Half Marathon Quotes

Oh, man there's a marathon of Beaches running tomorrow night. Can we go after ten so I can see it once all the way through?" Everyone in the room turned to the blond-and-black haired guy, who was propped in the corner, massive arms over his chest. What," he said. "Look, it's not Mary Tyler Moore, 'kay? So you can 't give me shit." Vishous, the one with the black glove on his hand, glared across the room. "It's worse than Mary Tyler Moore. And to call you and idiot would be an insult to half-wits around the world." Are you kidding me? Bette Midler rocks. And I love the ocean. Sue me." Vishous glanced at the king. "You told me I could beat him. You promised." As soon as you come home," Wrath said as he got to his feet, "we'll hang him up by his armpits in the gym and you can use him as a punching bag." Thank you, baby Jesus." Blond-and-Black shook his head. "I swear, one of these days I'm going to leave." As one, the Brothers all pointed to the open door and let silence speak for itself. You guys suck.

B-b-but who will I have cleaning marathons with?” “Casey. I’ll be there in spirit.” “She’s not neurotic and cranky like you.” “You’ll miss that, ay?” “Hell yes, I’ll miss that! When you’re obsessive and pissy, you tell those floors who’s boss. They won’t shine like that when Casey scrubs them. And don’t get me started on our Covenant Series discussions. The girl thinks Alex should pick Seth. Seth, Em. How can I clean with someone who isn’t Team Aiden? It’s like...madness. Madness on Earth. The fucking apocalypse—” “Whitney,” I chuckled, squeezing her tighter, “I assure you, you’ll survive. The second she starts running her mouth about Aiden, just spray her with bleach. That’ll teach her a lesson.” -Emma and Whitney

Half of all broccoli grown commercially in America today is a single variety- Marathon- notable for it's high yield. The overwhelming majority of the chickens raised for meat in America are the same hybrid, the Cornish cross; more than 99 percent of turkeys are the Broad-Breasted Whites.

I pulled out a kitchen stool, sinking down onto it. Running a half marathon didn’t exhaust me as much as all of this did. My love for her was a heavy, pulsing, living thing, and it made me feel crazy, and anxious, and famished. I hated seeing her stressed and scared. I hated seeing her upset at my anger, but even worse was the knowledge that she had the power to break my heart and had very little experience being careful about it. I was completely at her fumbling, inexperienced mercy.

I’ve been to 8 Mile. I condensed a half marathon into it.

Fiji, I’m betting you don’t drink a lot,” he said, trying to suppress a smile. “I don’t,” she confessed. “How did you know?” “Just a lucky guess.” “You think he’d like my phone number?” “Feej, that guy is tough as nails, and he’s not only been around the block, he’s run a marathon. He could eat you for breakfast,” Olivia said, half smiling. “And wouldn’t that be a great way to wake up?” Fiji said, with a broad wink. Manfred laughed; he couldn’t help it.

My brain was fine, but I did not feel like myself. My body was frail and weak—the person who could run half marathons was a distant memory—and that, too, shapes your identity. Racking back pain can mold an identity; fatigue and nausea can, as well.

She eyed his gorgeous body, and raised a brow. “Doing a little flaunting of your own this morning, huh?” “In deference to your delicate sensibilities, I pulled on jeans. Isn’t that enough?” Enough for what, her peace of mind? Ha. Being around Trace, especially with him like this, half-naked, sent her heart racing like a marathon runner’s. “Maybe it would be,” Priss admitted, “if you don’t look so good.” The compliment sent his right eyebrow arching high. “Oh, come on, Trace. You know what you look like.” She visually devoured him again, more blatantly this time, and noticed a rise behind the fly of his jeans. For her? Well-well-well. Flattering.

I’d rather die smiling. And running makes me smile.

