In his book, The Science of Hitting (a great book, btw), Ted Williams describes hitting a baseball as “the hardest thing in sports”. I got cut from my High School baseball team, so I’m not really qualified to assess that claim, but running a competitive marathon seems like it ought to be up there.
While it may sound self-serving for me to say that running marathons is harder than running ultras, the truth is that it would better suit my vain interests to claim the opposite. After all, I’ve never finished better than fourth overall in a marathon while I’ve won four 100-milers. Obviously, if the goal is simply to cover the distance, the longer the race, the harder. But, when you bring performance into the equation, things change. The way to optimize performance in an ultra is to constantly adjust to what your body is giving you. Optimal performance in a marathon is the opposite: ignore the body and accept the pain. My thesis is informed by a simple fact of introspection: when I just don’t feel like I’m up to a marathon – I register for an ultra.
I’ve been doing a lot of that over the last five years. Age is a reality that is increasingly difficult to deny. After finishing sixth in my age group at Chicago in 2018, I turned in a couple top-10 overall performances in regional marathons and set my sites on cracking the top 5 AG to bring home some hardware from a world major at Chicago, 2020. Well, we all know what happened that year.
By the time COVID was gone, I was dealing with heart trouble. By the time that was gone, well, I was old. Sure, I got a new age group in 2023 and a week later took a third in 60+ at Leadville, but marathon fitness was gone. I tried to get it back in 2024 with little success. I was still placing (and, in a few cases, even winning) ultras, but I simply couldn’t get back to running marathons well.
So, here I was at age 61 asking myself if I really wanted to do marathons anymore.
Yes.
And this is what I learned.
Show up ready
Well, duh, you have to train for these things. But, as I looked back over the training logs of the last five years, I noticed that there was not one instance of properly executing a full 18-week cycle AFTER laying down an adequate base. I came close on a few occasions, but there were always missed workouts that seemed like they were probably important.
Looking closer, the apparent reason was that I didn’t have a sufficient base coming in. I never used to worry about that for two reasons: 1) running 4-5,000 miles a year, I almost always did have a sufficient base and 2) I was very good at managing setbacks. As I hit my late 50’s, little setbacks that used to take me out for a few days started becoming significant obstacles to training. As such, my total mileage dropped precipitously; last year I only managed 2,400 miles (with another 5,000 on the bike).
For many athletes, that would be fine, but that’s just not the way my body works. If I don’t have a lot of base, I break pretty easily once the intensity gets turned up. That, of course, further limits your base and creates an even greater chance of a setback. The result was that I was not adequately trained to even begin a serious marathon cycle and starting one anyway just made things worse.
After a dismal spring and summer in 2024, I took some time off in the fall to try to get myself healthy (again, this dealing with injuries thing is pretty new to me). By December, I had a dozen weeks of decent base and no injury issues, so it seemed that putting together a real cycle for the Greater St. Louis Marathon was just a matter of getting past not wanting to end workouts in tears twice a week for the next three months.
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| 36 Quality workouts |
Bring some support
Every single time I’ve been under 3 hours in a marathon, someone I loved was there with me. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Running a good marathon is a deep emotional experience. It’s helpful to know there’s someone there to catch you at the end. After 31 years of marriage, Kate is understandably past the point of being impressed by my efforts but she still likes a good night out. So I bribe her by taking her to dinner at Lombardo’s and then we spend the night upstairs in the Drury across from the start line. She has a friend who runs the hospitality tent for Lockton (a major sponsor of the race) so she’ll have some good food and company while waiting for me to show up.
I get up at 4 so I can eat breakfast and get in my pre-run with a solid 2-hour break before the 7AM start. The pre-run is something I’ve been doing for quite some time, but I’ve found it’s getting more important with age. It just takes longer for my body to wake up in the morning. It’s just an easy jog of 3 miles or so; particularly pleasant on this cool morning. I wander past the Arch and Ballpark Village, both of which take on a completely different air in the darkness with nobody around. I relax for a bit, change into my racing kit, and then walk over to the start area, remembering to bring a chair for Kate.
I start my warmup at 6:15 because the RGA Runners Club is taking a photo at 6:40. (For those who may be wondering, I am NOT the fastest runner from RGA; Tony Galanti, one of our younger actuaries, is on hand and ready to lay down a sub-32-minute 10K that will get him second overall at that distance). After the picture, I have enough time to jog another mile and run my usual six striders before getting into the corral. St. Louis being a mid-sized affair, I still get the pleasure of an A-corral seeding.
Start mindfully
OK, are we ever going to start this thing? Yes, yes, but there’s a reason I’ve spent so much time on the prelude. There are two attitudes you can bring to a marathon as you age: limit the damage or embrace where you are. The last 10 years, I’ve been focused on limiting the damage. My PR was at age 48 (which reflects that I really didn’t take marathons very seriously until I was 40). For the first half of my 50’s, I was basically refusing to accept that age was a thing, running the same workouts at the same paces and at age 55 I was only three minutes slower and still breaking 3 hours.
