“How many days do you get to finish it?”
That’s my first question. I’m away on a multi-day training course, and someone I’ve only just met has told me she’s training for Ironman. I don’t know what Ironman is, so she explains. A 2.4-mile open water swim, then 112 miles on a bike, then a full 26.2-mile marathon.
One day, she says. If you’re not done inside 17 hours, technically you haven’t finished at all.
I look at her and think, she looks normal. What she’s describing sounds superhuman. And if she can do that, maybe I can run a half marathon.
... if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), Conclusion
Most people remember the dreams part of that line. The bit I love is the two conditions in front of it. You advance confidently, and you live the life you’ve imagined. The moving comes first. The success turns up after.
Picked last, signed up first
My dad ran a half marathon when I was about 12. I was the kid at school who got picked last, or close to it, for every sport going. Running 13.1 miles wasn’t something I’d ever pictured myself doing.
At this point I’m 37 and feeling fitter and healthier than I have for a long time. So I go home and sign up for the Great South Run (it’s ten miles, a bit short of a half marathon). Straight after, I’m on Facebook telling my friends what I’m doing and asking them to sponsor me.
There’s one small problem. I haven’t done any training. I haven’t run at all.
Breathing like Darth Vader
The next day I put a pair of trainers on and step out of my front door. I can’t run a mile. I’m breathing harder than Darth Vader, and I’m sweating so much it looks like I’ve just stepped out of the shower. I’m nowhere near race ready. I’d just been naively confident that I might be.
That confidence had already done something useful, though. It had raised the sponsorship, and everyone I knew had seen me say I’d do it. I wasn’t backing down. I was going to run those ten miles whatever it took, so I put the training in. On the days I didn’t want to go out, it was the public commitment that got me out of the door.
By race day, in October 2012, it felt pretty comfortable. I finished in 1 hour 23 minutes and 45 seconds, and I’m pretty sure I crossed the line with a bit of a smile on my face.
So what does advancing confidently mean if you don’t feel confident? I didn’t. What I had was a decision, and enough people knew about it that backing out would have cost me more than the training. In plain words, you take the step before you feel ready, then make it hard to step back.
Ten miles, then 3.1 more
That race wasn’t the end of it. If anything it was the beginning. Once I’d done ten miles, I knew I could find another 3.1 and run a half marathon. After my first half I thought, “Well, maybe I can do a full marathon.” The same year I ran my first half, I ran 26.2 miles in Edinburgh.
After that it was, “What next?” The following year I ran my first ultramarathon. It was billed as 100 miles and turned out to be 107.
There’s a lesson in that one too. On race day I didn’t feel like I had 100 miles to go. I felt like I’d already run 100 miles and just needed to get to the end. Unless an injury was bad enough to force me out of the race, I was getting to the finish, whatever it took.
That’s the second half of Thoreau’s line for me: living the life you’ve imagined. You hold the vision so clearly that you believe it’s done already, and then you do whatever’s necessary to cross that finish line.
If you want to know where my running really started, I wrote about the year I ran my dad’s race.
And if you could put your name down for one thing before you feel ready, what would your ten-mile race be?