You already have everything you need to be a longdistance athlete. You see, once you decide to run or walk farther than the 10-K (6.2 miles), your quest centers much more on tenacity than talent.

she would replace smoking with jogging, and that, in turn, changed how she ate, worked, slept, saved money, scheduled her workdays, planned for the future, and so on. She would start running half-marathons, and then a marathon, go back to school, buy a house, and get engaged.

Steve Langley, a forecast manager from Beloit, Wisconsin, recalls running 15 miles with friends on a January morning when the temperature was 5°F. Running through a park with a small lake, they passed several people sitting on buckets, ice fishing. “Look at those idiots,” said one of the fishermen. “They’re going to freeze to death!” Langley admits thinking the same about them.

And from Eretria they went to Marathon with a like intention, expecting to bind the Athenians in the same yoke of necessity in which they had bound the Eretrians. Having effected one-half of their purpose, they were in the act of attempting the other, and none of the Hellenes dared to assist either the Eretrians or the Athenians, except the Lacedaemonians, and they arrived a day too late for the battle;

Pretty much everyone we went to college with has a Hazel Bradford story. Of course, my old roommate Mike has many—mostly of the wild sexual variety—but others have ones more similar to mine: Hazel Bradford doing a mud run half marathon and coming to her night lab before showering because she didn’t want to be late. Hazel Bradford getting more than a thousand signatures of support to enter a local hot dog eating contest/fund-raiser before remembering, onstage and while televised, that she was trying to be a vegetarian. Hazel Bradford holding a yard sale of her ex-boyfriend’s clothes while he was still asleep at the party where she found him naked with someone else (incidentally, another guy from his terrible garage band). And—my personal favorite—Hazel Bradford giving an oral presentation on the anatomy and function of the penis in Human Anatomy.

Just as Drake turned six weeks old, I decided I wanted to lose some baby weight. Chip and I were both still getting used to the idea that we had a baby of our own now, but I felt it was okay to leave him with Chip for a half hour or so in the mornings so I could take a short run up and down Third Street. I left Drake in the little swing he loved, kissed Chip good-bye, and off I went. Chip was so sweet and supportive. When I got back he was standing in the doorway saying, “Way to go, baby!” He handed me a banana and asked if I’d had any cramps or anything. I hadn’t. I actually felt great. I walked in and discovered Chip had prepared an elaborate breakfast for me, as if I’d run a marathon or something. I hadn’t done more than a half-mile walk-run, but he wanted to celebrate the idea that I was trying to get myself back together physically. He’d actually driven to the store and back and bought fresh fruit and real maple syrup and orange juice for me. I sat down to eat, and I looked over at Drake. He was sound asleep in his swing, still wearing nothing but his diaper. “Chip, did you take Drake to the grocery store without any clothes on?” Chip gave me a real funny look. He said, “What?” I gave him a funny look back. “Oh my gosh,” he said. “I totally forgot Drake was here. He was so quiet.” “Chip!” I yelled, totally freaked out. I was a first-time mom. Can you imagine? Anyone who’s met Chip knows he can get a little sidetracked, but this was our child! He was in that dang swing that just made him perfectly silent. I felt terrible. It had only been for a few minutes. The store was just down the street. But I literally got on my knees to beg for Jo’s forgiveness.

ONE OF the biggest differences between the training of world-class runners and that of recreational runners is how slowly we elites sometimes run. Let me explain. Let’s say it’s the day after a hard workout. A typical recovery run for me is 10 miles in 65 minutes. A 10-miler at an average of 6:30 per mile might sound fast, but consider it in perspective. That’s almost 2 minutes per mile slower than I can run for a half-marathon and more than 90 seconds per mile slower than my marathon race pace. For someone who runs a 3:30 marathon, which is about 8 minutes per mile, that would be like averaging a 9:30 pace on a recovery day.

