Marathon

Let’s start with the day before. I went swimming with lil bro, and then I had a picnic, I ate 4 pizzas there. Now I’m going to sleepover at my buddies house and then marathon in the morning. It’s like 11 PM, and I haven’t ate since the 4 pizzas and I need to do a whole marathon tomorrow so we get another pizza. I don’t know what it was the but the pizza was amazing. I ate 4-5 slices that night. We went to bed at 12 AM, the run is at 7 AM, we’re up at 5:30 because my friend lives on an acreage 30-40 mins out of the city. Total pizza count it 8-9 pizzas, but the whole idea was that I would fully digest and take a dump with the aid of coffee. Plan did not work, and now I’m Jess + 9 pizzas (5ish hours of sleep) deep into the race, and that’s how it started. I could hear my stomach grumbling while I ran, but I literally couldn’t do anything about it. 🤢 🍕

I’ve done a half marathon before, essentially you just keep running, not much to it. I feel like any individual that is active can bang out a half marathon. I didn’t have a good time or anything but I finished nonetheless. That was the mindset going into the race, just don’t stop running no matter what. The whole point was to just finish the race, because I didn’t train enough to even wish for a time. I’m 26km, running at around a 6:45-7:00 pace, and if you don’t know pace standards, thats not very good, but I’m still finishing. I’m literally seeing people that are visibly less fit than me, just straight passing me. I’m talking people much older and much heavier, so it’s starting to get into my head but whatever I’m still going to finish.

26 km the cramps started coming in, the muscle behind my knees began seizing up I could no longer extend my feet comfortably. At this moment, the pain was bearable, and I thought okay the time is going to suffer a little, pace was around 8:00, but 7 * 8 = 42 so I could still do this. It must’ve been around 30km when I thought there is 12km LEFT. I just want to quit, like I’m going to hurt myself. Then I thought about Jeric, how is this guy going to lookup to someone that quits? like it only seemed like I was going to hurt myself and I know that a marathon will slowly wear you down so I still had a little bit of fight in me, so it turned into a one step in front of the other mindset. Around this time I ran out the Maynard gummy things that kept me going, every 1 km I would snack on 3 of them and it tasted so good. ( I thought this was genius because reward-incentive bias) 🤓

35km My left foot is starting to hurt, and I have experience with this pain. This is the EXACT same pain I felt in the right foot for a couple weeks before I broke it. This was quite sad, I would have to sit out, because breaking a foot is not a fun experience. I’m like okay I’ll walk a kilometer, so I walk a kilometer and I started slowly jogging, it still hurt but this is doable, and its faster than walking. I do that for a couple kilometers, and this is when I started going into my head.

38km The jogging was working before, but now my quads and every other part of my legs started to stiffen up, they were cramping and hurting. The foot was hurting, but the cramping was getting to me too. I had to sit down, I wished I had a foam roller, but I lightly stretched to sooth the pain, and begin slowly walking again. This is when I started limping, I’m not sure what caused the limp, but since my right foot was hurting, I modified my jog into a limp jog, and now it caught up to me.

39 km At this point I fully gave up running, I wasn’t going to run anymore. First reason was that I might actually break my left foot. Second reason was I literally could not push through the pain. People were stopping all through this and saying can you keep going? I’ve literally been limping for like the past 5 kms. There’s people going around the track on bicycles making sure I don’t break, and every time I told them “Hey my left foot is hurting but I’m gonna finish the race”. They said “Okay no worries you if you need anything let me know”. At this point there’s like 3 kms left.

A lady is beside me, and she tells me you got it, this other guy behind me Samuel, ran past me and we chatted for a bit and told me I got it. Now at this point, I’m literally thinking of everything. I thought to myself, I will never find a wife if I don’t finish this. I am literally unlovable, anything you can imagine I probably said to myself. Then behind me I see 6 hour pace runner, and I need to run, because I thought for some reason, she was tagging people out of the race. In my head if she passed me I literally loose not just the marathon, but everything in life.💔

I’m not sure what the fuck happened, but I started to run again, and I see all these people that passed me before Samuel, Blake, Jack. I see these guys and I’m yelling the 6:00 hour lady is coming bro we have to run. This guy slowed down and I yelled at him. Both those guys ended up passing me after, but I kept going. The end was near, I couldn’t even believe I was running, I was worried that my foot would break. My mom would never let me hear the end of it. I checked my pace after, and in that last km my pace was 6:23/km faster than my first 20kms. I wanted to sprint the last bit, but I didn’t have it in me, I didn’t want to break my foot. That’s how I knew I left it on the field, and then I got a banana ( a.k.a double na), got a water called it a day, ended up still finishing 6 hour 23 mins, so the pacer was off by 20 mins 😡 .

Analysis

During the whole race, there were people encouraging me. They could see my name on my bib, and they said “ Jess , you got this”, that went along way. Then I realized I should probably live my life in this fashion where I just persevere towards my goals instead of changing them all the time. That’s something I struggle with personally, if I just had one goal and worked towards that I would have been much better off, but I’m still figuring it out. Even in relationships too, My friend gave me this parallel between a startup and a marriage, it might get ugly, and it might be good sometimes, but the whole point is to stay in it no matter what.

Shoutout to Adven Villa for the mid-marathon interview. I don’t know him that well but he seems to be very hardworking he has like 400 videos uploaded on youtube. 📣 🐐.

https://www.youtube.com/@advenvilla

Please check out his podcast.

Shoutout Meckyle, never would have done it without him and I honestly love this guy. 🫶