The Fear Was Real But Pointless

I joked with my wife yesterday about injuring myself on purpose. Pulling a muscle on the stairs, twisting an ankle in the garden, anything to give me a reason not to go out and do the 28km long run sitting in my plan. She laughed, I laughed, but underneath those jokes was a very real trepidation about the pain to come.

It wasn’t the longest run I’ve ever done. It wasn’t the fastest. It was a big chunk of marathon pace work in the middle, and I already had 40km in my legs from earlier in the week. That combination was enough to fill me with proper dread. The dread before these Saturday long runs is something I’ve learned to expect. I just haven’t learned to be comfortable with it.

I’ll be honest. It wasn’t the pain itself that scared me. I can deal with pain. I’ll lean into it, push through it, even enjoy it in some twisted way once I’m out there. What scared me was the possibility of not being able to do it. Of walking home knowing I wasn’t good enough, and then having to sit with that feeling for the rest of the day. A poor performance sticks with you in a way that physical pain doesn’t. Your legs recover. Your ego takes a bit longer.

So I kept telling myself something that I think is true, that this is exactly the point where it counts. These runs are the ones that separate the person who shows up from the one who doesn’t. It’s easy to train when it’s going well, when the weather is right and your legs feel fresh and you’re hitting your splits without thinking. That’s not where you build anything. You build it on the days when every part of you wants to find an excuse, and you go anyway.

I wrote about doing hard things a while back, and training for Boston is reminding me why I believe it so strongly. There’s a mental shift that happens when you push through something you genuinely didn’t want to do. Not just a good feeling, a clarity. The rest of the day becomes simple. All the small stresses and annoyances that would normally chip away at you just don’t register after you’ve spent two hours fighting your own body and mind on the road.

I did it. I pushed through and came out the other side with a performance I’m happy with. The splits were strong, the marathon pace sections felt controlled, and by the end I was tired but not broken. The fear beforehand was completely real. I felt it in my stomach, in my excuses, in my jokes about self-inflicted injuries. And it was completely pointless.

That’s the thing about these moments. The anticipation is always worse than the act. Your brain builds a wall of reasons not to do something, and every single one of them evaporates the moment you start moving. It’s a pattern I recognise now, having gone through it week after week in marathon training blocks. The dread arrives, I entertain it for a bit, then I go out and run anyway. Afterwards, I wonder what I was so worried about.

Boston is getting closer. The runs will get harder. The fear will keep showing up every time there’s a big session on the plan. That’s fine. It can come along for the ride, as long as it knows I’m going out the door regardless.