So, it worked until it didn’t. But, once it didn’t, it really didn’t. I would plan to run a workout designed for 3-hour pace, say 8x800@2:56. After a couple it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, so I’d switch to 400’s at 88 instead. I could do that, but it was no longer intervals, it was speedwork. Similarly, my “marathon” pace runs were more like tempo runs. Tempo runs were more like cruise intervals. One could squint at the actual workouts on paper and say they were comparable to the plan. But, reality was that, rather than getting a well-tuned mix of quality workouts, I was running almost everything at less distance and the wrong speed. I was showing up at the start line thinking I was much better prepared than I really was. And it showed.
Part of knowing was another habit I’ve had for quite some time but is more important when you are struggling with assessing your capabilities: I raced a 5K the weekend before. Raced it. Hard. Not only does this give you an indisputable measure of fitness (only a 3K is better for assessing VO2max and good luck finding one of those), it’s a pretty good reminder of just how quickly a pace can get hard. I ran 6:40, 6:44, 6:35 splits and, while those used to be typical opening splits in a marathon, now that last mile was total redline. That gave ample incentive not to overcook the first mile today. But, it also made the correct marathon pace seem exceedingly comfortable by comparison. Doing it 25 more times seemed like an OK idea.
Quit eatin’ so damn much!
Sorry for the rather dated Chris Rock reference but as I approach the 3-mile mark the short but steep climb off the river reminds me that I probably could have done a better job of following his diet. I did manage to weigh in at 169 this week, but it was the first reading under 170 in quite some time. The fact that I lose ten seconds to those around me confirms that my ideal weight is still around 165.
I don’t panic and firming up the pace just a bit has me back in the 1:40 pace group in another mile. (There’s no 3:20 group for the full, so I’m hanging with the half-marathon pacer). It’s a whole post on its own, so I won’t elaborate here but, I train for three surges in a marathon. So, there’s no real damage done other than the obvious: I now only have two surges left and there are quite a few hills to come.
Use the field
Why stress over 10 seconds? Well, as I’ve said in other posts, as soon as you stop caring about seconds, you start giving away minutes. Additionally, in a marathon, who you run with matters quite a bit. I have several top-10 marathon finishes where I was pretty much running alone after the first few miles, but I don’t expect any more. Further deep in the field, there is almost always someone to run with. And, if you pay attention, you can usually find someone better than you. Especially in the early going, it’s foolish to turn that down.By “better”, I don’t simply mean “likely to finish ahead of you”, though, that’s part of it. I’m suggesting that, if one was to take a slice of the field at mile 10; say, 15 people who come through between 75 minutes and 75:30, around 10 of them are probably overcooking it and have no chance of finishing under 3:20. Another 2 or 3 (including me, in this case) are on pace, but vulnerable to messing up because this is at the limit of what they can do. The remaining few are cruising. Maybe they are running this one for training. Maybe they are running with a friend who needs their help. Maybe they are the 1:40 half pacer whose marathon PR is 2:55. Point is, they are better than this and since they are not right on the razor's edge, they are running very accurately.
It's true that GPS watches have assumed much of this role. If you don’t mind looking at your wrist every minute, it is entirely possible to stay on pace (until, of course, you simply can’t). However, the watch doesn’t know that you’re going up a 0.5% grade. It doesn’t know that there’s a slight headwind. It doesn’t know that you just lost 3 seconds grabbing a gel at the last feed zone. Being a slave to the watch is certainly better than running randomly but having some good runners to check that against has real merit.
There are real performance benefits, too. You can drop in behind them when running into the wind (if it’s a particularly strong wind, you really should offer to share the load, though runners who don’t also bike might not pick up that you are “wheelsucking”.) The psychological benefits are real, too. Seeing someone do something confidently helps get past the doubt that this might all go badly.
As our group gets to 10 miles (and a small detour to miss a sinkhole that has eaten an entire street and made national news) I’ve picked out five. Two of them (the pacer and another woman) are in the half, so they won’t be much use. We’re a couple minutes ahead of 1:40 pace, so the pacer is going to have to back off a bit. The woman, on the other hand, is digging in for the last 3 miles and drops her pace to 7:15, which is way faster than I need to be going right now. Three other women are in the full and, from the fact that they are chatting the whole time, I’m willing to assume they running within themselves. The fact that four of the five “betters” are female doesn’t surprise me at all. Without engaging in culture wars, I’ll just state that the empirical evidence from the hundreds of races I’ve run over the last 50 years points to women being a lot better at pacing than men. As the 1:40 group starts to splinter, I fall in with them.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t last for long. Mile 12 is ever so slightly downhill, so I don’t mind seeing it pass in 7:22. But, as the road flattens into downtown, they hang on to that pace. Maybe their plan was to get to work once the half split off. I’d really like to stay with them because we’re about to cross the Mississippi and the bridge might be windy. I burn another surge to stay with them but decide I probably can’t afford the interest on the charges I’m making and let them go. I hit the half in 1:37:36, which is about a minute faster than I’d like, but I also know that the second half of the course is considerably tougher, so this is probably in line with being just under 3:20.
