How I Ran a Marathon
Those that knew me a few years ago would be understandably surprised if/when they heard I was planning on attempting the 2022 Dublin Marathon. Heck, if you had told me from that timeframe I wouldn't have believed you. I was, frankly, an overweight and increasingly unfit person as I was barreling through my mid thirties. I was (and still am) an enjoyer of good food and craft beer, and it will be unsurprising that when paired with a pretty sedentary lifestyle, there's a bit of an inevitable trajectory implied.
So what changed? Well a few things happened. I was definitely aware of the overall trend for quite some time but it took a long time for me to get off my ass and do something about it. Part of the impetus for this was that my fitness had dropped enough that I couldn't keep up with my fellow (ice) hockey teammates. So in September of 2019 I began my running journey. And now, just over three years later, I ran my first marathon.
At the risk of being a bit self-absorbed, I thought it might be mildly interesting to some people on how I managed it. So read on if that would interest you!
Approaching the start line!
Forming Habits
Probably the single biggest thing I would attribute to this was getting into some good habits. The biggest of these was simply to make it not an option to get out for some exercise every single day. From about June or July 2020, I got out for a walk and/or went for a run nearly every day. I'm currently rocking a streak of nearly 720 days of meeting my daily fitness goal on my Apple Watch (and there was a single day in November 2020 that annoyingly broke a prior streak of ~150 more days).
There are a few nuances to this habit forming that I concentrated on over time. First is that the nature of the commitment to getting out every day is that the decision to get outside was fundamentally not an "if" question, but a matter of "when". So the daily forecast was a critical part of this. It turns out that while Ireland has a reputation for a lot of rainy weather, there was almost always a window in the weather that allowed for at least a short walk minimising time in the rain, or where the wind was calm enough that an umbrella was practical enough.
Second, I applied the "when" not "if" pattern to running occasions as well. If the goal was to run once a week, then I had to pick a day during the week to actually get out for a run. No exceptions. Looking back at my Strava logs, since August of 2020, I count just two weeks where I didn't log a run, so I did a pretty good job of sticking to this!
And third, the aim was to get better fitness. So for both walking and running, I began to push up the pace and distance traveled over time. There was a bit of variance over the past couple years, but I was easily averaging over 8km a day when walking, and 13-14km each outing when running.
There's one extra bonus I discovered with this plan. I found the daily walk/run routine was tremendously good for my mental health, particularly over a chaotic couple of years that included a global pandemic amongst other things. There's something about taking a break from whatever is going on at work or at home and spending some time on your own experiencing the neighbourhood and the outdoors. I explored the area around my house, discovered several very pleasant parks and green areas, and found that with a bit of time devoted to it, a lot more was within "walking distance" than I would've given credit to years ago.
Tracking Metrics
I found tracking my metrics and progression tremendously motivating. There's something about watching general trends move in a good direction that must appeal to my nerdy sensibilities. While I have long worn an Apple Watch, it wasn't until I started giving fitness some attention that I started to benefit from most of the fitness tracking aspects that it had. It is an incredible device for this purpose though! Between that and a basic bathroom scale I had most of the tools I really needed to have a good grasp of my fitness metrics.
The main things I tracked included:
Weight
Route and Pace of walking and running workouts
Heart rate during workouts
VO2 Max
Calories burned and exercise minutes
Resting heart rate
Some observations on what I saw over the past three years:
I lost the bulk of my weight in 2020 (nearly 10kg!). After that, my weight has stayed very stable within about a 2-3kg window.
I don't have nearly as much data yet and am not entirely sure how much I trust it, but I got a smart scale that alleges to be able to do some amount of body composition measuring. The general trend this year since about January is that while my weight has stayed fairly stable, I've lost fat and gained muscle.
My VO2 Max scores did not start to go up until midway through 2021. While I was increasing my walking pace and running once a week, it wasn't until I returned to hockey training that my VO2 max score started to increase meaningfully. More on that in a bit!
I gradually increased my daily calorie burned target (what Apple calls the activity ring) from ~500 kcal a day three years ago to 700 kcal the last couple weeks before the marathon. That should be viewed as a minimum per day to earn the activity award for every day - my average was nearly 950 per day in 2022!
