The Liminal Space Between Races

There’s always a decline in motivation once you’ve hit a goal. This is perfectly natural, of course. The buildup to something like a marathon takes up so much of your time (both physical, in the act of training, and mental, in that you spend an inordinate amount of time going over plans/splits/nutrition in your head) that it becomes all-encompassing, and the actual doing of the thing is often slightly anti-climactic as a result. Rumour has it that friends and family can even become a little bored by your constant references to minutes-per-mile and how you can’t stomach gels so you’re planning on nibbling on jelly babies instead. Not my friends and family of course. I know for a fact that they relish such fascinating dinner table talking points.

Nonetheless, the event comes and goes, you hit the high of completion (or low of failure), and then you find yourself at something of a loss. It’s over, you got your medal (or didn’t), smashed your PB (or didn’t), and the world kept on turning, utterly indifferent to the hours of sweat you poured into your endeavour. You consider the next challenge (another one? An ultra?) but the neat little plan that had been snaking its way around your head over the last few months to use this event as a springboard to greater things starts to look a little frayed around the edges when you realise you’re effectively starting a new training block from the very beginning. It’s probably how Alexander the Great felt after conquering the known world by the age of 30 – where on Earth do you go from there? And if you think it’s slightly incongruous to compare running for a few hours to a decade of uninterrupted military dominance, you’d be correct – Alexander had the luxury of travelling by horseback.

And so, you quit, or at least dial it back a bit. You let the uneasy sense of purposelessness set in, and end up you doing very little in the way of training for a little longer than you would have liked. After all, surely you deserve a break? Case in point would be this blog, which I haven’t updated in a couple of weeks. After all, what was there to say? I couldn’t run for a week because I felt like someone had smashed both of my patellas with a cricket bat? I almost cried walking up the stairs?

As an experienced runner and a generally wise person, I’d attempted to mitigate the future loss of motivation by not training properly in the run up to my race, based on the ironclad logic that you can’t suffer from running fatigue if you aren’t actually running all that much in the first place. This has proved effective, and a couple of weeks on from the marathon, I’m more-or-less fully healed and, if not champing at the bit, then at least pulling gently in the direction of further challenges.

I’ve decided to hold off on any really long-distance stuff for the time being, despite immediately receiving an offer to take someone’s place in the Manchester marathon in April. I briefly flirted with the idea, but ultimately common sense won out, and I can unequivocally rule out running more than twenty miles for at least another month. Instead, I’ve decided to focus on bringing my 5k time down. I ran an 18:07 at Darlington Parkrun several years ago, and I’ve been dining out on that ever since, despite rarely coming close to replicating it. I do have a “post-child PB” of 18:27, and a “post-second child PB” of 18:53, so I do think it’s possible to get there or thereabouts again.

Unfortunately, training for speed requires a bit more specificity in workouts than I usually like to adhere to. Some people love the structured pain of the 8 x 400m repeats, or hill sprints, or fartlek. Typically, I tend to be a bit more of a “run through the woods until you’re tired” kind of athlete rather than a “stick to this training plan even if it means missing your wife’s birthday dinner” phenotype (unlike several of my peers, who shall remain unnamed).

However, while I was once able to quickly bring my 5 and 10 kilometre times down simply by upping my mileage slightly and cutting down on the takeaways for a couple of weeks, I have now reached an age at which I would no longer sign myself on Football Manager, as Virtual Phil would only have a couple of good years left in him before being put out to the sandy pastures of the Saudi league. So mile repeats and hill sprints are in, running based on vibes is out, and I’ll aim to do something semi-fast in six or seven weeks time.

And if that doesn’t work, I’ll just set off one morning and see how far I can get before having to call for a taxi.