Monday 23 February 2009, 8 am, overcast sky, no wind and the thermometer shows 10 degrees: certainly very good conditions for training. The warm up begins with a very soft jogging, the body is a little bit stiff although the previous day?s run was quiet; well, it?s logical, it?s been many weeks of hard training, long kilometers, series, hills and all kind of hard work. It's one more notch in your marathon training.
The minutes pass and the sensations do not improve; it is hard to breathe and it seems that the air does not reach the lungs, how strange. A few exercises and gentle stretching to see if the body stabilizes and finishes waking up. Back to jogging, but this is still the same, choking, feeling tired, unable to move forward ... what's going on? On the way home, having already finished the training, the head spins around trying to find an explanation. Overdone? Anemia? Urgent blood tests, the results of which confirm the doctor's first impression: ANXIETY. Anxiety? No, it can't be, the sensations are real, there is no strength, the suffocation must come from something else?
The rest of the week passes very slowly, with bad workouts, fatigue, discomfort that even changes zone (but is that possible?!). For Saturday the sensations improve discreetly, but the mood seems to be touched.
And on Sunday ... yes, the legs are loose, the body goes alone, with strength, with encouragement, the air enters without problems, ... the ghosts fade and the best marathon time falls.
Has it happened to you?
That happened to me on the eve of the Barcelona Marathon, but similar situations, although not with such marked symptoms, happened to me in other important races as well. To me and to many runners of all, absolutely all brands and experience.
Why does it affect some of us more than others? Why do we put so much pressure on ourselves? Why don't we know how to manage these moments? But, aren't we popular? But, please, we are not at stake.
Or maybe we are.
Of course we are, we have months of training, effort and sacrifice at stake, or rather, we are convinced that we are at stake, but in front of whom? do we have to prove anything to anyone? Can we consider it a failure not to achieve our goal? Here we would all answer no, that of course it is not a failure, that we do this for fun, that the important thing is the road we have traveled until the day of the race, that we are amateurs, popular athletes?
The famous death shit
But inside, oh my inside! The marathon has been at the top of our list of worries for many weeks before the date: if I haven't trained enough, if I haven't done enough long runs, if it bothers me here, if it hurts there.... and reaches its peak in the days before with the sum of all these symptoms in what we know in this world as the famous cagalera of death in which appear alleged, but very real, pain in the hip, knee or piramidal, we have swollen legs (or so we believe), fever, malaise, etc.. And it is not because we are experienced athletes that we manage to master this fear that something fatal is happening to us.
But why is it that the marathon is the event that produces the most anxiety?
Each runner is different and lives it in a different way and intensity; we are not sports psychologists, but from our own experience and that of other colleagues over many years we can speak of several causes:
- You can not prepare and run many a year so we have few opportunities to do so https://www.runnea.com/2013/12/cuantos-maratones-pueden-correr-82.html
- A good preparation does not guarantee success, it is a very thankless race although many of us think that this is precisely what makes it great and different.
- Doubts accompany us in every training session. If we get a good series we get excited, if we ride badly we get discouraged, if we can not train the day we get demoralized and if we can not train two days, we believe we are sunk in misery when in fact all this is part of the preparation.
- Any setback we may have in the race, however small it may be, can ruin our goal: an inopportune stop to go to the bathroom, a blister, another even more inopportune to return to the bathroom...
- And what about totally external elements such as strong wind, heat, heavy rain, etc. that we obviously cannot control or predict.
Redirecting the pressure
It is easier said than done, but this anxiety that we are accumulating day after day must be redirected so that it does not hurt us, not self-pressure and not appear somatizations that can manifest in one way or another.
If everything remains in phantom pains and nerves there will be no more problem than to spend a few bad days, but we know of cases of runners who as a result of this stress have come to have muscle injuries or other physical disorders.
And not to mention what our friends and especially our partners have to put up with because of our constant mood swings, how annoying we are when we tell our training sessions, our doubts and our oddities in detail. This would be enough for a book.
Think about what you've done
We must think positive, that those good, not so good and even bad trainings have made us stronger, that we are perfectly fine, that when the Man of the Gavel wants to come out to meet us, we will have enough strength left to send him to the gutter with a push. What's more, we don't have to be satisfied with what comes out that day, but fight for what we are sure we have in our legs as a result of our preparation.
THE MARATHON MUST BE RESPECTED, BUT NOT FEARED.
Remember that the most important thing is that when the big day finally arrives, the day we have prepared for so long, and we stand shoulder to shoulder with hundreds or miles of other runners we are convinced that not only have we done everything in our power to get to the starting line in the best conditions but we will manage to give everything to achieve our dream keeping in mind that:
The marathon is run with the legs, with the heart and with the head. Cheer up, you are going to make it, YOU ARE GREAT, VERY GREAT.
Photo: Saucony
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