going. Whatever I could do to keep moving, I did.
I walked more than I usually do. I tried listening to music for a mile and then running a mile in silence. I thought about what I would write about here. I envisioned what it would be like if I could finally sit down and I constantly reminded myself that if I were to quit I would be so pissed for the rest of the day.
This wasn’t me finishing a race with a crack in my leg or pushing myself so hard I threw up at the end. This was me testing the limits of what I thought was possible for me to do.
Yeah moving the run up a day caused me to miss an entire day of carb loading and my nutrition plan went out the window as soon as I realized it would take me nearly an hour longer than projected, but I kept putting one foot in front of the other.
I think if I did stop moving, go home, shower, and go back to bed, everything would have been fine. Quitting in that moment wouldn’t mean I would never finish the marathon. But I knew if the marathon itself was that bad, I wanted to be able to get through it. I wanted to know I could fight myself and win.
Once I passed the 20-mile mark, the storm clouds in mind faded away and I felt a sense of relief and clarity. I wasn’t done, but I was nearly there. While I was more physically tired than I had been the entire run, because of the mental battle I had for most of the middle, I cruised the last three miles until I was finished.
Even though it was the worst training run I’ve done yet, I finished it. I went slower than I wanted to, but I was able to stop my watch when it got to 23 miles and be done. The hard part of the run wasn’t the physicality of it. The hard part was telling myself that I could get through it even though I didn’t want to.
The battles continued; I had to deal with all of the horrible chafing spots all over my body, how hungry I was, and how tired I was. But I did deal with those things, and I can continue to do so.
As I look toward the 26.2 miles I’ll run on November 16, 2024, I know I can do it, because I’ve already had the worst run I’ve ever ran.
I would argue this is the BEST training run you've ever had. It prepared and changed you more than any other workout you've done. Enjoyable? Hardly. But the bang for your training buck? Mountains. You did not squander this unfun workout - you capitalized on it. And that investment is going to stay with you, not just on November 16, but forever. You wouldn't have been mad at yourself for the rest of the day for quitting. You would have remembered that you quit for a very very long time - maybe forever. You are made of the stuff!
Sydney, thank you! Your writing is so brutally honest. I've had days like yours when there were multiple "valid" reasons not to run. My 1/2 marathon training workouts are much shorter than your marathon workouts, but on Sundays, at our Blue Sky training, I see you week after week run whatever miles Dana gives you. As my miles increase, I will remember that you still went out there a day early, without your normal fueling, in the dark and RAIN and ran more than 20 miles! And it was miserable. And you did it.