Marathoning — The slow ones; they’re hard too.

Today I feel a little like someone has beaten the backs of my legs with a baseball bat. Not that I’ve ever actually been beaten by a baseball bat — and I hope not to offend anyone out there that has — but my calves feel very much like I would imagine they would if someone had pounded on them for about three hours with a Louisville Slugger.

Coach Joe after the 2009 Portland Marathon

I think there is a good lesson to be learned here that I can share with you. The lesson goes something like this: even the slow ones are hard.

I have often said — and written here in this forum — that one of the keys to keep from wrecking yourself in a marathon is to back off the pace, or rather to avoid going out too hard for your capabilities. This is true. Selecting a pace that is within our capabilities is one of the keys to making sure that we don’t implode in the last 10KM of a marathon. We should all know that if we take the pace out too hard, those last few miles are going to feel really, really miserable.

But I haven’t often visited the topic of what happens when we attempt a marathon at less than our pace capabilities. It honestly doesn’t come up that often. What we’d be talking about is a runner that is in shape to run X pace, but decides to slow down to Y for some reason. Usually, when it does come up either the person has some reason to slow down (for example they have been injured or sick) or they are planning on running with someone slower than them. In the former of these cases, the runner actually NEEDS to slow down whether they like to admit it or not. In the later case, how it goes really depends just how slow that friend is going to run. I’ve escorted a lot of much slower runners and walkers through marathons, but that’s not what I’m really thinking about today.

In this case, I had run a marathon very hard three weeks earlier and then had two very tough weeks at work to follow it up. Mentally I just wasn’t ready to put myself under the pressure of racing hard. But the Portland Marathon is my hometown race and I thought it would be fun to do it anyway. So I decided to “take it easy” and just have fun with it. And I really did embrace the whole go out easy thing. I ran the first mile or so with a pace group to keep my pace under control and then I even stopped to go to the bathroom — clock running and all — because I was just “having fun.”

What was really interesting to me is that this easy pace still wasn’t what I would call effortless. When we talk about marathon pacing we often say that the first half of the marathon should feel like being on a typical long run — not harder. But as the first half of the race unfolded I still felt something there. I guess what I’m saying is that even backing way off the pace, you’re still running and you’re still going to feel it. I was running about 45 seconds a mile slower than I would normally run on a long run and while it felt “easy” I still had that feeling that this was going to get tough after doing it for a couple of hours.

Certainly there was a good deal of confidence that came with slowing down. I paced a number of folks through much of the course, because they could see that I was not pushing hard. But by mile 20, I have to tell you I was starting to feel a little impatient. When I heard the split at mile 20, for example, I had this thought that “normally” I would be two miles further down the road. This kind of annoyed me and I wanted to get it over with. I wanted to rush through it, but I still had 10K left to run and I knew I wasn’t going to get myself anywhere by picking up the pace in the last six miles of a marathon, even an easy one.

Those same mental challenges were there in the race, just like they would be in a race when pushing harder. I still felt like I had a long way to run at mile 16 with 10 miles to go. I still started to get a little grumbly when I missed a water-cup pass in an aid station even though I wasn’t really needing a drink. I still got close to entering John Bingham’s famous “Bite Me Zone” at mile 24. It was as if I was a running a marathon or something.

What am I trying to tell you? I guess the bottom-line is this: a marathon is still 26 miles, which is a long way. And a marathon is still going to involve some hours of repetitive motion on your muscles, which is a long time. So if you do ever back off the pace, you can still expect it to hurt in the last few miles just like any marathon would. Or perhaps an even better message is to remember what I said earlier about going out too fast. When you’re picking the pace for your next marathon, just remember that if even the slow ones are hard, taking the pace out too fast is going to be all that much harder.

As always, have reasonable expectations for your pace goals and do try to have fun out there.

Good luck in your fall marathons. May your calves heal quickly.

Coach Joe English finished the Portland Marathon in 2:57:37 with one potty stop and a generally good attitude about the whole thing. In his previous marathon he ran 2:48:41 at the Queen City Marathon in Regina, Canada.

Coach Joe English, Portland Oregon, USA
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