My First Marathon - how I went from 2k to 42K in 5 Months

2020 has been a weird year. It has brought pain and misery for millions of people across the globe due to the dreaded Corona virus, but it has been especially sad for me given my peculiar situation.

To be fair, it did start on a more upbeat note with a trip to Mexico for 2 weeks close on the heels of my return from India to Toronto in February. (More on those 2 weeks in a separate post)

Anyways, almost within a week of my return from Cancun to Toronto in March, all of North America witnessed a surge in Coronavirus numbers and US and Canada were put on a lockdown - we were told to work from home for the foreseeable future (something we had anyways been doing since last year).

I already had a weight management plan in mind before this, but the virtual lockdown of the city expedited things and forced me to think of creative ways to be able to spend more time in the outdoors - as sitting inside closed doors was becoming increasingly frustrating. With the Toronto winter still in full swing in mid March, I started with an hour of walking daily. 

By early April I mixed half hour of running (5k) with half hour of walking, which I then gradually increased to almost 8k of running daily in May before I suffered a right tendon foot injury, causing me to pause running for most of May. (I did continue cross training daily with biking though).

A little bit about the possible cause of the injury here - I strongly feel it had to do with my shoes:

 1. They were 3 year old  basic Adidas running shoes whose soles had thinned out. This wasn't noticeable while walking but when running long distances I guess it did make a difference to the impact to your feet.

 2. I was used to tying the shoe laces tightly. Again it didn't matter that much while walking, but running in those tight shoes daily did eventually hurt my upper tendon on the foot.

I learnt my lesson and got myself a pair of Under Armour's running shoes - nothing fancy but the difference in a proper gait was immediately noticeable.

Post recovery in early June, I got back into running, bringing my mileage gradually back to running 10k over the weekends. It was in the first week of July that I seriously considered running a marathon in the fall this year. The idea had been simmering in my mind for a very long time, perhaps for more than 15 years. It was up there in the bucket list of things to do before I die list. As to why run a marathon, this question has been asked of me many times even now after I was able to do it.

"What is it that you want to prove and to whom"?

There's no right answer to that - perhaps I wanted to prove it to myself that I still have it in me to take a physical challenge at this age, something that wouldn't be easy even when I was 20 years younger.

There is something pure about this - it takes a combination of multiple disciplines/skills to be able to pull this off (to be able to run it at a respectable pace and without injury). 

You have to follow a daily schedule of running to develop your aerobic base, doing an incremental load every week and watch your body adapt to take a higher level of stress - what we call as stamina.

You have to include some strength training exercises as well (not mandatory but recommended), to strengthen your core and lower body to be able to take a pounding and not get injured.

Fun fact - on the day of running a marathon the average person loses about 1cm in height,  about 4 to 6 litres of water in sweat, and 1.5 kgs in body weight.

Anyways luckily around the same time I saw a Facebook ad for an actual "socially distanced" marathon being organised in Muskoka on October 4th (all other marathons in Canada had been cancelled due to Covid) - I immediately registered for it to give myself the final push to realize my long standing goal. 

 Now that I had a date and target in mind, I needed to get some tools to help me prepare for this event. Until now I had been using the GPS of the Strava app on my phone to record my times for the run, but I needed a GPS watch that would be easy enough to check while running, and also give me other stats such as current pace, heart rate etc. I did some research online and bought the excellent Garmin Forerunner 235 as my pace tracker. As an added bonus it would automatically post my run from the watch to Strava app on completion. 

To help set a running schedule I installed the "Run with Hal" app on my phone that would take your target date and desired pace for your marathon and build a daily training plan for you accordingly. It was a 3 month plan that would make me ready for the marathon by 1st week of October - I now just had to follow it religiously - which I did.

The plan was basically training 5k to 8k daily from Monday to Friday, then run my long run on Saturday - increasing it gradually from 14k upwards by 2k every week.

The weekly long runs are the backbone of marathon training, as that's the run that most closely resembles the actual marathon in terms of pushing your body to do a longer distance at the actual pace that you want to target for marathon day. Sunday was supposed to be the rest day, as it's important to let your muscles recover after the hard pounding of those long runs.

Following this plan daily from the first week of July, I was able to run my first half marathon on July 27 in 2 hours 8 mins - not too bad a pace for my first time at 5:54/km. To compare, I would eventually be able to run the same distance in 1 hour 54 mins 21 secs on October 4th - my personal best time.

These 3 months of training (July to September) were crucial to my first attempt at a full marathon. All the websites I visited and YouTube videos I watched stressed the importance of increasing my weekly mileage gradually, as overtraining could result in an injury thus jeopardising my goal for October.

