After getting pulled in by the emotions and fortitude of the Marathon runners on YouTube videos my boyfriend indulged in during his early days of marathon training, I decided that I would join him on his journey of becoming a marathon runner. Keep in mind just days before this I had sworn up and down that I would never return to running! With what felt like a crazy new lease on life after sitting on my butt for years, I began training for the local marathon in my community in February. I had recently overcame Covid and was still struggling with respiratory repercussions. I thought that the biggest issues would be finding time to put in the long miles and trying to breathe while I trained. The days, weeks, and months to come taught me some unexpected lessons that I was not expecting.
Early on after trying to push through early runs without stopping, I realized that my body was not in the same place that it had been 12 years before when I did a sprint triathlon or 18 years before when I completed my first and only half marathon. I could run but my heartrate was through the roof and my lungs were struggling. After researching options, I fell upon the MAF (Maffatone) low heartrate method of training and opted to follow this course of action for training that meant that instead of teaching my body to tolerate running through use and abuse, I’d incorporate both running and walking based on my heartrate and allow my body to grow to tolerate greater levels of activity while maintaining these lower beats per minute.
At first I loved MAF training… I wasn’t huffing and puffing and overall wasn’t nearly as fatigued. I could walk and run. It felt so much better than the struggle bus I’d been riding on in those first few short workouts. Though the workouts took longer, it didn’t feel like I was abusing my body or pushing it in a way that would push me into overtraining or injury or adrenal fatigue. What I soon realized is that though MAF training for someone as out of shape with respiratory struggles is great for the heart and lungs, it plays one heck of a mind game on a former, prideful athlete that’s used to always running and bringing her A game.
Running is one of those unique sports where massive amounts of people come together to “race” but the majority of the competitors know that they don’t stand a chance of winning. The true race is against our former runs, against the elements, and ultimately ourselves. And when it comes to a marathon, the 26.2 miles you run on race day is only a very small part of what’s going on. There are months and months filled with miles and miles and, for me more than most, hours and hours of miles spent alone. I learned very quickly to love those long miles spent alone but what I wasn’t expecting was the mind games that would be played. Being alone in my head for these long minutes and hours became very sobering especially for someone used to a life that’s not filled with silence or much time for quiet reflection. The girl who felt like she had most things figured out and together quickly had new demons she didn’t realize needed slaying.
You see, every other time in my life that I trained for races or was playing in a sport, running was easy. Walking wasn’t an option. Walking meant weakness to me. If I was tired, I’d push through even to my own detriment. At this point in my life, running is the thing that’s not fully the option. I can integrate running into my workouts but I realized in those first weeks that walking would have to be my mainstay. After a lifetime of telling myself that walking wasn’t an option and walking meant (for myself) weakness, I was a walker who scattered in some runs periodically. The record in my head could sometimes be silenced but other times it was on repeat and fighting the constant urge to feel like a failure for walking was a difficult one. I realized pretty quickly that marathon training was going to be just as mental as it was physical.
Early mornings before work became my normal training times. I’d put in 3-5 miles early in the morning before my 8am work start. My miles went from 20 minutes to 18 to 16 to a sometimes fast 14 or 15. I was very proud in my improving times and I began to incorporate running when I did down hills and across intersections. On my shorter “runs” I could do 14-15 minute miles but on my Sunday longer “runs” (see, it’s ingrained in me to call them runs) the 15 minute mile seemed mostly elusive. The fear started creeping in: would I be the last to cross the finish line? Would they close down the course before I finished or, worse yet, would the water stations be out of water or Gatorade before I got to them? It seems somewhat irrational in retrospect but I’ve seen videos where people faced similar circumstances during their marathons so it was not a completely out of the realm of possibility thought.
My boyfriend and I trained separately though sometimes on our longer runs would start around the same time. Since we live at different ends of the path, we’d pass a couple of times along the way during these longer training sessions. His times were always faster than mine, and he’s able to run in ways that I can’t seem to make my body do. My competitive side finds this very difficult as I feel like I’m not even in the running (no pun intended) for an honorable mention. Damn, who knew training to compete in a 26.2 mile race would be more of a mental struggle against myself than any physical struggle. Obviously I didn’t, but the physical struggles have come at me in full force as well.
Muscle, fascia, and tendon issues were a constant struggle as was getting and making adequate amounts of time to stretch and roll and use my compression boots and gun massager and fascia release ball and vibrating roller and and and. Not to mention my weekly massage appointments at a local massage school. Good golly, training is not for the weak lol and I felt weaker by the week at times.
I realized that the faster my training times went and the more I was able to add running into my workouts, my self-doubt and self-depreciating talk didn’t improve much. As far as how far I’d come since day one, I was absolutely killing it but when my perfectionistic, former-athlete mind would become overpowering or compare myself to my former self or compare myself to the other people who would pass me on Duck Creek or compare myself to my hard-training boyfriend, I would feel like failure-personified.
I’ll talk about the actual day of the September 25th marathon another time as that glorious day deserves a post of its own. What I do want to talk about is that this training brought out the best and the worst of things in my mental health and pointed me to seek out help in the mindset realm. I’m currently a couple of months post-race and am in what is often referred to as the off-season. It’s cold outside and dark more hours than I feel humans are made to endure, but it’s peak-season for mindset work! I have a long, long way to go. This was made obvious tonight when I cried realizing I didn’t walk or run this last week, my treadmill is still broken, and my boyfriend thinks his pace (which is far faster than mine) is slow off-season work! Yes, I’m very much human and being a female with strong emotions in the feeling-like-a-failure realm doesn’t help matters. What I’m ever-so-grateful for through all of this (other than my hard-earned finishing medal that declares that my 45 year old self crossed the finish line of a marathon) is that through all of this, I was pulled back into the realm of focusing on my mindset.
Mindset work can be done in a number of ways including counseling and/or psychotherapy, yoga, prayer, meditation, exercising (ironic, right), affirmations, visualizations, and gratitude. I’m currently exploring the wildly wonderful and vast world of the Law of Attraction. There’s a lot to learn but in the same way that marathon training starts small at 1 mile and builds up to 22+ miles, learning new concepts and exploring new realms of science and self-reflection takes time and self-actualization is a long-term goal, not one realized in the first days of training.
I know self-doubt and frustrations in my limitations will probably always be a humbling whisper in my head in the years of training to come, but I’m not naïve enough to not realize that despite what I perceive as limitations, I am able to move at 4 mph pace for 6.5+ hours at a time without stopping and am among less than 1% of people in the world who can say that they’re Marathoners! I hope that through my inner work, I can at least quiet those whispers a little bit and when I feel less-than I can feel grateful for every experience that I have the blessing and possibility to live!