What I Wish I Knew Before Running Marathons

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 training plan. However, I want to talk about the more emotional tribulations that I have experienced with the marathon, that has, for me, been the much more difficult side of it.

There is a lot of joy

I will say the best feeling I had this past year was the day I ran a four-minute personal best in the marathon. This particular personal best meant a lot to me since I seemed stuck and stagnant. For the previous three years, I had not run a personal record. In fact, I had seemed to either regress or plateau since I had blown up in every marathon since. It was validation that I was not washed up, that my running career was not over, that this was the beginning, not the end of my goal to continually get faster.

After the race, I had a ton of adrenaline all day long, and it was a confidence boost that I could break down this wall and tackle this barrier, but that I was also a new person in other areas of my life, like marriage, law school, and my work in education. Of course, I woke up the next day and this wasn’t true, but running has always been one big sideshow in the grand scheme of my life.

After that marathon, I started to find a lot of thrill in the training. I am a slow starter, fast finisher. This is true in a lot of areas of my life, including as a teacher and law student, but it is especially true in my marathon training (and I wish it could be more true in my marathon racing). It is the thrill of being able to do a run I didn’t previously think I could do, including the time I ran 28 miles. But there are many runs where I feel significantly better at the finish than the start, when the nine or ten minute mile at the beginning that felt awful would never be indicative of how I would feel later in the run.

And then there is the social aspect. Running in high school and college brought me some of my closest friends to this day. Marathon training also brings a unique type of bond. Although I never saw some of them again, there were people I ran with during almost the entire duration of the marathon that I developed a shared bond with due to shared suffering. We talked for a long time to make the time go by faster, and then followed each other on Strava, a running tracking app. We had a shared understanding and gratitude: without each other, we would not have been able to run as fast and keep our composure together. When running 26.2 miles at the max effort, it is so much harder to do alone than in a group or with another person.

Because I have always relied on teammates and friends to motivate me in running and pull me along on runs, I used to hate running alone. In fact, I got into pretty bad shape any time I had to run alone in the summer or winter break. It’s not that I wouldn’t run during time off during winter break or the summer — but I usually did not wear a GPS watch at that time, and did not realize that I was running slower as a result. I would assume I was running seven minute mile pace when I was actually running ten minute mile pace. My motivation wavered and I hated just being in my own thoughts at that point in my life — time moved very slow during those solo summer runs.

Until a few years ago, I still struggled mightily with running alone. In a group, I loved to just keep up with the pace of the people around me and could match it very easily as we were in conversation. I could push the pace, and others would push the pace while I tried to keep up. Not every run was a competition, but the time just went by a lot faster. In high school, when I was a freshman, this often meant that I was hanging on for dear life as I hung onto the juniors and seniors who were running much faster.

Now, most of my runs are alone. My schedule during the week means I can’t make it to most group runs. During the weekend, I try to make group runs, but during weekdays, I have to train at strange times, like early morning or late at night. There was a time my runs absolutely cratered when I ran alone: I would cut the run short if it wasn’t going well, and I didn’t have the capacity on many days to delay gratification until mile 3 or 4 when I would finally start feeling good. But I didn’t realize that it just took me a long time to settle into my runs. I didn’t realize it could also be time to be able to listen to podcasts and catch up on my thoughts. Now, I enjoy running alone almost as much as running with others, and as a marathon runner. I even listen to law school lectures and videos studying for the bar on easier runs to keep moving forward on that part of life. On faster portions of the run, I listen to music to keep my rhythm and tempo.

But part of that is because I know I’m not alone in my marathon journey. Although I do a lot of my runs alone, I have friends who have concurrent running goals, who I train with on weekends, who are trying to chase their own individual goals in the 5k, mile, 10k, or half marathon. While we all have our individual goals, it definitely feels like we’re in it together, and it’s a lot of fun to keep pushing each other and celebrating each other, but remind ourselves not to take it so seriously when it’s not going well. That is what the best teammates have been to me and what I hope I have been to them. I am reminded that running is the most fun when it’s number five to seven on my list of life priorities, something I do as a distraction and stress reliever, rather than the number one or two priority like earlier in my life.