The marathon is less a physical event than a spiritual encounter. In infinite wisdom, God built into us a 32-km racing limit, a limit imposed by inadequate sources of the marathoner's prime racing fuel - carbohydrates. But we, in our human wisdom, decreed that the standard marathon be raced over 42 km. So it is in that physical no-man's-land, which begins after the 32-km mark, that the irresistible appeal of the marathon lies. It is at that stage, as the limits to human running endurance are approached, that the marathon ceases to be a physical event. It is there that you, the runner, discover the basis for the ancient proverb: "When you have gone so far that you cannot manage one more step, then you have gone just half the distance that you are capable of." It is there that you learn something about yourself and your view of life." Marathon runners have termed it the wall. (Chapter 10)

How Google Works (Schmidt, Eric) - Your Highlight on Location 3124-3150 | Added on Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:35:40 AM In late 1999, John Doerr gave a presentation at Google that changed the company, because it created a simple tool that let the founders institutionalize their “think big” ethos. John sat on our board, and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had recently invested in the company. The topic was a form of management by objectives called OKRs (to which we referred in the previous chapter), which John had learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove.173 There are several characteristics that set OKRs apart from their typical underpromise-and-overdeliver corporate-objective brethren. First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better … improve team morale … get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent … raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent … run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.) There is no ambiguity with this OKR; it is very easy to measure whether or not it is accomplished. Other OKRs will call for rolling out a product across a specific number of countries, or set objectives for usage (e.g., one of the Google+ team’s recent OKRs was about the daily number of messages users would post in hangouts) or performance (e.g., median watch latency on YouTube videos). Second—and here is where thinking big comes in—a good OKR should be a stretch to achieve, and hitting 100 percent on all OKRs should be practically unattainable. If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough. The best OKRs are aggressive, but realistic. Under this strange arithmetic, a score of 70 percent on a well-constructed OKR is often better than 100 percent on a lesser one. Third, most everyone does them. Remember, you need everyone thinking in your venture, regardless of their position. Fourth, they are scored, but this scoring isn’t used for anything and isn’t even tracked. This lets people judge their performance honestly. Fifth, OKRs are not comprehensive; they are reserved for areas that need special focus and objectives that won’t be reached without some extra oomph. Business-as-usual stuff doesn’t need OKRs. As your venture grows, the most important OKRs shift from individuals to teams. In a small company, an individual can achieve incredible things on her own, but as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates. This doesn’t mean that individuals should stop doing OKRs, but rather that team OKRs become the more important means to maintain focus on the big tasks. And there’s one final benefit of an OKR-driven culture: It helps keep people from chasing competitors. Competitors are everywhere in the Internet Century, and chasing them (as we noted earlier) is the fastest path to mediocrity. If employees are focused on a well-conceived set of OKRs, then this isn’t a problem. They know where they need to go and don’t have time to worry about the competition. ==========

Defensive running strategies thus become an important part of your training plan. If you want to have a long running career, determine what activities most often cause you to become injured, then avoid them. This is particularly true when it comes to overuse injuries that result from what might be called training errors.

For every runner who hits the wall because of his or her failure to consume enough carbohydrate during the race, there are several who hit the wall because of their failure to consume enough carbs in their everyday training diet. To

