I can’t run the marathon next Sunday. I never got truly fit. Even dialing back my pace expectations won’t be enough. These legs, this body, this spirit, simply don’t have a full 26.2 miles in them. The way I feel right now, four miles seems like a lot. Too much. Besides, what if it hurts? It’s going to hurt. While I’m doing it. After I’m done. Wait, is that… fear? Are you afraid? What a baby. Yes. I’m afraid.
I look down at my watch and see I’ve just shuffled through the first quarter mile of a four-mile recovery run at about a ten-minute-per-mile pace. Next Sunday I’m going to set out at a six-minute-forty-eight-second-per-mile pace and see what happens. Such a stark, ridiculous contrast. And these are the thoughts galloping through my head.
I make a conscious effort to zoom out and observe myself thinking these thoughts. I’m not my thoughts. I’m the consciousness observing the thinking. I float for a minute and things get a little better and the legs loosen up and the pace drops toward the eights. I probably shouldn’t have spent the afternoon cutting brush after yesterday’s last medium-long run. But it’s fine.
Why Is The Taper Always a Surprise?
This is the taper. You know the drill. You reduce your training volume in a calculated way (mine went from a sixty-mile week to a fifty-mile week, to this week’s forty-one miles) while maintaining some intense workouts to retain sharpness while simultaneously healing up from the four months of heavy training.
You always expect (why? did you not keep good notes from last time?) to start feeling great, rested, and limber, the minute you cut your mileage down. Instead, you always feel slightly worse. All the little aches and pains you wouldn’t have paid any attention to are now front and center and you consider each a tiny grenade that may detonate into a full-blown injury at any moment. Is that my achilles tendonitis coming back? IT band issue? Plantar fasciitis? Soleus strain? Hampstring pull? A sudden pain in my knee… shredded and frayed meniscus finally giving out entirely?
In addition to the injury paranoia, there’s a temptation to hold any given instant in any given run as a litmus test against the race to come. Based on how I feel right now, in the first quarter mile of my morning run, with a week left to taper, I cannot run 26.2 miles.
Things I Know Are True
Of course, having gone through this now 14 times (15 if you count the ultra), I know some things to be true it’s useful to remind myself of:
You always feel like this in the taper. You always expect to feel springy and supercharged and you never do. Let it go. Consider the aches and pains and weird energy to be the body’s healing process.
You did the training. All of it. To the best of your ability. The miles are in your legs. You ran the race-pace long runs (some went better than others, but the last longest one was dialed in). Felt great, strong, in last set of 1600s at the track on Wednesday. You don’t feel fast today, but you’ve been fast many times over the last four months. Empirically. Strava says so.
It’s gonna hurt.
Wait, Is That Fear?
That last point is the one that caught my attention this morning. Because I don’t recall noting and interrogating this emotion during prior race buildups, though I’m sure it’s always been there
Fear. I’m afraid of this race.
Interesting. Why would that be? Well, duh, you’re a mostly sane human being who is well aware of the pain and suffering involved in racing a marathon. Why wouldn’t you be afraid?
The Inevitable
What I love about the marathon, at least when all goes normally and according to plan, is how good the hard effort usually feels for about the first thirteen miles of the race. You feel strong. I even tend to want to talk a little bit if I happen to fall in next to someone who’s running the same pace and is also a talker. (I learned early on some people would very much rather you didn’t talk to them. Read the room.)
Then there’s a stretch of miles between then and maybe mile nineteen or twenty where you feel the weight of the accumulated miles and the hard effort feels harder and not in the good, relishing-your-fitness way it did before but not terrible yet either. But in it, you have a premonition of the feeling that’s going to come next.
The last six miles, give or take, your brain has run out of sugar, your muscles are glycogen depleted and that combination creates an almost irresistible desire to stop running along with a sort of existential despair. Your brain doesn’t work the same way it did a few hours before.
There’s an expression I’ve heard used about the marathon: “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” Whether you attribute this wisdom to the Buddha, the Dali Lama or Haruki Murakami, and however appropriate it may be in broader life philosophy, I think it’s bullshit in the case of racing your fastest possible marathon. That combination of physical exhaustion, glycogen depletion in body and brain, possibly also cramping, muscle soreness, nausea, etc., combined with the knowledge that you could stop at any time, creates a perfect vortex of suffering. To call it anything else is semantics. In fact, I can recall races where the opposite of the quote was true: I wasn’t in any kind of acute specific pain, I was simply suffering.
All that suffering waits crouched, slavering and flexing its claws, to meet me up on the asphalt in Maine sometime around 9:45 in the morning next Sunday. And when I think about it, I’m a little afraid of it.
In Defense of Fear
Dune is making such a resurgence in the popular consciousness thanks to the excellent Denis Villeneuve films that I’d be surprised if you hadn’t heard this quote from it (both the novel and the movies):
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
I loved this quote when I first encountered it as a young teenager ever beset by a swirling host of real and imagined fears. And I love it still. But it’s not the whole story.
Because fear isn’t all bad. In fact, in controlled doses, fear brings flavor to a life. Nothing we do that’s truly big and worthwhile doesn’t come without a dose of fear.
Fear is to life like salt is to food. Too much of it will ruin the meal. But just the right amount of salt seasons and enhances the food. And just the right amount of fear makes the rest of life, the fun parts, the comfortable parts, stand out even more vibrantly.
And maybe it’s part of why I, we, do this to ourselves. Again and again.
So I’m going to relish this little frisson of fear this week as I look toward the race. Toward the (I hope) pleasure of the early miles and the suffering in the later ones. I’m going to continue to practice visualization of a successful outcome, but simultaneously abide with the notion I wrote about last week: the process of getting to the start line has already more dividends than I can count, so I’m good no matter what. I’m going to run my best and so long as I do that I think I can accept any outcome.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Super nice on point!
I’m bookmarking this post to read every time I begin a taper phase.