Soon after running my first half marathon on July 27th I realized that my relatively new Under Armour running shoes were not good enough for the 20+ km long runs.

The soles of my feet used to ache due to lack of proper cushioning and I needed higher quality shoes that would protect my soles from the pounding on the asphalt. I got myself a pair of Adidas Ultraboost 20 runners - possibly the best running shoes they have. The difference was immediately felt in my next run - no more pain in the soles after a run.

So from end of July through mid-September I ran 9 consecutive half marathons (more than half marathons actually - taking my mileage upto 30kms by mid Sep).

I don't even know how these 3 months just flew by - I guess that's what happens when you're focused on a goal and enjoying the process of getting there.

A lot of runners talk about the runners high - and I can now speak from experience that it's an actual thing. 

The first 10 minutes of running are always hard - whether I'm doing a 5K or a 21K. Your body is gradually warming up - your mind keeps telling you to stop as you get out of breath. However, slowly  but surely, the body catches up with the pace. After about 30 to 40 minutes of running is when the real "flow" sets in, and depending on how good your aerobic base is - this flow state can continue for the next 1 to 2 hours (10k to 20k). If you're running on a familiar route, this time feels like meditation as you go on autopilot mode. I usually like to put on my headphones and listen to a good audiobook while running. I listened to 22 books this way from April to October; some of my favourites were: "Love in the time of Cholera", "Can't hurt me (David Goggins)", "Predictably Irrational", "The Rational Optimist" and "What I talk about when I talk about Running".

The fatigue while running usually sets in somewhere between 2 and 2.5 hours for me (20k to 25k), after which you have to put in a conscious, sustained effort to keep at it. The scientific explanation for it is that your body starts falling short of the fuel that your muscles are running on - called glycogen reserves. This is the fast energy that your body gets from carbohydrates being converted to glucose. You completely run out of your glycogen reserves around the 3 hour mark - at which point you can hit the dreaded "wall" where your body will refuse to move forward if you don't refuel it with glucose. So to avoid this I used to run in loops of 10k around the house - after the first 10k I would pick up a sports drink from outside the house and start running with it. Then after the 20k I would again loop back to the house and pick up a 2nd bottle to be used for the next hour or so. 

A tip here for anyone running just to lose weight - running slower or below 70% of your maximum heart rate (also known as anerobic running) uses fats instead of carbs as your fuel source, thus burning more body fat.

Another hack I used to make my own energy gel was to fill up a pouch with some date molasses mixed with salt - they're the best source of pure carbs that can be used as fuel while running. Speaking of salt, that's another critical component of long distance running that you can't afford to miss. As you sweat, you lose salt from your body - the amount varies from person to person. But after running for around 2 hours, I can usually notice the white trail of salt caked up on my arms and face. This causes a lack of essential electrolytes in your body - Sodium, Potassium and Magnesium, which is the most common reason for painful leg cramps - which can make it impossible to move further. So I also carried a few electrolyte tablets to take after 2 hours of running to replenish the salt reserves. While this served me well during my training long runs, I did make a rookie mistake of not taking them on time in the real marathon - which I'll come to in the next post.

My improvements in distance/pace can be seen in these 9 long runs from July 27 to Sep 19:

1. Jul 27 - 21.6km in 2 hours 8  mins(5:54/km)

2. Aug 2  - 21.1km in 2 hours 11 mins(6:13/km)

3. Aug 9  - 23.3km in 2 hours 23 mins(6:10/km)

4. Aug 16 - 26.1km in 2 hours 28 mins(5:43/km)

5. Aug 22 - 21.1km in 2 hours 09 mins(6:09/km)

6. Aug 31 - 27.1km in 2 hours 38 mins(5:52/km)

7. Sep 06 - 21.1km in 1 hour  55 mins(5:27/km) - vast improvement!

8. Sep 12 - 30.1km in 2 hours 53 mins(5:46/km) - longest long run

9. Sep 19 - 21.1km in 1 hour  56 mins(5:30/km)

From my first 21k on Jul 27 to the last one on Sep 19 - the improvement is 12 minutes - which looks small but is substantial in that span of time. Also the way I felt after completing the same distance was totally different: While I could barely walk after the first time, I was raring to go for another 10kms on Sep 19th.

Like I said - the best part of this was that you could actually see and feel the improvements in your body and physiology.

The last 2 weeks from Sep 19 to October 4th were tapering weeks where I gradually reduced the weekly running mileage to allow the body to fully recover in time for the final day.

A video of my final long run (13k) on the weekend before the marathon.

More on the final day and how it went in the next post!