It's okay to hate the marathon
A love letter to voluntary suffering
It was 20 degrees in London on Marathon Sunday. It felt like 25. London heats up fast and stays hot. The tarmac, the concrete, the glass, the swell of people. The lack of wind. Heat sinks into the fabric of the city and sits there, stewing.
For 90 mins before the start we cooked in a field. My start time of 9:40am meant I had to be in my designated starting area from around 8:15am. There was nothing to do but queue for the toilets as the sun warmed up. Frogs in our thousands, slowly boiling.
I’d done some running in the heat in California in February, while visiting family. 18-22 degrees most days, for runs 60-70 mins long, and one spectacular 2-hour long run along the coast at Ventura. Crucially, those runs all involved a breeze.
But I knew this would be a different beast. By 9am the UV was burning through the sunscreen on my shoulders. And there wasn’t a lick of wind. The game was changing in real time. This race was going to be about heat management, not hitting paces.
The race plan – 16km at conservative pace, 16km at race pace, and 10km at whatever I had left – was out of the window. I locked into my conservative pace and put all my focus into staying there.
In the hours and days after the marathon people wanted to know if I had fun. If I enjoyed myself. I’m sure I enjoyed the marathon a great deal more than those who couldn’t finish, whether that was due to injury, illness, or exhaustion.
But did I enjoy it?
Not exactly.
There’s a feeling you get when you’ve been running for an hour that’s unlike anything else. When the cadence of your foot strike syncs with your breathing. When your heart beats in rhythm with your stride. When everything is just flowing.
All your systems – cardiovascular, neurological, nervous, endocrine, musculoskeletal – working in harmony to propel you forward. It’s what people call flow state, I suppose.
Arriving here isn’t instant. It requires many hours of practice to achieve. It relies on a base level of aerobic fitness, for one. You need to be able to hold a steady pace with a steady heart rate. It requires strong legs, blissfully injury free.
And it doesn’t last forever. You might get five mins. Maybe as many as 30 on a good day. But I almost always find it, just beyond the 60 minute mark. A run I might not have been enjoying suddenly eases up. I feel light, strong, capable. All pistons firing.
Is running an hour for 5 minutes of indescribable feeling worth it? I think so.
But what about when it’s never fun? Is that worth it?
This is so fucking hard.
The voice started around kilometre five. What it meant was this is so much harder than it should be. I’d read about being pulled along by the runners around you, being carried by the energy of the crowd. That never happened. It started hard and stayed that way.
After the first couple of kms and a quick bathroom break to deal with a piss I didn’t know I needed (rookie mistake, I’d gone one last time in a hurry pre-race, and didn’t get it all out) I’d already decided my upper goal time of 3:20 wasn’t going to happen.
I felt sapped. Zapped. Spent. I had tapered and carb-loaded. I had done a 20-week block with multiple long runs at 30k. I had done my speed work, my easy miles. Rehabbed my injuries. My cross training and weightlifting. None of it mattered.
The line kept repeating in my head.
This is so fucking hard.
This is so fucking hard.
This is so fucking hard.
It was demoralising. The voice can be like that sometimes. Prone to negativity. So around 10k in I decided to change it. From that point on my mantra became:
You don’t need to go any faster than this.
I knew I was still on target for a sub-3:30. My lower end goal time. Not where I thought my fitness was, but not bad for my first effort at the distance (assumptions and guesswork don’t run a marathon for you).
You don’t need to go any faster than this.
At 16km my plan was to wind-up the pace by 10 seconds a kilometre, but it was quickly clear I was unable to hold it. Had I tried, I knew that I would have burned out, become a body being dragged from the road at the 35km mark, or likely before.
You don’t need to go any faster than this.
I reverted to my conservative pace and was able to hold on, mile after unspectacular mile. I didn’t stop, didn’t hit the wall. I grit my teeth and ground it out. In the end the 90-second piss stop was almost the exact time over my target. I finished in 3:31:20.
I run alone, mostly. I like the solitude, the space. I like the opportunity empty my mind. I don’t enter many races. I don’t Park Run. I’m not in a regular run club, run crew or run collective. Running, most of the time, is for me.
Part of my race-aversion is that I’m not a great one for crowds. It’s why I’ve never felt the urge to go to Glastonbury. Just the idea of a festival is overwhelming. Where do you go to think, to breathe? Am I expected to interact with people the whole time?
London Marathon is like being at Glastonbury but you’re all running together, shoulder-to-shoulder, through London. A moving festival, cheered on by the multiple other Glastonburies lining the streets: 750,000 people screaming, shouting, waving.
