The marathon training mindset
And unrelated: What to look for in a crumb cake
I’m writing this as I sit on the couch and eat ice cream for dinner. I should eat something more nutritious but I just cleaned the apartment after putting my baby to bed, and the thought of creating more of a mess from cooking an actual meal is just too much. I think the TikTokers would call this a “girl dinner” but I hate that term so so much.
I’m in the thick of marathon training right now and boy am I TIRED! If all goes according to plan, I’ll be running Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota in less than six weeks. A lot of non-running nerds ask me why I’m going to Minnesota to run a marathon and the answer is that Grandma’s is a fast course at a time of year when the weather should be decent in that neck of the woods. You can’t really count on good marathon weather anymore—and I’m now moderately concerned that Canadian wildfires will ruin the day—but it’s out of my control.
What’s in my control is the training. This is the ninth marathon I’ve trained for, and I’ve hit the point of the cycle where I remember two things: it takes over your life and it’s hard. That first point is probably the single most important thing to know before you commit to a marathon. It’s a real time suck! Last week, according to my Strava, I spent more than 8 total hours running. That’s a solid night of sleep if you ask me.
No matter if you’re a beginner or advanced runner, the cornerstone of marathon training is “time on your feet,” a training principle that manifests itself with a weekly long run increasing in distance from 10 to 22 miles. I don’t find the typical long run physically that hard, but mentally and logistically, it’s a drag. I try to frame it as my alone time, a period when there are no demands on me and I can recharge and listen to Taylor Swift and showtunes. In that regard, it’s quite nice! But there are a lot of other things I’d rather do for 2.5 hours on a Sunday morning. I also find the anticipation of it all-consuming. All day Saturday, I think about how I have a long run the next day. Will I get enough sleep? Will the weather be bad? What will I listen to? Where should I run? Do I have plans after that I need to get ready for? After I finish the run, I very briefly feel a sense of accomplishment for getting it done, but then I turn into a zombie until bedtime.
I haven’t run a marathon in more than two years, and in that time away, I romanticized what training would be like. Now that I’m back in business, I’m reminded that it is far from glamorous. It’s running home from work with your laptop and clunky shoes in a backpack. It’s going on your run in the pouring rain because that’s the only time you can do it. It’s having a poop attack across from Hustler Club on the West Side Highway and finishing your run on the treadmill. (It’s hard to talk about long distance running without talking about GI issues.) That’s all to say: marathon training makes you tough… and knowledgeable about the public bathrooms in your city.
I’ll share more of my training if that interests you, but for now, I’ll leave you with these before and after pictures of a recent run home from work. The runmute was more pleasant in the pre-pandemic days of leaving your laptop at the office.
Baked Good of the Month
I tried the crumb cake from William Greenberg Desserts (Exhibit A) and it was just fine. I expected it to be New York-style with a tightly-packed powdered sugar topping (like Exhibit B, from Tal Bagels), but it seemed more like a German streusel cake. I prefer a thick crumb topping that’s soft and buttery rather than hard and crunchy, and the WGD CC fell into the latter camp. It was a far cry from the one at Zabar’s, which is my gold standard for crumb cake (Exhibit C; the only photo I have of the Zabar’s CC is a selfie from when I was 40 weeks pregnant. Why did I take this?!)
Run of the Month
When I’m training for a marathon, I try to make a few of my long runs into sightseeing runs. This is nice for the obvious reason that it spices up the scenery of the run. The downside is that if the route has lots of traffic lights, as many of mine do, the time waiting at them becomes infuriating. I mapped out a 17-mile route last week that took me from the Upper West Side into Long Island City and Brooklyn, then back into Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge. It was nice to get out of Central Park and see neighborhoods I hadn’t been to in ages, but I clocked 25 total minutes of idle time waiting at traffic lights/checking my map/dodging tourists. Luckily I had the luxury of time as I took the day off work, but I don’t usually have the patience for that kind of dillydallying on a run.
That’s all for this month!
TTYL,
Elaheh