Sound of Body, Weak of Mind

I have only ever run one marathon. The 2009 Rock'n'Roll Phoenix Marathon. I failed spectacularly. My goal time was 3:10 and a Boston Marathon qualification. After mostly walking the last 10k, I limped across the finish line in 3:35. Shortly thereafter I ditched the road scene and started running trails, competing in a few ultra marathons before quitting running altogether and getting fat. 

In moments of self-flattery I describe my transition to trail ultras as a more primal switch to running for the hell of it and to see how far I could go. Oprah ran a road marathon, for God's sake. At the start in Phoenix I lined up with people who intended to walk the entire thing. I was clearly above that. 

In reality, though, I had it handed to me by a road marathon. I left, licking my wounds, gratifying myself with the enhanced social clout that came with the ultra. Everyone knows the marathon distance and can probably guess at a good marathon time. No one knows how in the hell long it is supposed to take to run 50 miles. They are just impressed that you did it at all (even though I was slow and weak and would still have come short of my goals at the road marathon). 

But what has haunted me persistently since that bad race in January of 2009 is the question of what went wrong that day. My training was incredible: I regularly cranked out sub-1:35 half marathons in Saturday morning training runs, broke 19:00 minutes in a 5k, 40 minutes in a 10k, and my 20 mile training runs came in around 2:20. In other words, I was primed for success. Yet I crumbled.

There were physical issues. I have a finicky gastrointestinal system and when taxed in long runs it is a crapshoot (get it?) as to how it will turn out for me. However, what haunts me isn't the fact that physically I broke down, but the question of whether or not the breakdown was purely physical. What haunts me is that I toed the line that morning strong of body and weak of mind. That I simply wasn't ready to shrug off the pain of those last, grueling miles. That, despite being fast in training, my training itself was plagued by runs where I ran well as long as I felt well and ran poorly as soon as I came under duress. In other words, I was never forced to grit it out a training run, and therefore was unprepared for the day that grit was required.

Fitzgerald talks about the ways in which we conflate actual real physical fatigue with simply our perceived effort. We mistake feeling bad for actually doing bad. He writes: "perception of effort. . . is the primary source of the discomfort that causes athletes to slow down or quit when they hit the wall in races." We are not actually physically at our limits, as is amply displayed by the fact that we feel immediately better once we stop expending the effort, i.e. once our perception of effort returns to a low level. Fitzgerald's conclusion resonates: "Physical fitness determines where the wall that represents your physical limit is placed. Mental fitness determines how close you are able to get to that limit in competition."

My physical fitness should have allowed me to run a great race: I was lean, fast, and confident. However, without having stretched my mental fitness during training, I was unable to get my body to respond when I found myself in the unfamiliar territory of mental duress. I buckled, and none of the fast, easy training runs in the world would prepare me for what I needed: the mental power to tell my body it was just fine. And that is something to keep in mind, so to speak, as I try to recover what I lost when I gave up my best habit.