How to run a half-marathon

I have never exactly been a runner. In high school, I played soccer. Our coach encouraged us to run track in the off-season to develop speed and endurance, but I never cared for it. There wasn’t enough structure — you just showed up and…ran? — and I didn’t like running for its own sake. I liked having something to chase.

During the pandemic, a couple friends from grad school and I developed this recurring bit. We called it beefcaking. One of the friends, Nina, was pretty into strength training before the pandemic hit and beefcake is how she described the friendly, somewhat guileless dudes who helped her at the gym: offering her a spot, giving her advice about form and macros. Beefcake is a nontoxic form of masculinity. They just want to get ripped and they want to help you get ripped, too.

Beefcaking became code for “I moved my body in some form today.” We texted each other about our daily exercise routines and used each other for motivation. Usually, it meant something beyond just taking a walk, but a walk also counted. We’d remark how much better we felt when we beefcaked, how much less tense and stiff, what a better mood we were in. It was obvious stuff that we already knew but that we nonetheless had to keep reminding ourselves of, something that we had to keep re-learning.

In the spring of 2021, I was building up a pretty consistent running habit, following an old training schedule I’d had made for Beach to Beacon in 2019. But I was a victim of my own excitement. One Saturday in early May, I had a great 8-mile run (not saying it’s the cause, but I did fuel with one of Julia Turshen’s sled dog muffins, which I always mistakenly call “bobsled muffins”) and I was stoked. The next day, the schedule suggested some kind of cross-training, so I went for a walk. It was a beautiful spring day. I ended up walking five miles. On Monday, I should have chilled. Instead, I went ahead with the three miles I was scheduled to run. (I am weirdly beholden/obligated to a spreadsheet. See below.) On Tuesday, my left Achilles tendon, which was fine when I walked, would not cooperate on a run. (A strain, not a tear.) As I was recovering, I got the news that my aunt, who had been diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer in early March, was not responding to immunotherapy. In fact, it seemed to have made things significantly worse. She died within a few days, just as I finally hit full immunity from my second vaccine dose. I packed up Luna and drove to Kentucky, where I remained for the next month. Life had halted my beefcake momentum.

Fast-forward to June of 2022. I was more restless than I had been the whole pandemic and my running was sporadic. I'd never really gotten back into a rhythm. I figured having a goal might focus my attention. I reached out to my fittest Portland friend, Lisa, to see if she'd be down to run the Mount Desert Half Marathon with me in October. She said yes. So I did it. And some friends who have never gotten into super long distances (something beyond a 10K) were, like, how? So here's how:

