My First Ever Marathon
Reflections on the Haining International Tide-Chasing Marathon 2021.
I did it. Just before lunchtime on 9 May, after four months and 1,190 km of training, I dragged myself, exhausted, beneath a large yellow gate, spanning the main road through Yanguan, Haining, 4 hours, 12 minutes, and 41 seconds after crossing under it the other way.
Finishing my first ever marathon, despite the time, felt like a fantastic achievement. It still does. In the immediate aftermath, the word I used to describe the experience was “humbling”, and I think that reflects perfectly how the heat, the distance, and the cumulative drain on both my legs and mind brought my goal time for the day crashing down in stages until eventually it took all my willpower and focus just to finish.
To put that time in perspective, all my performances in training had been pointing towards a 3:30 finish or faster. In March, I set a new half-marathon PB of 1:37:43, the fastest 10 km segment of which was faster than the all-out 10 km I ran on 1 Jan for the purpose of setting my training paces.
That shows I was improving, and if anything my progress was getting faster. Going into the race itself I was feeling significantly fitter than back in May. I was running my tempo and interval runs at over a kilometre per hour faster, for the same effort and at the same heart rate. Eight days before the race I set a new 5 km PB of 20:23, despite an upset stomach (my best time before this year had been over 22 minutes).
Two weeks before that I’d thrown a 24 km race-pace segment into my final pre-taper long run, averaging a fairly consistent 4:47 per kilometre over that distance. The night that before I’d run the 14 km back home from work, and so while not heavily fatigued, I wasn’t exactly running on fresh legs.
My progress in training may well have led to me overestimating my fitness. Even so, to end up with a time over 4 hours, it’s fair to say something must have gone wrong. While I’d like to stress that I have nothing but positive feelings about the overall experience, it certainly doesn’t hurt to analyse what went wrong and learn from my mistakes for next time.
I could explain at length how my race went from good, to okay, to bad, to worse, but instead I’ll just paste the splits I recorded. They paint a clear enough picture on their own: (The times below are based off my watch data and so don’t perfectly align with the official race time given in the first paragraph.)
First 14 km: 1:10:20
Second 14 km: 1:23:32
Third 14 km: 1:37:05
I lost almost a minute per kilometre in pace going from the first 14 km to the second, and then lost almost exactly that again going to the third. I didn’t even feel that bad for the first 14 km. I certainly didn’t feel like I was about to crash anytime soon. I’ve also included the splits by half-marathon distance, because I think they’re possibly even more illuminating:
First 21.1 km: 1:49:30
Second 21.1 km: 2:22:36
It should be pretty easy to see what happened: I set off too fast, hit a wall early, and never recovered. I don’t think this was a fueling problem, although, as I’ll explain below, fueling did end up being a minor issue. It was ultimately a failure to adapt to conditions on the day, and a failure to heed warning signs that I didn’t trust because my judgement was thrown off by my reaction to said conditions and a lack of applicable experience.
With that summary out of the way, here’s a list of the main factors that I think had a significant influence on my first ever marathon, and what I’ve taken away from it.
1. Temperature: it makes a way bigger difference than I thought.
This is the big one. This is the thing that killed me. This is the key factor that threw a spanner in the works and led to my other major failings on the day. I already knew what had gone wrong by the time I was hauling myself down the home stretch (in truth I knew by the turnaround), and I’ve only become more certain since.
I started training in the winter, I finished training in the spring. The first day it had been genuinely hot all year was a week before the race. The day of the marathon was the first time I’d run in serious heat (and humidity) all year. I didn’t have any experience to draw on.
I tried to factor the temperature in. I found some online calculators to work out how much slower I should go. I dropped my target pace accordingly. In the end, it was still too high; my calculations led to me slowing down about a quarter as much as I needed to and it doomed me from the start.
My original target pace was 4:50. That was conservative, based on all the race predictors I’d been using in the run-up, predictors that had been accurate for me time and again in training. In the conditions I’d been training in, I’m 90% sure that I would have made the distance at that pace. In the end I slowed it down to 5:00, but looking back, it should have been closer to 5:30.
2. Heart rate: pay attention to your organs, they know how hard you’re working.
My heart rate hit 172 bpm by the end of the first kilometre. From about 23:30, it didn’t drop below that mark until 1:48:20. That’s 16.5 km with a heart rate at least 10 bpm above what I would usually except for that pace. This should have been a red flag, but I ignored it. Primarily because it was so red, and waving so high, that I didn’t really believe it could be true.
I knew the heat would have an effect, and possibly the adrenaline from running my first ever official race (at any distance), but I wasn’t prepared for the size of the effect it had.
My average heart rate for that half-marathon PB (averaging 4:38 splits) was 169 bpm. Apart from one sudden spike that sticks out like an anomalously sore thumb and hit 173 right at the end, that 24km marathon-pace long-run segment (averaging 4:47) topped out at 168 bpm, and stuck mostly within the 162–164 range.
I knew anything over 166 bpm was a warning sign at this distance, and I knew that anything in the low 160s would almost certainly see me home in one piece.
