Running with the Pack Read Free

Zatopek, the great Czech distance runner of the 1950s, once said: ‘If you want to run, run a mile. But if you want to experience another life, run a marathon.’ I wouldn’t know, I’ve never run a marathon before. But it does strike me that my training for the marathon did tend to follow the general contours of life: a promising, but essentially misleading, start — and then it all went downhill. There are around 52,000 steps between here and the finish line, and I have no idea if I’m going to be able to complete more than a hundred of them.
    It had all been going so well. In fact, I clearly remember boring my wife with interminable commentaries on how I had utterly nailed the preparations for my first marathon. It’s not that difficult, really. Most people can run a marathon if they put their mind to it. But, there again, most people are far too sensible to want to put their mind to it. If you are already running around twenty miles a week — say four runs of five miles each — then you are only about four months away from being able to run your first marathon. In fact, I wasn’t even running that much when I started my preparation. The cornerstone of this preparation is what is known as the ‘long run’. This will typically be done on a weekend. The week is then reserved for shorter, faster runs. I started with three short runs of four miles during the week. The short runs always stay relatively short — when my training was in full swing, I was running six miles, eight miles and six miles during the week.
    The long run is really the key to training for a marathon. On the long run, you keep your pace down to something that allows you to hold a conversation, or would allow you to do this if there were anyone else there. I run only with my dog, Hugo, who is not the best conversationalist. For me, that pace was just a little over five miles an hour. Then, holding this pace more or less constant, you gradually build up the distance, week by week, mile by mile. The first, and rather inglorious, long run of my training regime was a pathetic six miles. In my defence, this was September in Miami: the temperature was in the mid-nineties and the humidity made it seem ten degrees hotter than that. People who have never run before in serious heat and humidity are shocked at just how much more difficult it is. I know I was. Your heart and lungs have to work so much harder just to keep you cool in thoseconditions. Sometimes, I would find myself sucking in air, like I had just come off the back of a series of sprints. But I slowly built up the distance — an extra mile per week, give or take. That, I suppose, was not as easy as it sounds. Every week, the last extra mile was a killer. I ran it if I could, I walked it if I had to. The key was simply to stay on my feet and keep moving forward. By early December 2010, I had my long run up to twenty miles — and for a marathon virgin like me, the long run never really goes above twenty miles. I was set.
    There were still two months to go until the race, and so I did what I usually do in these situations: I broke my own cardinal rule. When I first decided to run this race, I told myself in no uncertain terms that I was not going to even think about times. This was my first marathon, and my goal was simply to negotiate the 26.2 miles without dying. Whatever you do, Mark, I told myself, just focus on that. You’re not young any more — less than two years to the big five-o in fact. Your goal is simply to finish. Don’t get caught up in anything else. But then December arrived, I was running twenty miles without too much difficulty and I started thinking. I could fit in another five or six of these long runs before race day, even allowing for the tapering-down in the final few weeks of training. I could really work on getting the times down. I could not only run this race, I could run a respectable time. Maybe not four hours,