The next most important thing: Lessons from running the New York Marathon
Just a quick note before we jump in - I’d like to recognize and thank the incredible communications teams at Classroom Champions and the NY Road Runners for elevating the topic of mental health and raising valuable funds of over $100,000 to help schools bring Classroom Champions Mentorship and Curricular programs to their teachers and students through my participation in the NY Marathon. To Greg Bishop at Sports Illustrated, Seth Rubinroit at NBC, Adam Mendler, and more, thank you for using your giant light to illuminate the topic. And a special thanks to Genevieve Adams and Brooke Simpkins for helping to make this Instagram novice’s social accounts come alive! (Photo courtesy of NYRR)
A marathon is hard. I did it, but for some reason, likely ego!, it was harder than I thought it would be. And I thought it would be really, really hard.
I completed the New York Marathon a little over a week ago and if I ran one minute faster I probably wouldn’t have made it to the finish line.
Readers of this site know that I never imagined that I would, or could, run a marathon. Today, I’m happy to report that a) I did not die, and b) that my experience was amazing, including being difficult and painful in ways I never expected.
I’ll sum it up this way: Occasionally, life hands us an opportunity to prove to ourselves that we are the person we strive to be. In these rare moments, we test our mettle and find out if we really can live up to the standards we set for ourselves.
For me, the New York City Marathon on November 5, 2023 was one of these moments. Particularly from mile 15.5 to the Finish.
But I’m jumping ahead. Let me retrace my steps a bit.
Picture this: It’s a gorgeous, unseasonably warm November morning. A little too warm, actually — but I’ll get to that.
I rock up to the starting line feeling great after a solid, albeit shorter than recommended, 12-week training plan that I took very seriously. (And a huge shout out to Stuart Lieberman and Emily Heine with the NY Road Runners for making the experience so seamless.) My plan for the race is to run at a comfortable 4-hour marathon pace for the first half, and then pick up speed, aiming for a negative split. My goal is to finish in about 3 hours and 55 minutes — a reasonable goal given my level of training.
Before the race I’m enjoying my old bobsled pre-race ritual of just walking around the start, taking in the sites and enjoying the surroundings. One of the most enjoyable people I meet during that time is YouTuber Casey Neistat, who also happens to be a 3-hour marathon runner. So, a complete beast.
Now — there are six major marathons across the world. Boston, I’ve been told, is the most prestigious given how difficult it is to get in (and complete), and New York is the most coveted because of the scale: 50,000+ runners covering all five boroughs of the city. Most races start with a gun or a horn; New York opens with a cannon blast. Yes, a CANNON.
The cannon fires, and off we go. I’m ready for what’s to come and genuinely looking forward to the pain and suffering the last 5-8 miles will be on my lungs and body as I push into uncharted aerobic territory. (Prior to the race, any time someone asked if I was nervous, my honest response was, “No, I’m just curious. I’m curious what it’s going to be like to suffer for that long, and being that I’m in the best aerobic shape of my life, what it’s going to feel like to run that hard for that long.”)
For the first 8 miles, I’m feeling good. Great even. My target pace feels easy, heart rate is below where I expected. My family shows up to cheer for me at multiple points. I understand now why the NYC Marathon is considered one of the very best: there’s nothing like having 2-million people cheering you on at almost every step as you touch on every single borough of New York.
(If you didn’t catch any of the hilarious signs people were out with - here’s a great post from @WhatIsNewYork on the Insta.)
The one place where there’s no people? The bridges. Ohhhhh… the bridges. One would think New York would be an easy course, but it’s actually much hilly-er than you’d expect due to the five bridges you cross.
Back to the race: around mile 8, I notice that something is a little bit off. My HR is low and my pace still feels easy, but my core temperature is warm. I’m running hot. That’s a new feeling for me: I trained in the cool early mornings of Calgary where a typical temperature is 45 degrees F (7C), so overheating has never been an issue. New York is a bit warmer than Calgary this time of year, but I didn’t expect marathon day to bring about a high of 67 degrees F / (19C)!
Looking back, this was the moment where my distance running inexperience was detrimental. (Prior to this summer, I had never ran longer than 6 miles in my entire life.) Once I recognized that I was feeling unusually warm, I likely should have increased my water consumption, taken some salt tablets, and grabbed some of the ice bags available at the supply stations to cool my hands and help bring down my core temperature. ( FYI — I’m speculating a bit here. I plan to have multiple de-briefs with some experts about how to handle this issue in the future. I’ll be consulting the coaches I worked with — Joe Buckler and NYRR’s Ben Delaney — as well as my Olympic distance running friends.)
But in the moment, I feel fine and the vitals I can measure are right where I need them to be. So I just keep on going.
At 15 miles, I see my family one last time and head towards the bridge to Manhattan. I feel good at this point, confident that everything is lining up as it should be…
And then about 15 and a half miles in, as I’m running up the Queensboro Bridge to cross from Queens into Manhattan, I feel it: my left hamstring grabs (cramps).
No big deal, I tell myself. I stay calm. I figure I’ll just take a moment to let it settle. I stop, stretch and shake it out a little bit, and then trot slowly, hoping things will ease up.
No bueno. As I go over the crest of the bridge and start to descend, my left hamstring grabs again, along with my left quad.
Soon after that, my right quad grabs too. At this point, my legs are cramping up badly. It becomes crystal clear to me that if I don’t solve this problem, I’m not going to finish. It’s time to change the plan, quickly.
This is where the entrepreneur brain kicks in. The words of Precision Nutrition founder John Berardi jump into my exhausted brain:
“Sometimes you have to realize what the next most important problem is, and focus all of your energy there.”
In other words, I need to do everything I can to ease the muscle cramps and prevent them from getting worse — and prevent my body from shutting down altogether because if I don’t do that, anything I’d be worried about a few miles down the road won’t matter anyway.