There is a lot of disappointment

Training for the marathon is different than training for most running events. I’ll get the obvious part out of the way — it takes a lot more time and a lot more effort to be good at the marathon than it does to be good at the 5k, 10k, or even half marathon. People are often surprised at how someone running 40–45 miles a week can do great at a half marathon but completely fall apart when they try to run a marathon (myself included when I was running 40–45 miles a week).

A lot of my disappointment in the marathon stemmed from my first marathon. In my first marathon, I was a beginner and had no clue what I was doing. I just wanted to be cautious not to go out too fast. But I was in great shape from my college training for cross country, where I was running 70 miles a week to in the incredibly hot and humid Atlanta summers.

As such, I had no expectations. I ended up running very well and placing third. I was even winning the race and chatting with another guy until mile 18, when I started to fall apart and just crawl my way to the finish line — not literally, but I did slow down a minute a mile from where I was running from miles 1–18. Despite falling apart a bit in those last 6.2 miles, and even going the wrong way once, I ran 2:40:07.

That first marathon set high expectations for every marathon after, expectations I would not meet for all but two. There would be the marathons I wouldn’t finish. I would normally love to say that “no matter how bad it’s going, I never drop out of a race.” However, this is not always true, as much as I try to make it true. I dropped out of one 10,000 meter race in college when I went out too fast and botched the race plan. During the pandemic, I dropped out of a virtual Boston marathon when I could not run without limping at mile 20. I dropped out of a marathon when I went the wrong way for a long period of time.

The marathon, as a 26.2 mile race where you’re running as fast as you can for the distance, has a very small margin of error. In most other races, missing one water stop, missing one fueling station, or going the wrong way once won’t necessarily hurt you. But in the marathon, one mistake or a couple of small ones here or there can have huge implications. A couple degrees hotter than ideal temperatures can have big implications.

One thing I never knew how to prepare for was the complicated race logistics of bigger productions: during the Boston Marathon, I woke up at 4 a.m., took a shuttle to the start line at 6 a.m., and just sat around until 10 a.m., when the race went off. I did not eat breakfast before the race, which was a huge tactical mistake, and that experience led me to favor smaller production races where there may not be as much competition, but where I can show up to the race and start 30 minutes later. The act of sitting and waiting around for that long of a time just wasn’t something I looked forward to doing.

I wish I knew that no matter how much I prepared for these contingencies, they still happen, and my first thought is always how it was a personal or moral failure on my part that led to that collapse or failure. Of course, I can process that bad race later and realize things just happen — I think those disappointments have a tendency to hurt more because a ton of work goes into training for each one, in terms of time spent training, miles run, and energy expenditure. This is not the same expenditure someone has when training for the mile, 5k, 10k, or half marathon.

It’s a long journey

Last weekend, I ran a marathon where my goal was to break 2:30. I ran very poorly — I didn’t calibrate the race for how hot it would be. I was still on pace to run a personal record halfway through, but during the last six miles, I fell apart during the race. I knew I was feeling worse than I should have halfway through the race, but I thought I could still hang on and slow down a little bit to run a decent race, but I didn’t. I ended up running 2:56:20 in the marathon despite going out through the half marathon in 76:33.

Right before the race, I told myself that no matter the outcome, I was happy I put in the work and am a much more mature runner than I was when I started running marathons. Plus, it was just one race and the training prepared me well for the plethora of others to come. I used to not think about training that much and just rely on the adrenaline I got on race day.

But sheer tactics and execution on race day clearly cannot replace the years of built volume and training. I stopped just relying on just adrenaline during the race day. I realize it is time to trust in the training, trust in all the years and even decades of work, and realize that long-term this is just one step in my marathon journey, and bad races are sometimes just a part of that.