1. Pick a race. Like most people, I find having some kind of impending expectation to be constructive. I picked the Mount Desert Island Half-Marathon because it was a) many months away b) in a very pretty place that I had never really been, despite living in Maine for 7 years and c) it took place in the fall, when it would not be very warm. My ability to exercise is very influenced by the weather and particularly by the heat. I did not want to be running 10+ miles when it was more than 80 degrees, and would prefer not to run 10+ miles when it was more than 70. I like running in the winter. It’s very cozy.
2. Trust the process. Setting a goal is motivating, but once you’ve set it, you shouldn’t think too hard about it anymore. Instead, focus on the immediate task at hand and trust that these small steps are leading you towards your bigger goal. Who you are today is not the same person who will be running this race in three months. That said, Current You is also capable of more than you realize. If you ran three miles last week, you can probably run four miles this week. If you run four miles this week, you can probably run fives miles next week. Your body can do even more if you treat it with kindness. (Which means rest days.) I am lucky in that, while I often have high standards for myself, I have never had a problem taking it easy. Arguably, when it comes to work or effort, I am too accommodating of my inherent laziness. I like to coast.
3. Lower your standards. Go extremely slow. Slower than that. Be sure you keep your feet up, though. To maintain a slow pace but a decent cadence, you have to take these tiny little steps that feel silly, but who cares? You’re running! If you try to stay fast — whatever “fast” means for you — when you’re running long, you’re going to burn out. You’ll be sore. It’ll be unpleasant. You don’t need to stress your body along two separate axes at the same time. (I don’t know math or statistics; I hope that makes sense.)
4. Do less than required. Early on in my training plan (I got it from the Hal Higdon app), I was often only running three kilometers (a little under two miles) per training day. I was certainly capable of running farther than that but I resisted the urge to go beyond the assigned distance. I think there’s a certain (maybe Western? maybe human?) tendency to believe you always have to push yourself to the limits of your endurance every time, but you do not. Leaving something in the tank means you have something to go on the next day.
5. The challenge is (mostly) mental. When I got into my really long runs, I tried to look at them through the perspective of the runs I'd already completed. My final training run was 19.5 kilometers, which is about 12 miles. The week before it had been 17.5 km, or roughly 11 miles. When I hit two kilometers on that last run, I told myself that all that remained was what I had already done the week before. The halfway point is also really important — now you have less to go than you’ve already gone. (Ideally, between those two milestones, you don't really think about your remaining distance at all. You just know it's a lot and thus kind of irrelevant.) After the halfway point, you hit these really familiar distances — 8 kilometers (or 5 miles) to go, which I usually did the day before my long run and did at least once a week for the last six weeks of my training. Then you hit 5 kilometers to go, a distance I’ve done so many times in the past three months it feels like nothing. Then you hit that last bit — the amount beyond what you did the week before (and, keep in mind, these distances are nested within one another, so you’re hitting a new milestone/perspective setter every few kilometers), and why give up when you’re almost there?
6. The challenge is mostly mental, cont’d. The course for the half-marathon was unexpectedly hilly (and by that, I mean, I did not consult the elevation map until a week or two before), with a seemingly massive increase in elevation right at the 10 mile mark. I had not incorporated a lot of hills into my training (as I said, kinda lazy), but on my last training run, I tried to follow a course that had more elevation. I listened to 90s power ballads — specifically, a Spotify playlist based off of “I Have Nothing” by Whitney Houston, the true banger of The Bodyguard soundtrack — to ensure I didn’t go too hard. The songs are relatively downtempo but still propulsive. I think there’s an impulse on hills just to muscle through them and get them over with and …I do not advise this. Instead, I try to maintain a consistent effort both going up and coming down. This is mostly just a matter of feeling — obviously, my pace goes down and my heart rate goes up when I go uphill, and my pace goes up and my heart rate down when I go downhill — but I don’t try to maintain my pace on the inclines and I don’t just let loose and go wheee on the downhills. The big hill turned out to be not a big deal, as, like my long runs, it had been put into perspective by all the smaller hills that had come before it. I was like “Oh, this is just, like, three of the previous hills put together.” It was mildly disappointing.
7. Really, don’t try that hard. There were a few times during the race where I caught myself doing what meditation teachers call “efforting” — where you’re just trying too hard to really be effective, basically forcing things in a way that makes them less likely to succeed — and had to remind myself to ease up. This especially happened toward the end, when I was excited to be done but had to recognize I couldn’t just gun it for the last mile.
8. Figure out your motivation style. In her book Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin invented the concept of the "four tendencies" to talk about how different people can develop better habits. I am definitely an Obliger, which means I am able to meet external obligations but not always able to meet internal ones. I find I can hack this by creating some kind of external obligation for an internal goal. In my language learning, that's just Duolingo being sad I have not done French today or my tutor expecting me to do homework (and show up to our lessons) every week. In running, it's an app or a spreadsheet telling me what I need to run on what day. It's a way to turn people-pleasing into a driver of personal satisfaction. That doesn't work for everyone, especially those who have issues with authority. (Doing something just for the sake of doing it can be both an advantage and a challenge: the stakes are very low, which can reduce your motivation, but also the stakes are very low, which gives you more freedom to fail and thus makes you less likely to fail. Nothing is riding on it.)
9. Embrace cringe. I am not above a mantra when things get difficult. Nobody needs to know how you motivated yourself to keep going.
10. Bad runs happen; just begin again. Good runs are encouraging but bad runs are instructive. In early September, I foolishly scheduled my Omicron booster / flu shot for a Friday afternoon. I had a busy weekend and that Saturday morning — my usual long run time — was really the only available time for me to get in 14.5 kilometers. So off I went. Things started out alright but just past 9k, my body just said, “Look, sorry, we’re mounting an immune response. Good luck." Everything hurt. I was mildly concerned I was dying. I was also still quite a ways from my apartment, so I couldn’t quit. I walked for a while, then tried to run for a bit, was immediately hit by the omnipresent ache / deep fatigue inhabiting my body, then walked for quite a while, and ran maybe a tiny bit more. I eventually ended up hitting 14.5k, just not by jogging. I think there's psychological value in finishing even if you have to stop or you end up walking a significant portion of it.
11. It does eventually get enjoyable. I can’t speak to the existence of runner’s high, but I can say that about halfway through my next-to-last training run, as I was rounding the last curve at Mackworth Island on a really beautiful fall day, I actually said to myself, as a form of reassurance, “Don’t worry, you have a whole hour left.”

