Everyone’s hot-taking the sub-2 marathon right now. Don’t do that with your own race.
If you’re new to running/racing or you’re avoiding the news like I do, you may have missed that someone (two people!) broke 2 hours in the marathon. Everyone is writing about it and giving their hot takes, analysis, opinions, etc. I’ll share my own thoughts on the sub-2 madness down in section 3, plus two takes that are slightly different than the generic Runner’s World commentary. Stick around for that.
It’s running race season everywhere in the world (even here in Sydney, Australia, where the seasons are backward from the Northern Hemisphere, all the races start in April, ironically). And with race season comes race analysis. I’m fine with looking at the data after the race to see where you’ve improved; that’s not the problem. The issue is the timing and looking at it too close to the conclusion of your race.
I’m guilty of it as much as all the runners I coach are (and probably you, too). To avoid this, I’ve adopted the rule that you need at least 48 hours after a race to really let it chill out before you get hyper-analytic with the metrics.
Take Brenton… I coached and paced him last year to go sub-3 in the marathon. This year, he ran a 45-second personal best, and missed breaking 3 hours by 3 seconds. THREE… SECONDS! If he opened Strava 20 minutes after that race (which he did before I told him not to and had AI analyze everything for him), what story do you think he told himself? Definitely not the one about a 45-second PB.
There’s a thing in psychology called the Affect Heuristic. Basically, your current emotional state hijacks how you read facts. When you’re gutted right after a race, every data point starts looking like evidence for that feeling. The numbers don’t change but the story you layer on top of them does.
We discount our emotions (looking at you, men!), but how you feel actually is the first thing you should address. When you look at the data, you’re mixing objective analysis with your feelings, and things get weird. You get mad at yourself for doing x, and then overlook the non-quantifiable data things you did for y. The numbers are only half the story, and then the story we layer on top of the numbers is what sticks.
So before you start telling yourself the wrong story based on the same numbers that could tell you the right story, do the following:
- Instead of breaking down what went wrong (usually what we do), just let it be.
- Don’t go into Strava or your smartwatch and analyze your metrics.
- Force yourself to journal, meditate on, or think about all the positive things that went well or that you did (even seeing something on the course is a positive if nothing else).
- Try to do it for a minimum of 24 hours, but I like 48 hours to really “feel the feels”.
Try it on your next run, hard workout, or long run, and reply back to me to let me know how it went.
PS – If you’re wondering what a 1:59 marathon has to do with your 4:30 marathon, it’s more than you’d think. click here to find out.