It's important to make sure you're looking at overall trend lines. It's not a good idea to stress about a particular datapoint - particularly for things like weight that can fluctuate a fair bit from day to day. I obsessed over my metrics, but made sure to be zooming out to the week or month time frame as that gave a much better picture of the progress I was making!
(Mostly) Sticking with a Training Plan
Okay, so all of the above gives a picture of general fitness, but now we should talk a bit about the specifics of training for a marathon. Keep in mind that this is how I did it, and I may have gotten exceptionally lucky with how it all worked out - it's one datapoint, albeit hopefully an inspiring one.
At the gentle prodding of a friend who had run the last couple Dublin Marathons, I decided to put my hat in the ring for a lottery entry into this year's Dublin Marathon. I thought that the chances were pretty slim that I'd actually get the chance to actually buy a ticket and what was the harm? Well, on the 17th of January this year I got an unexpected email that I had won an entry. So without thinking too much about what I was signing up for I plopped down my entry fee and proceeded to plan out my summer training schedule.
After some research I settled on aiming for a fairly ambitious 4-hour target. To pick that, I used some of my personal longest run times to plugin to an online calculator to get an estimate about what might be feasible. So after some more research I picked out the 4 hour marathon plan from The Marathon Handbook, and then proceeded to make a few modifications to it.
The original plan was 20 weeks long and I was anxious to get started so I tacked on an initial week at the start. Possibly not advisable though - the plan ramped up my running volume a bit faster than I probably should have.
I used my hockey club's weekly in-the-hall-on-wheels training session to substitute for the one day a week that program had you do sprints. Hockey is a great cardio sport and is not that dissimilar from doing sprints - particuarly in game-like sessions. This let me reduce some running volume but still getting good benefit to my cardio training. Our hockey team also had matches scheduled on the weekends which I just added into the schedule for a little extra exercise. Perhaps a bit foolhardy but it worked!
A typical hockey training session. Look at that heart rate graph!
I scheduled myself to take part in the Dublin race series of events. Since I had spent all of my running training on solo runs I figured that my first race with other people shouldn't be the Dublin Marathon. The Dublin race series is one-event-per-month series of increasing distances over the summer: 5 mile, 10k, 10 mile, and a half marathon. These race days didn't quite line up with the schedule so I had to bump things around a bit to accommodate them.
Finally, on every day without a run on it I continued to take my lunch time walks to make sure I filled my daily move goal. These walks continued to be fairly high-pace things which I believe also contributed to my overall fitness levels.
My training plan with colours indicating if I had met the plan or not. Target pace for all training runs was 5:27/km, target pace for all long runs was "easy pace”. Days outlined in red had ice time in Belfast in addition to the training schedule.
So plan in place, I kicked things off early in June with my now customised 21 week marathon training program. I was able to follow the plan pretty consistently throughout with the main modifications during the program of swapping a few activities around to suit the weather or the social schedule. I ran into three disruptions that caused me to miss a little bit of training:
About a month in, we had some friends in town and we took them on a bit of a decadent trip to the west coast and had several nice meals. I did my best to fit the training schedule around that, but some of the adjustments to both my diet and the training schedule resulted in a heavier week including some interval training instead of hockey. The result was after returning from that trip I nursed some sore knees and decided to give myself a bit of a break from running, missing three runs and struggling a little on a very hot day for the Fingal 10k. Thankfully, I was able to get back on track!
A hall closure caused us to miss a couple weeks of hall training and I missed one due to some end-of-month festivities at work. I did substitute a HIIT workout from Apple Fitness on one of the evenings, but it was a bit of a drop in overall cardio training in the middle of September.
October was my tapering month but throughout most of the month my knees were giving me grief (particularly my left one). I completed nearly all of these runs in October but by the last week I was in a bit of a panic that my knees were not close enough to 100% for comfort and dropped a couple of small runs at the end of the schedule and reduced my walking pace and duration a whole bunch to try and avoid provoking the injury more. Somehow this along with icing the knees and foam rolling contributed enough to get me back into business for the big day.