The wind is light and directly out of the north, so the east-west out and back to Illinois on the Eads bridge is not a problem on my own. And, as the route snakes through the Gateway Arch grounds, I suddenly have a companion that brings more motivation than I want.
Last year, I was the 3:40 marathon pacer for this race. As such, it was with some surprise that I found that I had actually won my age group. A marathon of this size usually has some fast old guys. Well, this year it does as 64-year-old Donald Demetriades from Montana pulls up alongside me. So much for any ideas of jogging this one in. The next 10 miles are going to be a fight.
While well marked, the course is easily the most complicated route I’ve ever run and at the end of mile 17, we hit the same hill we ran at mile 3. Donald, who probably weighs 40 pounds less than me, opens a fair gap. I’ve never pulled off a successful surge after mile 20 so now is obviously the time to burn the last one. Once again, it takes a full mile to close the gap, and this time hurts a lot more.
Just past 18, we pass a friend of his and Donald calls out, “check the shoes!” It’s a detail I had also noticed…
All in
A brief diversion, which I assure you has a point. 30-year-old me had nearly every conceivable advantage over 61-year-old me. Higher VO2max, better lactate clearing, faster recovery time, and, most importantly, was a lot more likely to get pissed off when someone passed him (I still don’t like it; but 30-year-old me was a real jackass). Endurance might be a tie, but there’s only one area where I have a clear advantage over my former self: I have a lot more money.
I wore the original model at Chicago in 2018 and did some testing to see how much they really helped over traditional racing flats. I concluded it was probably around 2 seconds a mile. Six years of R&D later, this version is better; maybe 3 seconds a mile. That doesn’t sound like much, and it’s not. That is, until you are at your limit running side by side with your competition. Three seconds a mile turns that into a fairly comfortable 1-minute gap by mile 20.
The problem is, Donald is wearing the exact same shoes (including the flames). So, there are no excuses on either end. When he makes his comment, I take the bait. “Us old guys need every advantage we can get,” I reply. He chuckles as much as one can at mile 18 of a marathon.
Stick to the plan
There is another advantage of age: I’ve been here before. Many times. As much as I feel like I could explode at any moment, I’ve felt this before and not, in fact, exploded. Coming up with a good finish is my stock in trade. To the point that I have very specific criteria for what constitutes finishing strong.
I have run negative split marathons, including one run in 3:00:16. But, all my sub-3’s as well as other good finishes on courses too tough for me to break 3 were slightly positive. I would typically hold pace through 18 miles, give a few seconds back between 18 and 21, then finish at about 10 seconds per mile off pace resulting in a second half about a minute slower. I believe this is the natural result of shortening my stride as things tighten up while keeping my cadence constant.
So far, 13 of 18 miles have been between 7:25 and 7:35 (the exceptions being the 2 hills and 3 surges) and my watch says my average is 7:32. This is the part of the race where things really get hard, so I decide that I will do everything I can to stay under 7:40 all the way through 21. The fact that mile 23 is entirely uphill is a problem I’ll deal with when I get there.
Donald hangs tough and we run side by side through 19 but he drops back a few steps through 20. There’s a small climb halfway through 21 and, when he doesn’t close back up, I take it as a sign that he might be fading. Holding this pace for another mile doesn’t seem realistic if I’m going to have anything for the long hill, so I back it off to 7:50 for 22. There’s a sharp turn onto the grade of 23 which affords an opportunity to check the gap. I can’t see him, so it seems I’m clear by at least 30 seconds. I don’t know where he started so he might still be ahead on chip time. Of course, there’s really no strategy at this point. With only 30 minutes remaining, you just go with what you got.
Let go of the plan
As expected, mile 23 is the slowest of the race at 7:56. As I try to get back on pace, my right hip flexor is flashing red warning lights. It’s looking good for both the sub-3:20 and the age group win, but a torn muscle would put an end to all of that. I back it off for 24 (flat) and 25 (back down the hill) and it shuts up enough that I get in a respectable 7:38 for the last full mile. I’ve given away three minutes in the second half instead of one, but I’ve also averted disaster. I won’t call it my best finish, but it will do.
So, my love-hate relationship with marathons continues. They may not be the hardest thing in sports but, given that I’ll never learn to hit a baseball at this age, they’re the hardest thing I can do. And, I’ll continue to do them until I can’t.