So to be hitting 181 bpm and averaging in the mid-to-high 170s (remember, 172 is the lowest it got in that time) at 5:00 or slower was, I think, a little bit too much of a divergence for me to process. I wasn’t expecting it, I didn’t know how to interpret it, and so I just ignored it and hoped it would go away (not literally, I’m aware that heart beats are useful things to have).
3. Refueling: don’t leave all your stuff at home.
This one’s fairly self-explanatory. I came home after my marathon weekend to a bag of gels, both caffeinated and caffeine free, sat in a plastic ziplock bag on the table by my door. They shouldn’t have been there; the packaging should have been spread out in bins across Haining and their contents long returned to the soil from whence they came, at least on some level, via the intermediary of my digestive tract.
As it was, I was swigging fruit chews from a bottle the whole way round and wondering how well I was digesting and absorbing the energy from them. I couldn’t help thinking I would be suffering a lot less if I’d been forcing down specially-designed, near-luminous gloop instead.
4. The final 10 km: it takes more mental strength than the first 30.
I crashed. The numbers show that. They show I did it well before I ever got to 30 km. But what they don’t show is just how much I wanted to (and felt like I was going to have to) throw in the towel at around 32 km in. If there had been a bus for the weak-willed sat by the side of that section of road, I’d be really hard-pressed to say I wouldn’t have crawled, agonised, inside.
From roughly the 32nd to the 35th kilometre, the road left the partial, god-given shade of the tree-lined road which the marathon course otherwise followed for its entire length, and turned out onto the riverside: a flat, exposed, convection-heater strip of concrete that seemed to stretch all the way to the looming outlines of failure and despair, shimmering off in the not entirely un-immediate distance. I stopped and walked on this section, twice, it was hell.
My heart rate was now lower and roughly stable (I was putting in seven-minute kilometres or worse), but I felt badly dehydrated and lacking any energy at all.
And before you get all accusative about the dehydration, trust me, I was drinking more than enough water. Where other people were taking cups from the aid stations, I was taking whole bottles. I was the only person I saw in that whole damn race with a hydration pack on, and I took an extra bottle of Gatorade with me to the start-line to boot.
I sweat more than any human on Earth and I took that fact into account when getting ready. But water takes time to absorb, and it certainly felt like running in near 30° heat was using it up faster than I could soak it in. I might have been losing fluids, but you couldn’t fairly accuse me of ever letting my stomach get dry.
Anyway, I’m getting side-tracked, the heat was a bastard, we know that. The point is, running 20 or even 30 km doesn’t require any mental input, other than trying to stop yourself getting bored (as long as you’re in good physical shape to begin with). It’s a physical endeavour. Your brain’s mostly happy that you’re not going to kill yourself and so it merrily minds its own business and lets you abuse your body.
The final 10 or 12 kilometre stretch, at least in my case, was the point where my brain kicked in and started to have concerns. It started raising objections, it started pointedly asking what we were going to do if a bear started chasing us and we didn’t have any glycogen left to run away.
I started having doubts too. I thought I’d burnt my legs out completely. I thought I physically couldn’t run anymore. No longer was it a case of eating up the kilometres, knowing that finishing was a matter of when; now it was if, and that “if” sets off a dangerous spiral of negative thoughts. This was my first time experiencing that final psychological hurdle in a race and I didn’t respond very well.
5. The gym: weak glutes make for weak running.
It’s not just the glutes; it’s the hamstrings and the quads and the calves, but the glutes are the ones that come up most often when discussing weak muscles, and there’s a reason for that. I already knew I needed to do more leg-based gym work but it took me until the second half of my training plan before I actually built it in to my schedule.
Even then I clearly wasn’t doing enough. It’s hard to be sure just how much of a difference resistance training makes to performance, but I’m in no doubt that it’s significant, and from now on I’m going to be taking it far more seriously.
6. Illness: it happens, and there’s not much you can do to stop it.
My taper was going really well. All my metrics were telling me that my fitness was improving as my workload was tailing off. That is, until about 8 days before the race, when I came down with some sort of a stomach bug that pretty much canceled all running from that point onwards (except the fast 5 km I attempted on the first day of feeling ill).
After four or five days of the problem not showing any signs of going away (I can’t remember ever having a stomach bug last longer than about three days before), I picked up a bunch of medicine and had just started feeling better (in the comparative sense, not the absolute) by the morning of the race itself.
I’m not sure if this had a huge effect on my final performance, but it certainly had some. It also reminded me that no matter how well you prepare, your body can always throw up barriers at the worst possible times.
-Overall, I feel really good about the experience. I thoroughly enjoyed being part of an organised race event for the first time: the free t-shirts, the medals, the cheering crowds and friendly volunteers, and just the general atmosphere around the whole thing.
I’m also proud that I managed to finish, and I think my struggles in getting over the finish line have given me invaluable experience for my next marathon, because there is definitely going to be a next one, and this time, I’ll know exactly what I’m facing.
