Marathon

{{first_name|Hi}}! WE’RE BACK!!

In August I said “we’ll take a summer break for a couple weeks”…and here we are. After summer break was Labor Day weekend, the Jewish holidays, more Jewish holidays, and then the last four weeks of marathon training. It was a crazy period and I did not prioritize writing to you.¹

Now we’re restarting this thing, although I reserve the right to take more long breaks in the future! And starting next week these will go out on weekdays instead of Sunday nights. I am a procrastinator and if I post these Sunday night then I will think about it and work on it all weekend, which is not great for my focus during family time. So it will now be a mid-week moment for both of us, cheers.

A week ago I ran the NYC Marathon, which was incredible and surreal for someone who grew up hating running. I wanted to share three learnings I had that apply to anyone trying to do something big and a little crazy.

Yes running a marathon is hard, but wow, training for the marathon is way way more work. I ran ~400 miles in the three months leading up to taking a ferry to Staten Island on November 1. I got up at 5:30-6:00am for ~50 mornings to squeeze in the run before the kids went to school. I pushed through several 2-3 hour long runs by myself somewhere random in Denver even when it felt like there were so many other things I should be working on.

By the time I got to the start line on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, I knew I’d be able to finish the race. It was still wildly hard (more on that in #3) but I felt like the real labor was behind me.

This seems highly applicable to so much. Getting to the start line is actually the hard part. By the time we have taken our bodies to that point, the rest comes as a gentle organic result of what the body already knows how to do. We often frame projects and missions as getting to a certain finish line, but I wonder if we would be better served by framing it as getting to the start line - and then just putting one foot in front of the other.

It’s hard to describe how immense the energy was across the entire day of the marathon. I knew it would be huge - NYC is famous for this - but the way it affected my body exceeded what I expected.

After the bridge, you run down into Brooklyn and it’s just one big block party. And then at Mile 8 you make a sharp right turn onto Lafayette Avenue and all of a sudden it was like a dial got turned up. Yellow fences lined the road, with big old trees providing a canopy overhead. Every few hundred feet someone had set up a DJ stand and speakers on their brownstone stoop, and the crowd was 5-10 people thick throughout. They cheered so loud, leaning over the fence for high fives, they seemed like extras in a movie.

Everyone tells you to pace yourself in Brooklyn because there is still much more race left to go. But on this stretch, it seemed like there was just one pace for everyone: fast. It was like riding a raft on a big ocean swell, the energy pushing and growing and pushing and carrying and I just couldn’t slow it down if I wanted to. It made my jaw drop.

I’m trying to remember how powerful it was because in our regular lives I think we overemphasize little internal things that don’t end up mattering that much for our true energy flow. When packing for the trip I was fretting about my food plan, carb loading, minimizing my step count the day before, trying to optimize all my logistics so perfectly. I was stressed, and my wife noticed. She said “I’m pretty sure how well you feel during your run is going to have more to do with how much you can just ENJOY the experience rather than if you got your carb count exactly right the day before.”

Ah. How often in our lives do we overemphasize controlling and optimizing and perfecting because we believe that will lead to success, versus emphasizing joy, rest, and full-heartedly to the beautiful moment in front of us?

Related - I overdid it on the running gels, and starting at mile 21 my stomach started taking bloodflow from my legs and energy flow from my brain. I had to walk for chunks of the last few miles, but not because my body was tired - just my stomach had sort of shut down.

From my long training runs I knew I needed to do fewer gels/carbs than my running training program had told me to do. So I scaled back for the marathon, but because that race was so much longer than my training runs, even on the slower gel cadence I still consumed much more than I usually did. My body didn’t feel like it wanted anything in it, but I tried to force it because that was the carb consumption plan the experts had recommended.

It’s a cliche but it is apparently still something I need to do a better job with: just listen to your body, not the external voices. Especially when we are trying something new and scary, we turn toward expert advice, which is important but also must be in context with your own inner advice.

There were so many awesome signs (“It’s just a 5K, why would I deceive you?” with Elizabeth Holmes’ face) but my favorite was a huge cardboard square that just said AI COULD NEVER.

It made me giggle in how that message is both absurd and profound at the same time. In this tech-y age, with computers in pockets and on wrists, chips on our bibs, fresh off our snazzy app-based training plans, we could easily get swept up in all the data and performance elements - the calories, the steps per minute, the negative splits.

But the marathon was for me a reminder of the astonishing human-y stuff: the collective effervescence on Lafayette Avenue, how porous my body felt when the cannon went off at the start line, how my pace quickened when a stranger cheered my name, the surprise tears that burst up and out from the big lump in my throat as I stepped across the finish line. The sun had set but there was enough light to glimpse all the teary faces around me and I’ve never felt so much love for so many strangers.

Have a beautiful week - whatever you’re up to, I hope you can bring to it the ENERGY and AWE it deserves!!