8, more or less
The number of years since my last serious stint running. I ran cross-country in high school and enjoyed it. But then I got pretty good at drinking in college and enjoyed that more than I enjoyed running, and that was that.
I spent a few springs and falls cycling, but that didn’t quite stick. I’d hit a yoga class occasionally, and a spin class with a buddy. But running? Running sucked. Running was what I did when I’d exhausted all other options, when the gym was closed and Flywheel out of the question and I really wanted to suffer my way through exercise. I was not, nor would I ever be, a marathoner. And then, after a few months training at a boxing gym, I tweaked my back. Physical therapy helped, and taught me that I’d essentially neglected my glutes and low abs for most of that near-decade. Running, I thought, with its straight line movement and required use of one’s ass, might provide an answer—and, miraculously, it did. The glutes clicked. The abs engaged. I was pouring sweat, and my lungs were Juul-ridden, but after a few weeks, my back was feeling better. And then, toward the end of June, the kind folks at Nike emailed to ask if I’d be interested in running the Chicago Marathon, in October. No, I thought, not in a million fucking years. And then I wrote back to tell them I wanted in.
86
The high temperature, in degrees fahrenheit, measured at JFK the day of my first training run, at the beginning of July. One thing that people don’t necessarily tell you, probably because it should be blindingly obvious, is that because marathon season hits in the fall, marathon training season—especially for Chicago, a month earlier than the race in New York—starts just as summer really gets cooking. Naturally, it peaks as the weather gets truly miserable.
You learn a lot of things running in the summer: that you need to wear sunscreen. That taking your shirt off is a reasonable response to high temperatures, but that you better have applied sunscreen on the parts of your body that were covered up when you left the house. You also learn that you need to get out early, before eight, lest it get too hot. Which means you probably don’t need to have that extra beer at dinner the night before—and, hell, maybe you just stay in tonight, anyway. Early one tomorrow, and all. You learn that being done with a long run by the time everyone else is waking up (or just stumbling home) provides the purest hit of self-righteousness—and then you learn that your friends don’t particularly care to hear about how early you woke up. So you learn to find a balance: a night out here, a quiet one there. You learn to forgive yourself for skipping a day, but also to make it up when you can. You might even learn that running doesn’t have to be miserable.
7.27
Length, in miles, of my average training run. I think one of the reasons I used to be resistant to running was that I never lasted that long. “Going for a run” meant “Running three or four miles,” which in practice meant exercising for, at most, 25 or 30 minutes. And if you’re doing something uncomfortable for 30 minutes, it’s pretty hard not to spend the entire time thinking about anything but being finished. It should follow that, if running three miles is miserable, running six should be worse. Because running is a fickle beast that mocks your sanity, the opposite turns out to be true.
I say this knowing full well that you will all scowl at me, unless you already know it, too: running six miles is so much better than running three miles. When you’re exercising for an hour, you can’t spend the whole time thinking about the finish line. You’ll go nuts. You’ll start to hate running.
So I started to think about different things, or not to think at all. I’d just go blank for 20-minute stretches. (Considering the amount of my waking life spent near visual or aural content, stuff, this was a big number.) I’d think about my stride, and remember to tuck my pelvis in, and keep my arms moving. I’d check my watch a little too often, but eventually that would subside, too. I’d borrow a tip from a guy I read about in a Runner’s World I bought in an airport, and conjure the word “Float” when I was struggling. Or I’d think about something the comedian Pete Holmes had explained on GQ’s Airplane Mode podcast: that the phrase “Yes, thank you” can endow a boring experience with depth and mystery. It sounds horrendously dorky, I know, until you say it when you really need it. Then it works.
22
Length, in miles, of my longest training run. No one should ever run 22 miles in a row. It’s just the absolute dumbest thing in the world.
1,000
Length, in meters, of the interval series that broke me. I’ll confess: the speed workouts surprised me. Nike introduced me to Steve Finley, a flinty, easy-joking coach. He set me up with a training plan, which included weekly speed work—which, conveniently, I could do under his supervision: he’s the head coach of the Brooklyn Track Club, which inexplicably hosts a morning workout on the track in East River Park once a week. I’d roll out of bed, jog to the track, and listen up for my punishment.
