The number one question I’ve gotten over the past four months of training for the marathon is, “do you have a time goal?” For someone who only ever dreamed of running this race, the question first seemed audacious to me. Certainly, if you asked me at the time I first ever thought about running this race, all I would have said is that I want to finish while they are still giving out medals. Still, training for this race has changed me. It has prepared me to get that medal and dared me to reach for more.
But it turns out, “more,” is not a time goal – it’s a feeling. What I’ve come to find in my own running journey – which has been one that’s tested all of my limits and pushed me beyond anything I’ve done before – is that, in the end, it’s no different than any other part of my longer journey. It’s all about winning the day! And for my New York City Marathon, here’s what that means . . .
I’ve now passed the peak of training. I hope to post once more before the race and will conclude this marathon series of blog posts with my final thoughts after whatever happens on November 2. But as I sit here, all of the hard work is done. I ran the longest run of the plan on Saturday – 20 miles (which I will discuss in more detail below) – and I am now in the tapering phase. After all the highs and lows of the past four months, I know what my body is capable of. I know what time is possible and what likely is not.
When I started training, I had a finishing number in mind. It was one that I could not have done if I tried to run 26.2 miles at the time, but one that I could train for. It was a pace that I could do on some long runs during the early days of training to feel the pain of pushing myself faster, and hopefully, one that I could get used to running for longer distances without pain.
Here’s what I wrote in the first post of my marathon series:
“[D]eep down, I also realized that I want to finish the race in the best possible time I could achieve, and I dream of finishing in less than five hours. Would I feel shattered if it takes me longer? Not a chance. I could cross the finish line in the dark with the runners in the back and fulfill my biggest dreams as long as someone is still handing out medals when I get there. But . . . if I put absolutely everything I have into this training, then no matter where I finish, I will know that I not only reached the dream of crossing the finish line, but I also will have crossed it in the shortest amount of time that I possibly could – whatever that may be.”
Now 17 weeks later, that same process that has taught me to reach for the sky has also enlightened me about what exactly I am striving for on marathon Sunday. It has taught me much more about what it will mean to win the day than I could have known when this all started. Throughout my training program, I’ve experienced both the struggle of pushing my body beyond what I thought it could do and the freedom of feeling like I could run forever. And here’s what I’ve learned.
While I love seeing what my body can achieve when pushing it to reach new heights, the best feeling I get from running is when I am out there and don’t even realize I’m doing it. That happened to me on Saturday’s run. Ironically, it happened on a run where I also had a time goal in mind. I wanted to see if I could finish the 20 miles in under 3:48:00. That would include stopping to fill my water bottle (which I did twice) and going to the restroom (which I didn’t need). My Strava app always tells me my moving pace, but this time, I focused on whether my overall pace, with stops, could be less than 11:25 per mile. After all, this would be my dress rehearsal for Marathon Sunday, and it was time to see if a sub-five-hour marathon was on the table.
For the first 10 miles of the run, I was just ahead of the pace, but I fell behind it a bit after making my first stop for water. I then ran into my friend Sarah doing her long run with the guides from Achilles, and that’s always a worthy moment to slow down and say hi. We ran together for a bit, as we told the guides about our time together in the park – something I’ve posted about on my Instagram . . .
