Motivation: Mid-season blues and seeing the big picture

There comes a point when we hit the middle of the training season, when the excitement of the has worn off and we’re still a long way from the end. It’s at that point that I’ve noticed my athletes going through a sort of mid-season blues. The training runs are getting long. They’re doing a lot of running and they may be starting to feel a little bored with their long workouts.

There are lots of ways that coaches can deal with this: like mixing up the format of long runs, giving lower mileage rest weeks, and running new routes in unfamiliar places. But I’ve found that there is another element that helps to keep you going and that’s to remind you what you’re doing out there.

See it’s easy for us to forget that we’re training for marathons. These long weekend runs, even when done in groups, can be somewhat lonely and solitary endeavors. As we push along a quiet road or trail, we may be thinking that no one is watching, imagining that no one is seeing our efforts. It’s at those times that I like to focus on the marathon itself – that thing out there that you’re training for – and reflect on just what it is that you’re doing.

It starts with a little bit of history.

Sure, we’ve all heard the first part of the story – the part where the Greek messenger runs from Marathon to Athens to give news of a great victory and then promptly drops dead. (my shortened version). The next phase of the story however, starts in modern history in 1894. In a effort to try to bring the world together and foster athletics, a movement was launched to bring back the ancient Greek tradition of the Olympic games. Coming out of these initial meetings in Paris, the first games of the modern Olympics were created and would take place in Athens in 1896.

The organizers wanted to include an event in these games that would really be a test of human endurance and they choose a long-distance footrace tracing the steps from the ancient story to run the 25 miles from Marathon to Athens.

The idea, again, was to find something that really tested the human body. The ancient story had, after all, featured a messenger running so far and fast that he had actually died as a result of the effort. [See note below.] The organizers of the first games didn’t expect people to die in modern times, but they did expect this to be a major feat of athletic endurance. And people at that time really didn’t know what to expect. I suppose at that time, it would have been like most of us were in the early 1980s seeing people do the Ironman for the first time. We were in awe of this new event, because there was a sense of disbelief that anyone could do it.

So when it came time for this endurance race in 1896, the fate of these runners was somewhat of a question. Seventeen runners competed in that first race and amazingly none of them had ever competed in a race of this distance before. On top of this, a couple of the runners had even competed in the 1,500M that same morning. The 17 athletes covered the 25 miles – and none of them died doing it.

People were truly amazed by this. The raced caused such of a sensation and the next year, in 1897, the first Boston Marathon was held. The reason: people didn’t want to wait four years for a chance to try their hands at it. There were only 34 people in that first Boston Marathon. Boston has now been run for 111 consecutive years.

My point of all of this is to illuminate something that gets lost on people today. Yes, it’s true that the world’s best runners fly through marathons in under five minutes per mile. And yes, it’s true to that there will be more than 450,000 marathon finishes in the United States this year. But none of that takes away from the fact that the in human terms, the race is just as difficult as it was in 1896.

Sure we do things differently. We understand that by slowly ramping distance and running up to 20 miles in training that we will be well equipped to run the distance. Sure, the pavement is better and the shoes are better. And yes, we understand hydration and nutrition. But in human terms, we’re still taking hundreds of thousands of steps to cover 26.2 miles.

In human terms, the marathon is more incredible today than it was back then. In 1896, although the participants were inexperienced at the distance, they were all athletes chosen to represent their countries in the Olympic games. Today the multitudes of people that finish marathons are not primarily athletes. They are regular people. They are regular people that have fought off the over-whelming social pressure to watch American Idol and eat Big Macs and play PSIII. They are regular people that are doing something that a bit more than a hundred years ago, people didn’t think was possible.

In human terms, the marathon is more of a test of physical endurance than it ever was. It is steeped in the history of the millions of regular people that have wondered if they could do it – and found out they could.

Keep on running my friends. Push through these mid-season blues, set your sights on the marathon at the end of the training, and enjoy the exploration of human endurance.

Coach Joe

Running Wild with Coach Joe – a blog focused on marathon racing, training and motivation. Bookmark us at http://coachjoeenglish.wordpress.com or use your favorite RSS feed reader to get the latest news and articles. Running Wild is also now available on Yahoo! 360 and My Space.

[Note: there is a great deal of debate over the real story of the legend of Phidipedes and his runs from Athens to Sparta and Athens to Marathon. Most scholars agree that he did actually accomplish these feats, but there is a great deal of question over whether he actually died after running from Marathon to Athens. There are many great articles and books on the history of the marathon that more fully cover this aspect of the story.]