Speed of Spirit
This post is, in a way, an extension of the last one. If it seems late, it's because it's arriving at the right time.
It’s been almost a month since I ran the Rome Marathon, which I started training for at the end of 2023. I’ve wanted to write about it here since then, but I needed some time to process not just the race itself, but also the three months of preparation that preceded it. So, let’s revisit the beginning of that journey.
As this was my second marathon, it was inevitable that I wanted to improve my time. I challenged myself to aim for 3 hours and 15 minutes, which seemed feasible since my first marathon took me 3 hours and 19 minutes. Now, with more experience, I had a better sense of what running 42 kilometers would entail.
With this goal in mind, I decided to turn back on the pace-setting voice that I had turned off two years ago. It had previously made me feel pressured and prevented me from fully enjoying my runs.
I quickly noticed that turning the pace-setting voice back on helped me run faster. In a sense, it was like having someone constantly urging me on, reminding me that each kilometer wasn't good enough. However, this momentum was short-lived, and one day, out of nowhere, the familiar pain in my left knee returned.
I thought it was going to be something that would be gone in 2 or 3 days, so after slowing down my pace for a week I started to feel better. I sped up again… but the pain also came back, and it stuck around for longer than I expected.
After learning the lesson through pain, I started to be more sensible and not to get carried away, but mainly I had to work on something harder: fighting the mental battle of acceptance.
As I had to slow down and even skip some runs to avoid getting any major injuries, I knew my ideal goal was gone, all I could aim was to make it healthy to race day. At the beginning seemed like a failure, almost like it wouldn’t make sense to run the race if I couldn’t do a better time than before. It was almost like I had to prove myself in front of others and get a silly Strava badge saying that I made a Marathon PR. So I had to step back and remember why I was doing this, I had to connect back to the bigger purpose of it, and it was just that, again: love.
Little by little, I’d start approaching the long runs of the prep differently, instead of being something that “I had to do” and that was disturbing my weekends, I’d wake up, brew some coffee, get some oatmeal, and write in my journal with excitement how I felt before the run, setting up the mood, being aware that I was doing that because I wanted to, because I love to. And since then, the game changed. The voice that would put pressure on me would come sometimes but I wouldn’t listen to it much, and when two weeks before the race it seemed like the pain in my knees was gone, I remember feeling a sense of gratitude I never felt before, and I held into that every run, because I knew that what mattered the most it was that I was still able to do what I love, no mattered for how far or how fast, and because I knew that the energy I now have one day will be gone, so I better had to squeeze it as much as I could.
On the day of the race I wasn’t nervous at all, I was excited but relaxed, it just felt like another weekly run, so as I crossed the starting line I just went all in with an open heart; what happened in the next 3 hours and 11 minutes can be explained with words, because it reached something almost spiritual, to the point that, the unexpected PR is the last thing I care about, yes, I’m proud of myself and it proved the hard work, but when I think about Rome and these 3 months I think about choosing to love, choosing to enjoy, choosing to stick to my spirit and not my ego.
Thanks for reading!
I’ll be releasing soon a zine about the marathon, keep an eye here if you’re interested!
Yours,
H.