As of my run this Sunday, I will be four weeks away from my first marathon. My anticipation for the race has been killing me, and I feel like my journey so far has forced me to improve my habits as a runner, as a college student and as a person just going through life.
The biggest mistake and lesson that I learned during this process was about overtraining and stretching myself too thin. When I started out, I didn’t take rest days, did two long runs a week and increased my distance every long run. I also didn’t take my diet or sleep into consideration for training. I felt like I was invincible because I was training hard and unknowingly wearing myself down, but not feeling the consequences yet.
The breaking point for me happened on my first seventeen-mile run. The run started out feeling relatively normal, but at about fourteen miles in, all of my prior overtraining and abuse to my body hit me at once. I got lightheaded, my lungs burned like I had been running at double the pace that I had been and my muscles ached. When I stopped running, I couldn’t start again. It was the first long run that I did not finish, and I felt massively ashamed of myself.
Why couldn’t I finish a run when I had felt fine just earlier that week?
The answer was probably the most important thing that I learned this summer. Just because I felt okay didn’t mean that I wasn’t pushing myself too hard. Things build up over time, even if they don’t feel like it, and it only takes a straw to break a camel’s back.
Looking back, I wish that I could say that I learned this lesson immediately, but I didn’t. I was dumb and prideful and spent the next three weeks after this point still pushing myself as hard as I could. I would run every day, fail about half of my long runs and sleep horribly at night because my mind and body were a mess by this point. All because I was stubborn and scared of backtracking in my training.
When I was finally convinced to tone down my training and get actually onto a training schedule, it was terrifying. I was reducing the intensity of my runs by nearly 50%, and I didn’t immediately feel an improvement in my performance. I would feel better during the day, but I didn’t feel like I was growing, and the idea of not being ready for my marathon in time would keep me up at night.
It wasn’t until about a month later that I finally started to feel stronger than I did in my original stretch of training. All of my runs began to feel way easier. This is how I learned the second most important lesson of the summer. Sometimes I just need to shut up and trust the process.
That leads me to where I am now. My race is about a month away, I have only a couple of long runs left before I am going to need to start tapering, and I know that cutting my runs down for that is going to drive me nuts. This time, I am going to stay calm, not overwork myself and trust the process.