All that said, while there was a lot that contributed to things going well, I can also look back and see things I would have done differently.

1. My anxiety made me very avoidant, which was helpful when it came to not freaking out about the long run I was going to do six weeks in the future (because I was not looking that far ahead), but was less useful when it meant that I didn’t even check what my long run was until the day before I was scheduled to do it. Twice, I discovered a much more elaborate assignment than I was expecting. I managed to complete both of them, but not without some unnecessary agitation.
2. Similarly, I resisted attending to a lot of really basic logistics about the race itself until way too late. (I think because attending to them would require facing my fears about not being able to finish the race or might lead me to encounter an obstacle that would mean I couldn’t go to the race at all.) I generally hate everything that has to do with a race that isn’t the run. There’s all sorts of stress about picking up your bib, waking up in time, getting on the shuttles to go to the start, using the restroom before the gun goes off, dropping off your little bag. Once it’s over, you have to wait for another shuttle to take you back, or fight your way through crowds to get to your car or bike. It’s all very nerve-wracking. Lisa had to inform me of most of the procedures on our drive up — I did not, for instance, realize that the half-marathon did not start or finish in Bar Harbor. (It started in Northeast Harbor and ended in Southwest Harbor, which are actually towns, not just harbors, and you’d expect them to be on opposite sides of the island but they are actually on opposite sides of the sound or the gulf or whatever.)
3. I had managed to book a convenient hotel just a few minutes from where the shuttles picked us up (though I really pushed it and Lisa and I came very close to having to take our friendship to the next level by engaging in pre-race platonic co-sleeping). However, neither Lisa nor I considered until way too late that we’d have to check out before heading off to the starting line because by the time we returned, it’d be past even a late checkout time. Next time, I will definitely book a second night even if I’m planning on heading back the same day, just to have somewhere to shower. As it was, I had to change in a public restroom and wipe myself down with some Wet Ones I found in my car. (And I was grateful for that.) (We also considered going to the Y, but it closed at noon, the exact same time as the late checkout for our hotel. Free suggestion for race organizers: Have the Y stay open for the race people. Charge them something exorbitant for a day pass. There’s isn’t a semi-reasonable-ish sum I wouldn’t have paid.)
4. I also didn’t really consider what I’d wear on race day until the week of the race. I probably should have had a pair of shoes that I’d worn enough to break in but that I hadn’t been training in. I was vaguely aware of the concept of a singlet but not really sure what its purpose was. It all worked out fine — I wore what I’d been training in since the weather turned cooler. But I think there could have been some psychological value in having a “race day” outfit.
5. In keeping with the theme of “I didn’t really consider,” I also didn’t plan out any kind of playlist. The service in Bar Harbor isn’t great, so a lot of stuff I might have listened to wasn’t accessible because I hadn’t downloaded it before heading up to MDI. This was fine — I started jogging without music right as the pandemic started, mostly because I didn’t want to take my phone with me. I found it made it much easier to pace my runs and regulate my breathing. I had started listening to podcasts again on the long runs – notably the 22 Goals podcast with Brian Phillips – as a bit of an incentive but I didn't need it on race day. Still, it would have been nice to have the option.
6. When I registered for the race back in June, I checked “non-binary” in the gender field as that feels more accurate for me. It did not occur to me that this information would be used to, like, categorize me? In a competitive sense? It was just me being upfront with a little drop-down menu. When I visited the timing station after the race to get my official time, the ladies behind the table seemed…perplexed. On the screen, it said that my overall place in the race was somewhere in the 300s — right in the middle of the pack — but my gender ranking was….1. There was no division (usually age + gender) displayed at all. That seemed obviously incorrect. Then it hit me. Oh shit. Are they going to give me some kind of award for my 2 hour and 21 minute half marathon, all because literally no other non-binary people registered for this race in Downeast Maine? I questioned all my life choices that had led me to this point. Would pictures have to be taken? I considered bolting, but in a dignified way. I regretted anew my failure to construct a signature race day look that would have been distinctive without being too match-y. Unable to bear their confusion any longer, I explained the situation to these ladies. They finally found someone they could ask about it, who informed them there was no prize/award for the non-binary category. And while maybe they should have one on principle, I was also like THANK GOD.

In conclusion, I'm No. 1!