I figure that the cramping is at least partly due to lack of hydration and energy; because my body was running hot and sweating more than expected, I need more electrolytes, salt, water, and calories to keep going. (BTW Muscle cramps are not only painful, they can be a sign that the body is overstressed and dehydrated. If you ignore this cue, you could find yourself collapsing and being dragged off the course, which happened to dozens of people I passed.)
Typically in a long run, I delicately portion out fuel (often in the forms of gels and gummies) and fluids (such as water and electrolyte drinks) throughout the race, so I don’t upset my stomach while giving myself enough energy and hydration to keep going. My typical pattern/plan is a gel every 3 miles, increasing to every 2.5 miles in the last 10 miles of the race.
But at this point, I can’t worry about rationing. I know that if I don’t get ahead of this right now, I’m not going to finish.
I believe I need to flood my system with amino acids, carbohydrates, sodium, potassium, magnesium, and water. And I need to do it right now.
I don’t have time to Google it, I just have to MacGyver it. I have to work with what I’ve got and commit to a plan. We’ve talked about this before in You don’t need a better plan - it was time to walk (/run) my talk!
I’ve never experienced cramping in my legs, and I’ve also never been in a situation where I would push through something like this. In high-performance sport, it’s not worth the risk of pulling or tearing something. When you feel something, especially something this major and painful, you stop and treat it.
But in my post-Olympic life that is now about exceeding the limits I’ve put on myself, it’s put-up or shut-up time.
So, from the 15.5 to 17-mile mark, I consume everything I have. I drink all the water stored in my water vest, along with two salt tablets and two electrolyte tablets, along with the high-carb gels and gummies I had in my pack. In total, I consume about 200+ grams of carbs and 600 milligrams of sodium, and a liter of fluids within 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, I find a pace that feels tolerable. Despite the incredible pain of running on cramping muscles, I frequently find myself tempted to go faster because aerobically I feel fine. But the marathon quickly educates me.
When I increase my pace just, say 10-seconds per mile faster by opening up my stride an inch, my hamstrings and quads fully cramp and seize. Take one step while a cramped muscle is fully seized and it will rip.
So I’m not just in pain, I’m frustrated. Running under-pace entering Manhattan where the crowd turns into 6 layers deep on both sides, going crazy, goes against all my instincts. But it’s necessary. So I stay vigilant, allow myself to recognize the frustration and then let go of it since being frustrated isn’t helping me.
At this point, my left hamstring and quad, and right quad are holding at about 90% cramped, but they aren’t getting worse. And that’s good enough for me. My plan to throw the kitchen sink at my body has paid a dividend. A pretty shitty one, but good enough to keep the lights on.
So I keep going. On cramping but not seized legs.
Every time I pass a water station, which come every mile, I slow down. I walk the whole 25 meters of the water table and drink as many half-filled small paper cups of water as I can while briskly walking. Every time I pass by a medic tent, which come after each water table, I pick up salt packets, like the kinds they have in fast food restaurants. (By the way, ever tried to eat a packet of salt with no water, just saliva? Yeah, I learned the hard way that it’s not fun.)
And since I’m out of my own fuel, I now move into my next most important problem: how to hold the10%-hanging-on-by-a-thread equilibrium I’ve established in my body. Good news is some people on the side along the race hand out food. A half a banana from a stranger? Sure, I’ll take it. Twizzlers? Great. Whatever they’re offering, I’m eating. (Turns out Twizzlers are perfect. They’re long and easy to grab and bite.)
And through all this, except maybe while trying to suck down a dry salt packet, I have a huge smile on my face.
I’m looking around, in more constant pain than I’ve ever experienced in my life, and thinking this is awesome. It sucks, it’s miserable, and it’s all my fault. I am responsible for this pain, I and I alone right now am earning it — and I love it.
Throughout the entire race, I am acutely aware:
I am running through New York City with millions of people by my side. I am pushing my limits and giving it all I’ve got.
I am suffering in ways I haven’t suffered before.
And that’s exactly what I signed up for.
I wanted to experience pushing through pain in a way that I never had before.
I wanted to push myself in a way I never have before. And sure, I was expecting the marathon to be an aerobic push, but instead I get to run through hamstrings and quads that are 90% cramped. And I get to make some interesting “succeed or not” choices and figure out how to keep going in a situation I didn’t prepare for. To me, that is pretty damn cool.
I finish the marathon at 4:16.
I can’t believe it. Somehow, with all the walking and stopping and gulping down gels and water and food from strangers, I finish only 17 minutes later than my goal. This tells me that my training was great and I was ready, and you better believe I’ll be even more prepared next time.
Of course, there’s always going to be stuff that happens that we can’t prepare for. In sport, in business, and in life, no matter how much we train and plan and prepare, there are going to be curveballs.
The questions are: Can we roll with the curveballs when they come? Can we stay calm and push through the pain and do what has to be done?
Can we make the decision we need to make (even if we don’t have all te data or information we’d like to have)?
Can we decide that just because something bad is happening to us, it does not mean we have to hate it?
If something’s happening, then it’s happening. We can’t change it, but we do get to choose the meaning we derive from it.
This time, in a way that I never have before, I chose to see the pain and suffering to mean I was putting in the work, and that made me happy.
When we can control what something means to us, we give ourselves a better opportunity to control the emotions that arise from it. The situation doesn’t dictate either, we do.
I’m proud that I did that in a moment of duress where my goal was not going to be achieved and I needed to change the plan on the fly. Having a real-world scenario of focusing on the next most important thing and choosing the meaning of it is going to help me for months at work, at home, and beyond.
And I bet you can do it too.
So… when are you going to come running with me?
Let’s go.
- Steve