It was incredibly overwhelming to the crowd-shy runner. It took all my efforts to not dwell on the sheer number of eyes falling on me. If I let the voice start repeating those words – everyone is looking at you – it could choke the air from my lungs.
Despite wanting to engage, to read the signs, to give high fives, after a while I had to stop. I missed my wife at mile 12 because it was too difficult to focus. Instead, I fixed my eyes to the tarmac several metres ahead and kept them there.
There is a blue line marked on the road through the marathon course. This is the tangent line. The racing line. It’s there to show the elites the shortest possible distance around the course. To survive, I locked in on it. Literally ran the tangents.
I hate getting tattooed. It’s like have a lit cigarette slowly dragged across your skin for several hours and paying for the privilege. But I love having tattoos. I have eight. Each a memorial of a time, place, or person. And each time I went back, knowing I’d hate it.
It’s a trope among people with tattoos, that we never remember the pain. As soon as one has healed the next one has been booked. But I don’t think it’s true. I remember how much it hurts. I want to do it anyway. It’s the cost of the experience.
Runners are much the same. No matter how much you hated a run. No matter how beaten, exhausted, or broken you were by it, most of us will do it again. Be it a workout or a race. It’s voluntary suffering. This is the pain you asked for.
I do difficult things because something has to counter the voice. I have to know that I can do hard things, so that when the voice says I can’t, I know it’s lying. Voluntary suffering boosts confidence, builds resilience. Bolsters the mind against the negative.
Voluntary suffering teaches me that I don’t have to listen.
The pleasure of completing arduous tasks is not in the doing, it’s in the having done. It’s knowing you had that in you. That you could do it again, or worse, if needs must.
Fun might be free, but difficult experiences are earned. That’s what makes them so valuable. To anyone plagued by doubt, by fear, by internal disinformation, by the feeling that they are not enough, difficulty is currency.
“There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.”
– John le Carre, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
I don’t remember a great deal of the marathon. In the immediate aftermath the effort and exhaustion blurred it all together into a shapeless mass of colour and noise.
What has come back has taken weeks to realise itself, to shake loose from my memory the moments that lodged there.
The difficulty and pain haven’t lingered. I haven’t dwelled on the gel I dropped. Or the pee break. I dwell on the moments of unexpected beauty, the moments of levity, of resilience, of victory (not to be confused with winning: victory is completing the task).
How strong I felt on the uphill sections, which reminded me the fitness was there. The nightclub ambience of the tunnel section at Westferry Circus. The occasional spigots showering runners with cold water. All the signs that said “Go Dan!” (thanks!)
All the signs that advised going to therapy instead (hint: you can do both!)
The runner who told me to go back for the dropped gel (I didn’t listen). Rock Choir, which made me think of my mum. Pelting a spectator next to a dumpster with a half full bottle of Buxton (sorry!). Speaking to my dad (the dead one) when it got hard.
The ferocity with which my American wife shouted “Finish strong!” as I turned turned the corner at Westminster. (Reader, I finished strong.)
Sobbing for the entire walk to the family meet and greet area at the end. The people who enquired whether I was okay (I was very overwhelmed). Being offered a free protein yoghurt and nearly throwing up at the thought.
The sheer elation and outpourings of emotion on the faces of every runner in the finish area. Every member of the public who said congrats on my way to Kings Cross.
I don’t know where the expectation to enjoy running a marathon comes from: The explosion in popularity of the sport. The run clubs, pop ups and events. The running influencers on social media. The good vibes only crowd (ugh). But it’s there. I felt it.
London was so unbelievably difficult. I knew the final ten kilometres were going to be hard. But it was hard from the go. For three and a half hours. And I endured that. Not only endured, but ran well. An evenly paced race. In brutal conditions.
A pursuit doesn’t have to be enjoyable for it to be worthwhile. Challenging yourself, pushing out of your comfort zone, be that a couch-to-5k program or a marathon on the world’s largest stage, is a worthwhile pursuit.
Life is really fucking hard. Work, parenting, getting out of bed in the morning. If they aren’t always fun, that’s ok. (If they aren’t ever fun, talk to a therapist). The hard things we choose to do help us through the hard things we don’t.
I don’t love crowds. I don’t love having that many eyes on me. And I didn’t enjoy it, not exactly. But I love running. I ran London to see if I could. I love that I have.
It’s okay to hate the marathon. It’s okay to not have had much fun.
And it’s okay if you want to do it all over again.
See you at the next one.
Really enjoyed this 🙏🏼 thanks for sharing!
Just love this! Doing hard things is always worth it!