I hadn’t really done speed stuff before—and back when I was a runner, I thought it was beneath me. 5000m > 100. Right? But I quickly learned that track work is hard—a lot harder, often, than skipping along at a mellow 8:40 pace for 10 miles. And I also learned that the only way to run faster is to run fast: to put in that time on the track. Which made more sense after the set of 6x1000 meter intervals than it did before. Woof.
0
Number of sleeves I learned you should wear while training in New York in the summertime.
2
Tech-y bracelets I wore to train. Left arm: an Apple Watch, the Nike edition, linked up to Nike’s Run Club app. Right arm: something called a Whoop, to measure effort, sleep, and recovery. The watch was essential. It told me how far I’d gone, and how fast, though I found myself peeking at—and paying attention to—my “average pace” readout more often than I should have. And though I’m loathe to admit it, the app’s gamification techniques (giving you badges for running three times in a week, say, or hitting different milestones) hooked me.
The Whoop, on the other hand, produced a stranger sensation. By measuring heart rate (and something called heart rate variability, which is exactly what it sounds like), the wrist-worn strap told me how hard I’d worked in a given day, how well (or how poorly) I slept that night, and how ready my body was to take on more strain the next day. It was great to know not to expect peak performance on certain days—I’d throttle my effort back, and push a little harder on days my recovery was in the green zone, rather than yellow or red. It was less great, for example, to learn that my body was in full rebellion: that I’d slept a paltry four hours despite being in bed for eight—or that, on race day, I was only 53% recovered, or whatever the number was. Other information was so obvious as to make me laugh: a night out with my brother in Austin landed me squarely in the red zone the next morning. (Do not run 13 miles in the red zone.)
I cannot say I dug my dual-bracelet look, but both tools provided me enough information to prove actionable—but not so much that I was buried in it.
60
Pounds of force applied by the Theragun, a “percussive therapy” device I enlisted for my recovery. Good lord, do I love my Theragun.
0.5
Mark in miles, roughly, at which I had to pee on race day. One thing I probably should have seen coming is that running a marathon involves plenty of waiting. The gun went off at 7:30 A.M., but I didn’t start running for another 21 or 22 minutes. Which meant it was a solid half-hour since I’d last peed, which on a nervous race day might as well have been four days. So when I passed under a bridge less than a mile in and saw plenty of folks (all men) dropping trou, I joined in. Which wound up providing, in its own a way, a kind of lesson.
Three miles in, and I was moving slow. Not, like, marathon-advice, take-the-beginning-easy slow. Slow-slow. And I think I might have sat pretty at that pace had I not found a running buddy.
3-10
Miles, roughly, during which I ran with Jes Woods, Nike running coach and all-around gem. Some 45,000 people were running the race that day, and I managed to bump into one of the five or so I knew. (To be fair, we started next to each other. But then I had to pee.) Jes was looking for another of our Nike pals, so she pushed the pace a little bit, and my body agreed. So I found myself, ten or so miles in, all of a sudden right back at my goal pace. The lesson: when you can bump into a world-class runner who casually knocks out ultramarathons and needs to run exactly the pace you do for approximately seven miles, you do that.
19
Mile at which I thought to myself, and was subsequently thrilled to be thinking: Wow, this is going pretty great! Things were a breeze. The sun had come out. The weather was perfect. Nothing was chafing.
20
Mile at which I thought to myself: This is not going great. My quads tightened up. My knee started getting all hinky. I remember coming under a bridge and thinking: Well, fuck.
23
Mile at which the marathon actually started to suck. The thoughts I had at 20 were adorable, charming, representative of a mind and body that had not yet learned what pain was. This was new territory for me. It was miserable. It was glorious. I remember nothing.
7,200
Approximate distance, in meters, from the 800-meters-to-go sign and the finish line.
100
Number of marathons completed by a man I met just on the other side of the finish line. “Here’s the thing about everything between your first marathon and your hundredth,” he told me. (I could barely stand, so you’ll have to trust my paraphrase.) “You’re gonna have good days and you’re gonna have bad days.”
0
Percentage chance I run 99 more marathons.
100
Percentage chance I do another.
