No matter whether you run or walk them, if you are a marathoner, then you probably have heard this advice more than once:
- Run your own race!
I once wrote about the same advice for any marathoner after completing a marathon. I had trained for most of the season leading up to that race by using the “1:1” form of micro-level pacing, in which one repeatedly runs for a minute and walks for a minute. But I ran the first 15 kilometers (some 9.3 miles) of that marathon without walking. And this mistake of not “running my own race” hurt my chip-time tremendously.
In summary: I ran too much of the race because I did not run my own race!
That is, I did not participate in the marathon in the same way that I had trained. Instead, I got caught up with the excitement of the crowd and ran much too much of that marathon. By the time I had reached the 13.1-mile flag, I had run nearly all of what I had planned to run for the entire marathon.
Recently, in preparation for yet another marathon, I had a 21.6-mile training route to cover. Because I started the marathoner training session with walkers but not runners and wanted some “conversational company” starting at 5 in the morning for that 21.6-miler, I ended up walking the first 13.4 miles with a walking marathoner before I switched to the 1:1 method.
- I was not surprised that my total time was much longer than what it would have been with nothing but the 1:1 method.
- I was surprised — at least in the first several hours afterward — that I developed a back ache from that session, given that I had not gotten a similar back ache from an 18-miler a few Saturdays earlier.
But then I thought about it some more and realized that I had trained my “running muscles” and “walking muscles” to alternately be engaged every other minute. I know: This is not scientific, but you get the idea. I had trained for several months to constantly mix my running and walking.
So walking the first 13.4 miles on my 21.6-mile training route was analogous to running the first 9.3 miles in the aforementioned marathon. And this leads me to a corollary piece of advice to any marathoner to “Run your own race!”:
- Run your own training route!
Let others go ahead of you or drop behind you, but stick to the way that you like to run or walk or run and walk as you cover any given training route, just as you should stick to that way during a marathon.
