“That sucked!” was my first thought after crossing the finish line of my first full marathon – the Bangalore marathon 2024 – just shy of six hours. Backed by some solid training, I expected to do it in style, run the first half marathon slow and then pick up the pace to finish strong, something under five hours. That would have been a good marathon result for a first timer. That would have been a great result for someone who had just done a couple of half marathons in last one year and decided to train for an October marathon in July, with very little mileage in the first half of year. No, just because this is my first marathon, doesn’t mean I’ll not set goals. All that enjoying your first marathon, celebrating it as an achievement and other self congratulatory advice does not work for me. I want to run as hard as I can, and I’ll celebrate when I have given my best.
But I couldn’t give my best on that day. I sensed that from the very first mile. I wasn’t feeling like my usual strong self that aced the long runs in training. Somehow, the week leading to marathon managed to cripple me through workplace stress, lack of sleep and probably the anxiety about running my first marathon combined with the inactivity of taper phase. For those who are training for a marathon, don’t underestimate the mental challenge of the taper. It is one thing to train hard, and an entirely another challenge to hold back once you have gotten used to hard training. The brain rebels against the inactivity just as hard as it can rebel against fatigue.
Then there was the whole thing of four am start. As someone who has learnt to like getting up early, “four in the morning early” was still a little too early for my taste. I had slept at ten the night before, woke up at two am and drove to the marathon venue, having made a big mistake of not sleeping in the afternoon before, playing FrostPunk 2 as a way to celebrate this achievement on Saturday – little too soon it turned out. That’s not all. Instead of listening to my body, I become arrogant around tenth kilometre and starting to run faster than my easy pace, a whole minute faster. Marathon is a distance that demands respect, and wants you to underplay your hand all the way until the very end when it reveals it’s own cards. You let your ego take over your feet, and you are guaranteed to blow up. Don’t hydrate well and fuel early, and your body will teach you lessons you never thought you needed while training.
All that combined , is the recipe for a disaster of a marathon.
The winner of this year’s Bangalore marathon had finished exactly as I was crossing my first half marathon loop that day around two hours forty five minutes – him shirtless and posing for the cameras with his chiseled body and looking like he could turn around and do another marathon, me just learning the gravity of the mistake I had committed by running too hard upto that point. Talk about salt on the wounds. It was all downhill from that point. They say that a marathon is a ten kilometre race with thirty two kilometre warmup. I learnt how true this was on that day. Cramps started emerging somewhere around the twenty mile mark, something that I had never experienced in all my training upto that point. I ran-walked-ran a little bit, stretched a bit and repeated this few times. Then I came across a big-hearted volunteer who was offering free muscle relaxant sprays for poor souls like me, and basically got my lower body covered in the cold spray. That brought momentary relief, but it still helped me crawl to 36 kilometres. By that point, nothing can save you from the waves of fatigue, and it can quickly become your undoing if you were to dare think that you are still somehow in charge of the situation. Humbled by the marathon by this point, a wiser me decided to respect the race and quietly joined the zombie walk following some of my fellow runners, finishing the horror movie 312th out of 355 runners and feeling like a total loser in the end.
That’s the venting part done.
A week later, I understood this experience a little better, less like a lesson and more like an achievement. I had finished “the marathon” ! Only a fraction of population ever attempts this distance. Over the course of next few days, I slowly became a rockstar in my own eyes. I had started out this journey barely three months ago, having only run half marathon as my longest distance, my last race in January 2024. In three months between July and October, I acquired good weekly and monthly mileage, studied a great deal about running, gotten motivated by a bunch of superhumans who had achieved greatness in running by hard work. If I could do this in three months, what could I do in another three? What could I do in a year? In five years?
So I picked myself back up, went on a luxury trip and ate everything that my tastebuds desired. As ambitious as it sounded after finishing six hour marathon, I figured that a sub 2 hour half marathon was something achievable in 2024. Sure, this was a full 15 minute faster than my last year’s half marathon result, but I knew I was a faster runner now and could go longer on the legs on the right day. Maybe the marathon result didn’t have to define me as a runner this year. Maybe this year was just about establishing that i could go the distance and set up competitive times in shorter distances. Maybe a runner does not have to be defined by his results in one race. Maybe signing up and doing the races is part of the sport, no matter the result.
Two half marathons – one in November and another in December – to make up for one bad full marathon felt philosophically correct. The first one would serve as a fitness test, and another could be used to break the magical two hour half-marathon barrier. Spaced out one month each after the full marathon, this two-step goal served a dual purpose. It prevented me for overtraining after the first full marathon – something that I realised my ego would trick me into otherwise – and it helped train for pace which I could use later for next training cycle. It’s funny how your definition of long distance shifts after you’ve run your first marathon. Half marathons and ten milers become medium distances, eight and ten killometres become short runs. With eyes set on longer distances beyond a marathon in 2025, it was important that I approached this cycle right. Keeping my weekly mileage low at 50-60 kilometres, I started focusing on intervals and tempo runs, fine tuned the strength training regime a bit and signed up for two half marathons, one on November 16th and another on December 14th. The first one was a good flat trail run near Mysore – the Kaveri Trail Half Marathon – while the other was a midnight run in the heart of IT parks of Bangalore – the annual Midnight Marathon, my employer PhonePe being it’s title sponsor. The whole thing had a nice poetic ring to it.