I’ve had a lot of failures, but it took a while to see a bad race as not catastrophic. This race where I ran poorly was actually a small success because it was a lesson that I needed to get better at running in the heat. Because it’s a long journey, it started to become incredibly important to start slow and acclimate, something I will work on this summer.

I think Eliud Kipchoge made transitioning to the marathon easy, since he was instantly world class in his very first marathon, like someone who is really good at the 5k or 10k can just move up in distance to the marathon with ease. But there are plenty of people who struggled with the transition. For example, Joshua Cheptegei, the world record holder in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters, ran a 2:09 in his first marathon. 2:09 is not a bad time by any stretch, but with the marathon world record being 2:00:35, the best distance runner in the world on the track would presumably be expected to be better at the marathon.

This has always made perfect sense to me. The last 6.2 miles of the marathon tends to be “the wall,” and from a scientific perspective, it’s understandable: as the body depletes glycogen, it starts to utilize other fuel sources like fats and proteins that are not as efficient.

But people who don’t run marathons don’t know how that “wall” actually feels. It takes everything not to just start walking, and you slow down quite significantly from your previous pace. The entire time, you feel like you’re going to die with every step, and if it’s hot and you’re falling apart, it feels like a death march. I actually find it an existential moment every time, even when it’s going terribly: am I going to give up and fold or keep going even though it seems impossible? And then I try to break up the excruciating part of the marathon by every couple of steps, every minute. I have run more than 10 marathons, and the death march of the last 6.2 miles when the race is not going well is especially tough for me not only because of the physical pain, but relentless self-criticism and self-doubt.

I wish I knew that sometimes, it just doesn’t go well. Every marathoner has races where they crater. Eliud Kipchoge, for example, the first man to break two hours in the marathon, did not perform well in the 2023 Boston Marathon, 2024 Tokyo Marathon, and in the 2024 Olympic Marathon, he had to drop out. Still, he is considered the best marathoner of all time based on his two Olympic titles and his various world records over the event. For the obvious reasons of it being such a long race, it takes a lot more recovery, and takes a lot more work to prepare for.

Now, I am much more mature than I used to be about not letting a bad race define me, moving on with my day, and doing other things to get over it. But this time, this marathon was all I could think about for a couple of hours because my expectations were so high — I wanted to run 2:30, or at least run a personal best.

This time, I jumped right back on the train and just had fun running again with my friends— I had a quiet confidence that even if this race didn’t go well, that if a certain workout did not go well, everything would still be alright.

My marathon journey has been a roller coaster, not only in the actual times I have run, but the emotional journey of a marathoner. I find the latter part tougher than actually running the race.

As Steve Magness, author and renowned running coach, says, “true confidence is quiet; insecurity is loud.”

No matter the time and result, each marathon is another step in the journey of my relationship with running, and in that sense, each is a success. There is a feedback signal I get from each one, whether it is to be more responsive to the conditions on the ground, whether it is that I have too much going on in my life to be in my best marathon shape, whether it is that it’s just one bad day and I just need to keep going.

Running used to be something in my life that was only fun when it was going well, that was miserable when it wasn’t. I’m not saying that element isn’t still there as part of human nature, but the lows aren’t as low as they used to be. I still have some insecurity in my running, but I am working on building that long-term quiet confidence that every run, every race is just one step in a lifelong process.

For now, I resolved never to run another marathon between the months of March to August, at least not for a personal best, where the chances of heat and humidity in the part of the country I live in can lead to personal record chances going away entirely. I resolve to focus on other big running goals, including running a personal best in the mile, 5k, 10k, and half marathon.

This year, I am graduating law school, leaving the teaching profession, and becoming a lawyer. With so much in life changing, one consolation is that I can always rely on running marathons to be an avenue for chasing self-improvement and having fun.