An Argument for the Defense

When You Can't Help Justifying "All That Running"

Do you ever find yourself, while talking about running, justifying your dedication to it the way one might a questionable habit? I’m only drinking this much wine right now because I’m hoping for a scholarship to sommelier school. I saw on TikTok that eating bacon double cheeseburgers daily can train the body to metabolize fat 30 times faster than eating apples. The long, grueling, all-consuming preparation for a marathon is known to make you a better father, romantic partner, leader, employee, etc.

See what I mean? Fishy-sounding. Except that last one, with caveats, is also true.

The Complexity of Putting Together and Executing the Marathon Plan

Today was the last day of week eight - almost halfway there! And only seven hard weeks before the taper begins, so really more than halfway. This week was a 58 miler, which seems like a lot to me as I’m doing but it’s about ten miles less a week than I would have been doing back in 2013, and that much less than what my training pals are all doing now. Nevertheless, 58 miles is a lot to cram into a week already crammed with work obligations, family obligations, and for me, a gig on Tuesday night from eight to eleven. I got home at midnight and had to get up early and get a 12-mile run in before work the next day.

Yesterday was a hilly 20 miler and today was an easy recovery pace run with my friend Randy. We were talking about the challenges of fitting it all in and putting it all together correctly, so you stay healthy and get the right amount of stress or recovery from each workout.

I said, perhaps unoriginally, as we loped up a hill toward McIntyre Ski Area that the complexity of putting together and managing the marathon training plan is really the meat of the game. The race is just the endpoint. Or to put it another way, the marathon is the final battle of a long, complex war.

The heart of this project of course is the simple, stubborn will to get out the door every day there’s a run on the schedule and … run. Whether you feel like it or not. But running without a strategy will certainly not get you your fastest possible race: that takes long-term goal-setting abilities, obsessiveness, a love of schedules and spreadsheets, training data, course elevation maps, and research.

What Kind of Amazing Person Can Achieve This Complex Synthesis of Will and Intellect?

Back to my point about justification.

There’s likely a time in all of our running when we wonder, “Am I being selfish?” It takes about eight hours a week to run 60 miles a week. What am I carving that out of? And should I be? And are the benefits of this, to my health, to my sanity, to my spirit, making me of greater use to the people who rely on me?

I believe they are, most of the time.

But it’s possible to be on the wrong side of that balance. Only by observing and acknowledging that shadow side of all this can you avoid tipping over into it.

And acknowledging that potential dark side also helps us to remain as grateful as we ought to be to the generous non-runners in our lives who understand and support this compulsion and share our belief in its benefits, to us and them. They could see it quite differently, and I’m sure some do.

The combination of skills and traits that come into play in planning and executing a marathon training cycle and race overlay well on skills required for success in all the other arenas of our lives. To whatever degree the training helps us hone and refine those skills and traits, and to whatever degree we are truly able to apply them to work, to family, to our communities, the justification holds true.

Not that everything in life needs to be justified every single time. Now pass the wine and cheeseburgers.