Time: 3:59:27
Net calories burned: 79,675
Number of runners: 28
I
n preparing to embark
on any endurance endeavor—be it a marathon or a two-hundred-mile run—it’s helpful to set realistic expectations. Don’t kid yourself. Accept the fact that you will encounter low points—often devastating lows when you feel you can’t go on. No matter how well you prepare, you will likely encounter moments when you doubt your ability to succeed, or perhaps even to take another step. It’s not a lot different from life. The most important element is to remember that such setbacks will inevitably occur. They always do. If you’re honest with yourself beforehand, you will have an easier time dealing with these low points.
When I hit a low point, I use a technique that I simply call “baby steps.” Let me tell you a little story that I think illustrates this concept. The first time I attempted to run 200 miles nonstop, I hit a point at mile 168 where I couldn’t take another step. I’d been running for some forty straight hours: I was completely spent and in tremendous pain. It hit me in the middle of the second sleepless night, and I sat down on the curbside, unutterably depressed that I’d fallen short of my goal.
I sat there, wallowing in my grief, knowing that covering another thirty-two miles was a complete impossibility. I could barely lower my bottom to the ground, let alone run another marathon plus a 10k. I wanted to scream in defeat, but I didn’t have enough energy.
Instead, I decided to block out the fact that there were still thirty-two miles left to cover. The thought was too daunting to consider. I broke that bigger, seemingly impossible, goal into smaller, more manageable, micro-goals: baby steps, if you will.
Just stand up and run to that bush ten yards up the road,
I told myself.
Don’t think about the mileage still ahead. Be in the moment; put one foot in front of the other to the best of your ability. Take baby steps.
Once I reached that bush, I celebrated the accomplishment.
Okay,
I said to myself.
You made it!
Then I set my sights on a traffic signal twenty yards up the road.
Just take baby steps,
I kept repeating.
After reaching the traffic signal, I set my sights on a bend fifty yards up the road. After that, I chose another marker, and then another, celebrating every milestone as I reached it. I stayed in the moment, just putting one foot in front of the other, not thinking about the mileage still left in front of me.
Some eight hours later, I crossed the finish line. How? By taking baby steps.
I used the same approach to get through the Endurance 50. Whenever I found myself looking too far ahead—considering all the running that still lay in front of me—my stomach felt queasy and my heart sank. The math was terribly intimidating. The world’s top professional marathoners typically run 110 to 130 miles per week for a few weeks at the height of their training. The Endurance 50 would require me to run 183 miles per week for seven consecutive weeks, plus a day.
Contemplating such numbers made my confidence plummet, so I trained myself not to look too far ahead. Instead, I celebrated each completed marathon as a baby step toward my final destination and looked no farther ahead than the next one—the next baby step. Would I be able to finish all fifty? I had no idea. I thought that I had trained and prepared adequately, but this was largely a step into the unknown. Every morning, I awoke with the same commitment: “
Today
I will do the best that I can.
Today
I will try my hardest.”
One way to use baby steps that comes naturally to many runners is dividing marathons and other challenging runs into equal halves and focusing on reaching the halfway point until that point is reached. Only then do they think about the finish line. If making it all the way to the finish line or the end point of a run is too daunting to think about, making it just to the halfway mark usually isn’t. There’s something magical about the midpoint. Once you pass it, you know you have covered more distance than remains in front of you. Every mile you run now makes the total distance behind you two miles greater than the total remaining distance in front of you. Your confidence gets a boost. Now you can focus on the finish line.
Small Goals
Setting short-term goals is an effective way to use baby steps to build confidence and morale as you train for a marathon or other event. Here are examples of short-term goals you might use for yourself in training for a marathon:
• Run six days next week.
• Run forty miles next week.
• Increase my running by five miles per week for the next four weeks.
• Complete a half-marathon.
• Run 150 miles next month.
• Complete my first twenty-miler.
In my freshman year of college, I registered for an ancient history class. On the first day, the professor handed out a syllabus that listed all the required reading and writing for the semester. I couldn’t believe how much he was asking us to do—and I expressed my exasperation.
“This workload is overwhelming,” I said. “It seems impossible to do all this in one semester.”
“Don’t look at it that way,” the professor replied. “Just try to get an A every day.” What he meant was that I should not think about the entire semester’s workload but only the small part of it that I needed to complete each day, and complete it to the best of my ability.
I took his advice to heart, and it worked. Instead of stressing myself out by thinking about the total workload, I focused entirely on getting an A on that small portion that had to get done today. Sure enough, when the semester ended, I had read everything the syllabus asked me to read and written everything the syllabus asked me to write.
The same strategy will work for you in running. Suppose you’re training for a marathon and you struggle to complete your first twelve-mile training run.
This is a calamity!
you think.
How am I supposed to run a whole marathon in ten weeks if I can barely run twelve miles today?
The 10 Percent Rule
Trying to take big steps in the process of building your training for a marathon or other event is never a good idea. Increasing your running mileage too quickly may result in an injury such as a pulled muscle or shin splints. To avoid these problems, obey the 10 percent rule: Increase your running mileage by no more than 10 percent per week. So if you ran twenty miles last week, run no more than twenty-two this week.
Don’t look at it that way. Instead, consider that twelve-mile run—difficult though it was—as just one more step on the path toward eventually being able to run twice as far. Remind yourself that it’s a mile or two farther than you ran last weekend, and if you want to look ahead, don’t look any farther ahead than next weekend’s thirteen-mile run.