When training for a fast half marathon after completing your full marathon, you don’t get tired as much. It’s basically your ability to push hard in the last five kilometres that counts, that is kind of where you run out of steam during a race. It feels like a tempo run stretched out too long. The first ten miles your body handles perfectly well. Then you start faltering, feeling that you have done enough. Listening to that same voice of mediocrity tell you that if you ran slow now, you’d still get a personal best. Your body craves comfort, it’s designed that way. Your mind wants your body to survive so it defaults to tricking you into thinking that a regular PR is good, you don’t have to go crazy fast. You don’t have to go for the sub-two half marathon time. You’ve just come out of your full marathon a month or so ago. Most people never even get that far. Why make it unnecessarily hard for yourself?
Because you must. Nothing grows on the barren plateau of mediocrity. It’s a place full of dead dreams and forgotten virtues. Mediocrity encourages you to build a house on this plateau, become a king of your personal pile of inconsequence, bathing in the bodily comfort in this modern society fuelled by amenities, commonplace achievements and weekend drinking. I know because I stayed there for years, and still go back to see it from time to time. I know how hard it can be to leave once I get there. I would rather attempt to climb this mountain of discomfort and find treasures here than ever going back to my old life. So now, every time I feel that I can go easy, I go hard. This is probably what David Goggins talks about extensively, this is what he means by chosen suffering. It’s not masochism, but rather the virtue of learning to celebrate discomfort in order to become your better self, relentlessly. On the flip side, I also understand that I have to prioritise my rest and sleep as an ageing athlete. My ugly full marathon taught me that recovery is as important as training. Maybe that was the lesson I had to learn from it.
Following consistent effort in a month that followed, I finished 9th out of the 109 people in my age category on the Kaveri Trail half marathon, completing the event in just under two hours & six minutes, and realising that the full marathon had given me much more than I understood at the time. All that aerobic training was paying off, with an offset of a month. Fatigue was absent as I sustained higher pace for longer durations in races leading upto and following this event. Having never imagined finishing in top ten anywhere in any racing event, this was a big confidence boost, one that helped me train hard in the month after that. I arrived at the starting line of midnight half marathon on 14th December, ready for my shot at the sub-two mark. I knew that this was a much bigger event and had no illusions of finishing in top ten here. I just wanted my two hour breakout. A good rank was welcome but not necessary. In the end, it felt amazing when I did finish in one hour and fifty eight minutes, finishing 28th of the 161 runners in my age category. It felt awesome to be able to race – really race – and chase a few amateur but faster runners down by sheer will in the twentieth kilometre. I took a victory lap in my head, kissing my racing flats when I was done. This was the feeling I sought in October. It arrived at a different race, for a different distance, but it was incredibly satisfying nonetheless. I smiled at mediocrity and she smiled back, knowing that I was enjoying the climb away from it.
The year is now coming to an end, and I have now taken a full week’s break from any kind of activity, going on a jungle trip to be in the nature and feel humbled by it, breathing the pure air surrounded my fellow wild animals. People keep asking me why I seek longer distances paired with higher effort and longer suffering. There are many answers to that. One of them I found deep in the jungle, looking at a tigress roam freely as we city-dwellers looked on from our jeeps. Humans run to feel that wild instinct, the hunter-predator-animal within us beseeches us to use our legs for the purpose they were built for – not just suspend them from a rolling chair in our cubicles. An instant in a race when we are reeling in the runner ahead, this animal gets what it needs, something deep is fulfilled. We can ascribe this to as spiritual experience, but is the spiritual so different from the physical. Is the body so separate from the mind as we prefer to think?
I am also learning to make smaller adjustments to nutrition like going more and more vegetarian in line with my disposition, adding a plant based protein supplement to compensate for the protein deficit, adding probiotic drinks and foods as integral part of daily diet. This year made me a faster – and more importantly – a smarter runner. I have learnt that running plans are as important as the motivational music you listen to while training. I have learnt that you don’t need to gulp down all that many gels during your training. Consistent training, followed by regular racing teaches you a lot about your fuelling, pacing and recovery strategies, all of which is extremely specific to the individual. No amount of online gossip or training advice can teach you that. You have to learn them on your own. Equipped with these lessons, 2025 is going to be an interesting year for the runner that I want to become. A hard year, but an interesting one nonetheless. I have never made new year resolutions, you just keep pushing forward in whatever it is you want to achieve. And that’s exactly what I intend to do. After the jolt of becoming a marathoner hit me in July this year, these three races helped me unshackle myself from mediocrity. I certainly have goals and ambitions for the near year, like all runners do. I also understand that some of these races will try and break me like my first marathon and some will be exhilarating like the midnight half marathon. I will however, train hard and show up to race as hard as I can. That is my calling, as it is every runner’s calling.