Yesterday I ran 17km in Kings Park in perfect conditions but limped to the finish after my plantar fasciitis flared up and I ended up just about crawling back to the office. I then spent the rest of the afternoon sulking at my desk as my right foot reminded me why you shouldn’t run 17k at lunch when you have plantar fasciitis. Treated myself (?) to a couple of Voltaren anti-inflammatory tablets and scurried home in a bad mood.

While I was in the changing rooms at work my colleague Sascha came in after his run and asked me “when does this start to become fun?”. He, like me, had had a poor lunchtime run and wondered, after over 6,000k’s of running (thanks Strava.), why he was still to experience the euphoria of running. In that time he had ran three marathons, over a two year period, but his last marathon was a disappointment.  After the Perth Marathon in June Sascha has struggled to maintain the intensity of his pre-marathon training program but with another marathon less than a month away he is going through the motions. Unfortuantely going through the motions can come back and bite you , normally around the 32k mark of a marathon. With marathon training you need to be all-in from the first run to the last (the race itself). There’s no half-hearted effort as this will only lead to failure, you cannot hide from a marathon.

Sascha’s ultimate goal is the holy grail of most runners, the sub three hour marathon. This is one of the main running yardsticks by which runners can be measured, the other major one is, of course, distance.  We’ll start with the sub 3 goal. Personally I chipped away at my times to get my first sub 3 marathon finish. It was in my 11th marathon when I achieved this time and I had dropped my times incrementally until then.  I started at 3:54 (three times !) then 3:26, 3:25, 3:19, 3:12, 3.09. 3:06 and finally 3:05. It was the Perth City to Surf in 2009 when I ran my first sub3, was what more remarkable was the fact I ran this time without my now trusted “speed beard”…..see below. (Also the days of skins for racing, now mainly for recovery but always worth having a pair in your closet. https://www.skins.net/au/ )

This year I will run my 10th City to Surf and marathon number 44, in total, and will be hoping to break sub 3 for the 31st time, for me it’s about keeping that sub3 streak going for as long as possible.  The image below was from last year where I managed a reasonable time mainly due to the course being 500m’s short. Funnily enough at the time I wasn’t that worried about the length of the course, just enjoying the finish straight, my favourite part of any marathon.

So is Sascha justified in being disappointed that, after over 6,000km’s of running,  he feels his running has stagnated to such a point he questions why he is doing it ? If marathon finishing times is his main goal then yes he has grounds for a ‘please explain’ moment. In this case he needs to look at his training as personally I feel he is repeating the same training runs daily and not varying pace or distance. He is stuck in the trap that many runners fall into in that they are not building enough distance , albeit slowly, to build their aerobic engine; while at the same time wearing down their mind and body with runs that are too fast to be truly aerobic but too slow to be anaerobic (like thresholds, tempos  or VO2 max runs) To quote Albert Einstein “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”.  I’ve mentioned this to Sascha on a number of occasions but he always ignores me, this came back to bite him recently at the Perth Marathon when he went out ahead of the 3hour 15minutes bus and came home many minutes behind it. Has he taken my advice on board post-Perth Marathon, at the moment no so we’ll see what happens in a few weeks at the Perth City to Surf. Confidence is low but he has a few weeks so maybe reading this post will energise him ?

So how can Sascha achieve his sub3 ? There are no short cuts in running marathons , he will basically have to either train harder or smarter;  preferably both.  Marathons reward training and “trust in your training” is a mantra I live by. Put in the hard work and you will be rewarded, this is a fact. (bar injury of course) If you are stagnating you need to look at your training and work out ways to change the outcome by changing your routine, either add distance or pace with a caveat of only adding pace after building the aerobic engine. In Sascha’s case I need him to probably add 10-15% a week to his daily training totals as well as adding a 10k tempo and a faster long run on the weekends, simple really. To really help his cause he should run  twice a day a few times a week  because, IMHO, nothing improves running better than running more. Finally he needs to get out of the runners trap of running his slow runs too fast and his fast runs too slow, ending up running yourself into the ground and into the arms of our mortal enemy ‘injury’.

Right back to the title of the post, why do we run? Every runner has a reason for putting on the trainers and getting out there, there are too many to list but you do need a reason. A run for no reason is not going to be an enjoyable experience, actually it probably isn’t even going to happen,  truth be told. It’s not as if you’ll find yourself in the middle of a park , dressed in your running gear , wondering how the hell you ended up there,  looking around in a daze ? Each of you needs to remind yourself once in a while why you do what you do and I hope it is because you just love running, it really can be that simple.

Of course you can make it more complex, like all things in life, by adding goals and motivational targets but these need to be secondary to your love of running. If you don’t love it you will eventually stop, common sense really. I’ve seen it so many times over the years when good friends have just disappeared off the running radar (this is now called Strava http://www,strava.com ) Like a good marriage you need to keep the relationship, with running,  fresh and exciting, and this for me is why I race marathons and the odd ultra. These events keep me coming back for more and I’m as excited about my run tomorrow as my run yesterday or even my first run many years ago, this is why I keep doing what I’m doing….this is why I run.

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