The Endurance 50 presented the closest thing to a formal training schedule that I have ever used. Because I participate in so many races and events throughout the year, I don’t follow a structured training schedule. Normally, I have no clue how far I will run tomorrow, let alone seven weeks from tomorrow. But when I toed the starting line for the Lewis & Clark Marathon on Day 1 of the Endurance 50, I knew exactly how far I would run each day for the next seven weeks plus. In some ways, though, the Endurance 50 was more like a fifty-day race than a fifty-day training plan. A good training schedule is designed to ease you into your workout regimen and become gradually more challenging as your body adapts to the workouts you’ve done. In races, you’re thrown in over your head from the first step, and you just hang on from there.
I approached the Endurance 50 in much the same way I approach a race, which is to say I did my very best to exist completely in the moment. I tried not to think about our final marathon in New York City, or how many marathons I had left to run before I got there. Sometimes I slipped up and started counting, and whenever I did I felt anxious, so my slips became fewer and fewer as I went along. In fact, I became so focused on the moment that I completely failed to observe one of the most significant milestones in any endurance test.
I was hanging around at the Finish Festival after completing the Baton Rouge Marathon with a terrific group of runners—including a twelve-year-old who went the full distance—when I got a call from my wife.
“Congratulations!” she said.
“Thanks,” I said. “What for?”
“Twenty-five down, twenty-five to go. You’re halfway there!”
I stood in silence for a moment as I tried to mentally confirm Julie’s statement. Was yesterday’s marathon in Dallas number twenty-four? It was.
“I guess you’re right,” I said. The crew and I celebrated by climbing aboard the tour bus and driving five hundred miles to Huntsville, Alabama, for number twenty-six.
What’s My Motivation?
Day 26
October 12, 2006
Rocket City Marathon
Huntsville, Alabama
Elevation: 607'
Weather: 68 degrees; partly cloudy
Time: 4:15:27
Net calories burned: 82,862
Number of runners: 32
P
rying myself out of bed
at sunrise on Day 26 was not easy. The previous night’s drive from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Huntsville, Alabama, had been long and exhausting. My sleep had been brief and shallow. Yet the drive was no longer and no more arduous than many of the preceding drives our crew had endured together; nor had I gotten less sleep than usual.
So why was it so hard to throw back the bedcovers on the morning of Day 26? Probably because it was the morning of Day 26—the first day of the second half of my fifty-marathon challenge. I had been plowing forward for a long time already, and I still had a long way to go. My level of motivation had been very high in the early days, when my body felt fresh and the whole experience was novel. I knew that my motivation would surely rise again as I got closer to New York. But right now I seemed to be suffering from a mild case of the halfway blahs.
It is human nature to struggle for motivation at such moments. When you begin a major challenge, your body and mind feel charged and ready. Later, when you near the end of a big challenge, you are pulled along by the drive to achieve your goal, or to just get the darn thing over with (which can be as powerful a motivator as any). The middle part of a big challenge is the part where morale tends to flag, because the challenge is no longer new, and physical and mental fatigue have begun to set in, yet the goal remains far off—too far for its magnetic draw to have any effect.
The best way I know to overcome low motivation for running is to get back in touch with the source of my passion to run. Motivation and passion are somewhat different. Passion is an overwhelming love for the experience of a favorite activity. Motivation is a drive to engage in an activity based on some reward the activity offers beyond the simple enjoyment of the experience itself. When you have great passion for running, or anything else, you don’t need any extra motivation. But motivation without passion can only take you so far.
Nonrunners become runners by developing a passion for running. But runners often take their running in directions that distance them from the source of their passion. Trading the simple joy of running for a focus on competition is the classic scenario. I seldom feel burned out on running. When I do, it’s usually when I devote an extended period of time to training for a specific event. I start to view my runs not as adventures but simply as exercises necessary to achieve my race goal. While I am highly motivated to reap the benefits of my workouts and attain my race goal, I steadily lose my passion for running; once the passion ebbs beyond a certain point, the motivation soon follows, and I enter a state of burnout.
I’ve learned to pull myself out of such stale patches by shifting my focus away from the big event and back to the activity of running itself. Sometimes I jump into another event spontaneously just for the fun of it, even though doing so might throw my preparations for the bigger event off track, because by following my heart I’m bound to reawaken my passion for running, regardless of how I perform in any race. I just don’t like pinning the rewards of running on the results of a race. I like running to be its own reward.
That being said, there is no question that setting event goals can be a powerful motivator for runners, and it has had a positive effect on my morale in the past. Looking forward to a specific event goal has a way of making each individual training run more meaningful, and that extra layer of meaning keeps the motivation level high. However, goals only have this effect when they are appropriate, and when they are viewed with the proper perspective. For example, if you set a goal to run a marathon as a way to impress others, it probably won’t keep you motivated. Goals have to come from the heart. They must represent achievements that you desire for yourself. And if you place too much importance on any goal, then it won’t keep you motivated. If achieving a certain finishing time in your next marathon becomes the only thing about your running that matters to you, then you may not enjoy the process of training for that marathon. Sure, achieving a goal can be rewarding, but it’s the journey—not reaching the destination—that brings true fulfillment.
Another trick I use to ward off and overcome running burnout is
not
running. I think it’s a mistake to assume that
motivation
is always the problem when you feel unmotivated to run. Sometimes
running
is the problem. Who says you have to love running every day, just because you love running in general? While running is by far my favorite outdoor activity, there are many others that I also enjoy, including mountain biking and surfing. I have never lost my enthusiasm for outdoor activity altogether. So whenever I get a little bored with running, I do something else. In fact, I often do something besides running even when my passion for running is high, and I believe that doing so helps keep it high.