I guess I bring up the above detail as specific examples of how my training didn't go to plan. You'll see most guides indicate that basically nobody's training plan goes totally to plan and that injuries or issues can crop up. It's important to be agile and use your training plan as a template for making progress towards the goal but not treat it as a strict mantra.
The Big Day
Since this is the one and only marathon I've ever run, this part is probably the least instructive of the whole story. But I figured it'll at least be interesting to capture some anecdotes from the experience.
First of all, the whole event is a surreal thing to be a part of. The amount of community support is incredible. Almost every part of the route was lined with at least a sprinkling of people cheering you on, and at several junctures there was huge crowds of people with a DJ playing tunes. I can't even describe the feeling of being on the race route and getting that energy from the crowd, but I can say that it definitely gives you a boost to keep going.
I'm impressed by the sheer variety of people that draw into this event. A marathon distance is no joke, but people of a huge variety of fitness and age show up and give this event a go. When you see so many people struggling in whatever way they are affected to cross the finish line, it is incredibly inspiring. I'll say this: more people can run a marathon than I would've given anybody credit for before seeing this happen. I think that's far more inspiring than my own attempt I'm chronicling here.
Because I had put a purposefully pessimistic time on my entry, I was staged in the 4th and final starting wave of the race. It turned out that this was a pretty good spot to be. I showed up early and took my spot pretty close to the start of that wave and because my planned pacing was a good bit faster than the pacers in my wave (the fastest pacers in my wave were targeting 4:30), I got out of the pack pretty early. The other psychological benefit this had was I spent most of the race passing people from the wave ahead of me instead of being passed.
One other thing I quite liked throughout the race was I used the official time tracking app to get notifications of the other people I knew in the race. The app gave a notification every 10km and at halfway and the finish line. So as I was racing, I got notifications to my watch about where people were. I found it encouraging to see my friends and colleagues making good progress in the race.
In terms of my own pacing, I tried for the first 10km or so to keep my pace a bit on the slow side. I had found this to be a hard thing to do in every race I had done so far and it was similar in the marathon - but for the first 10km I managed to keep things in and around my target pace of 5:27/km. As the race continued I found it harder to hold back and started to push my pace up a bit through the 20km and 30km milestones.
Things nearly unraveled around the 34-36km mark where the second steepest hill of the route hits you for a bit more than 2km. My left knee that had thus far held up started giving me some really concerning spasms every few strides. Thankfully, a bit of a slower pace and some determination got me up that hill and my knee mostly held on through the remainder of the race.
I had enough energy left to push the last couple of kilometres, and once I saw that I was within range of beating out a 3 hour 50 minute time I buckled down, drew energy from the crowd and pushed over the finish line. I have to give most of the credit to the surge you get from being cheered on by a ridiculous number of random strangers. It's not something I'll get to experience very often in my life, but it is incredible and impossible to describe.
Crossing the finish line was surreal. And very soon after slowing down to a walk you definitely start to feel just a bit of the soreness you've been trying to ignore all race long. It's hard to walk, but it's also hard to sift through the emotions at the time. Someone puts a finisher's medal over your head, you make your way along and pick up the swag bag and the marathon participant's shirt in a very strange mix of exhaustion, euphoria, soreness, and disbelief. What a bizarre thing.
Some other quick hit anectodes:
Somewhere in the first half of the race, somebody had a BBQ going with tantalising smells of grilled food. More than one person around me made the joke of running over to ask for a serving - I'm sure they weren't the only ones.
Given the proximity to Halloween, there was several people who put in the effort/sacrifice to wear a costume. I think I saw a couple of Star Wars Mandalorian characters, a Spider-Man, some Baywatch lifeguards (complete with an inflatable lifesaver under their arms), an Elvis, and many more that I can't immediately recall.
There was some good signage out there. One read "never trust a fart" which gave me a good laugh as I was passing by. Several "tap here to power up" signs with a Super Mario magic mushroom were common. One guy near the end had a "the end is nigh" sign right near the finish line.
Again it's hard to overstate just how many supporters there were out there. So many people had offerings of sweets or orange slices or bananas, or were playing music loudly on their car stereo or whatever speaker they could blare tunes out of. So many people screaming and cheering for you as you went by. I don't know if that's how every marathon is, but that is how the Dublin one was, and it was incredible.
