The part of serious marathon running hardest for outsiders to understand is not the actual racing – they can relate to the pull of the glory – but all the training that goes into it. It’s one thing to go out and run twenty-six miles once or twice a year, but quite another to spend precious weekend mornings plodding along for hours at a time when any sane person would be catching up on sleep.
It’s easy to think long training runs are a ridiculous amount of something you know in moderation is good for you – a stunt like brushing your teeth for three consecutive hours or doing deep knee bends for four. Even if you basically like running, it’s easy to view long runs as simply too much of a good thing.
I have come to look forward to them, more or less. More precisely, I have come to appreciate them – not only for what they’ve done for my running but also for my life. Long runs are good for me because after them I relax. They melt anxiety. They obliterate worry. Afternoons after a morning long run are the only times I find myself able to be lazy and not feel guilty about it. I’ll watch a baseball game. I’ll listen to an opera. I’ll take a nap. And for once I don’t worry I should really be working or reading or dreaming up dumb shit for a boss.
Of course, I do not appreciate them right before I actually start them. I can always find an excuse for another sip of tea or final trip to the loo. But given the choice between racing, say, five miles in front of a crowd and running twenty miles by myself through the woods, I’ll always take the woods.
The trick to getting in your long runs is to balance routine with exploration. Routine means you get it done. Exploration means you keep it interesting. I’m a sucker for maps, and nothing has enticed me more over the years to poke around the city than the NYC Bike Map. If you want to get in twenty miles, you can really go places. The long run becomes a chance to travel.
In recent years, most of my long runs have ended up at the same non-descript shopping mall in Westchester. My wife picks me up; she likes to swim in a pool nearby. There are many different ways of getting to this spot, the shortest of which is about fifteen miles. I go on sidewalks. I go through parks, culminating in Van Cortlandt Park, which has so much terrain it’s like a Vail or an Aspen for runners. I can connect to miles of multi-use bike path, not to mention the dirt path on top of the Old Croton Aqueduct. So I mix it up, even if I’m never going any place new. Weeks when this arrangement falls through I’ll typically explore the city, running to some place I haven’t been in a while and taking the subway home.
Sidewalks are to be avoided. Suburban roads without sidewalks, or much in the way of a shoulder, are the worst, even when it’s early morning and it’s just you and the boys rushing to make tee times—cars don’t necessarily make it easy to share the road.
When given a choice, I’ll always take the route that feels will be the shortest, even though it’s not. The run itself will often indeed be a chore, like spending all morning reading or driving – when you run twenty miles, say, you get reminded twenty times that just a single mile, come to think of it, is actually a long way. You just keep adding one to the next. No mile is shorter just because it will be coming before nineteen others. Some miles will feel short because you get distracted or because you are running downhill, or, best of all, because you’re running easily but fast. Maybe three times in my life have I lost track of where I was and had the pleasure of being surprised by how far I’d gone. A million times I’ve been disappointed.
It’s important to practice marathon pace, which can also help break the monotony of a long run. Don’t go slow just because you’re running a lot further than you do normally. (If I ran my long runs at a recovery pace I’d be out there all day). So I’ll pick it up for as much as 15 miles, depending on how I feel. I do like to get these monsters over with.
It’s okay to plan on including some stops, even if you’re experimenting on running faster than usual overall. Bathroom breaks are likely non-negotiable anyway. I don’t carry water, so rely on fountains (or drinking from the faucets in open “Comfort Stations” when fountains are turned off). I will run with a gel or granola bar to give me some pep when my energy falters. I do not scientifically plan on “fueling” myself at regular intervals, first because I believe we consume food and not “fuel” and second because I trust my body’s signals more than I do pre-event calculations of caloric need. And sometimes it’s very good to practice gutting it out when you have nothing left. I will also stop at a favorite Dunkin’ Donuts, where I’ll have a quick expresso, flirt with the South Asian help wearing hijabs, and, if starving, eat one old fashioned doughnut, the nutritional limit to what I can tolerate on a run.
So I do run with some money, often a Metro Card. And toilet paper. My wife says I should carry ID in case I drop dead and they need to identify the corpse; I think this is pessimistically morbid, but do try to remember to bring her cell phone number, both so people will have a number to call if I do drop dead and also so if I do need to call her I don’t have to rely on my memory.
I carry these items in an ingenious device found in my gym shorts called a pocket.
I cannot say I’ve never run without a phone. I confess to carrying one when there is a realistic threat to my not making it – a nagging injury, too much ice, a hurricane. But my basic assumption is that I can find someone with a phone to borrow if I need one. In fact in hundreds of runs I’ve never had to do that. I rue the decline of the payphone and the quarter.
Many people join forces and turn long runs into social occasions and bonding experiences. Good for them. The number of times I’ve run long with someone to chat with? Zero. Then again, I really haven’t run with anyone since 1999.