Not all stories we tell ourselves are helpful; some are self limiting, and you find yourself running a half marathon to learn that you’re capable of b'eing athletic'. (Na ostatnich studiach miałam zajęcia z prowadzącą, która w twarz mi się uśmiechała, a za plecami w swoim gabinecie, przy mojej nieobecności oczywiście, dwukrotnie obliczała punkty przed wpisaniem oceny końcowej, nie mogąc uwierzyć, że mam wysoki wynik, wykrzykując o mnie że 'Ona nie może przecież mieć u mnie czwórki!' Koleżanka stała tam lekko oniemiała, patrząc na ten mikro-spektakl nienawiści, stąd się dowiedziałam). Dodam tylko, że był to jeden z wielu przykładów tego rodzaju zachowań. #arogancja władzy #zawiść pomiędzy kobietami polskimi (której nie rozumiem i nie partycypuję w powyższej) Kiedy ktoś nas obgaduje czy stara się za plecami umniejszać nasze umiejętności przy osobach trzecich, ale nie w twarz, zastanówmy się zawsze nad możliwymi motywacjami personalno-prymitywnymi zanim uwierzymy w pełni. Jeśli dana osoba nie daje osobie krytykowanej/obmawianej możliwości odpowiedzi, a wręcz nie informuje jej o swojej krytyce, podejmuje działania za plecami, nie wskazuje to na dobre intencje, a raczej na próbę budowania historii/własnego wizerunku/zniszczenia innej osoby, której się być może (jeśli to prawda to całkiem niesłusznie), być może podświadomie, zazdrości? Lub obawia? Nie wiem, trudno mi to ocenić, gdyż nie myślę tymi kategoriami na co dzień. Również nie pracowałam nigdy w większej grupie, w której musiałabym się wywyższać na tle kogoś innego, stąd być może nie wyrobiłam w sobie takich schematów myślowych. Raczej staram się być lepsza od siebie wczoraj niż od kogoś innego. Po to zresztą się uczę i po to również studiowałam, dla siebie i własnej wiedzy, co do której zawsze mam wątpliwości, że jest niedostateczna. Stąd też bierze się moja kompulsja na punkcie uczenia się.

You are what you eat, read, watch, and wear, but it doesn’t end there. You’re also the gym you belong to, the filters you use to post vacation photos, where you go on that vacation. It’s not enough to listen to NPR, read the latest nonfiction National Book Award winner, or run a half marathon.

I was thinking of doing a half-marathon and then I remembered I hate running.

Here’s another, startling way of thinking about these numbers: if you are a typical person who barely exercises, it would take you just an hour or two of walking per day to be as physically active as a hunter-gatherer. Even so, few Americans or Europeans currently manage to achieve those modest levels of activity. The average PAL of industrialized adults in the developed world is 1.67, and many sedentary individuals have even lower PALs.23 These declines, moreover, are relatively recent and largely reflect changes in how we work, especially the growth of desk jobs that glue us to our chairs. In 1960, about half of all jobs in the United States involved at least moderate levels of physical activity, but today less than 20 percent of jobs demand more than light levels of activity, an average reduction of at least a hundred calories per day.24 That modest amount of unspent energy adds up to twenty-six thousand fewer calories spent over the course of a year, enough to run about ten marathons. And outside our jobs, we walk less, drive more, and use countless energy-saving devices from shopping carts to elevators that whittle away, calorie by calorie, at how much physical activity we do. The problem, of course, is that physical activity helps slow aging and promotes fitness and health. So those of us who no longer engage in physical labor to survive must now weirdly choose to engage in unnecessary physical activity for the sake of health and fitness. In other words, exercise.

Compared to where we ought to be, we are only half-awake. Our fires are dampened. Our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our mental and physical resources. The human individual usually lives far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts, which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum.

To finish a marathon in less than 4 hours, you should ideally be a runner for a couple of years, have completed a half marathon, or be extremely determined and competitive.

Many runners in the 12-16 minute pace range have reported running 60+ minutes faster in the marathon or 30+ minutes faster in the half marathon when they switched to R/W/R.

With the publication of Running & Being in 1978, George Sheehan’s voice became the voice of a movement, sounding a clarion call to hundreds of thousands of people to abandon their sedentary ways, take to the streets, and run. Today, there are millions of us lacing up our running shoes, training for 5-Ks, 10-Ks, half-marathons, and marathons—each trudging the same path of fitness and self-discovery that he blazed decades before.

halhigdon.com,

My sport is your sport’s punishment.”) Usually,

That was the funny thing. What happened to John would pass for his classmates, but for John it was a long challenging road ahead of him. Who knew where he would be sent, maybe a juvenile detention center? He might keep in touch with a few friends if his parents let him, but he would never return to Wakefield High. His peers had no clue the journey ahead of him, that his life was changed forever. And they had no idea what lay ahead for Lilly. No one knew she had been given a task by the Archangels to fight a war against pure evil. They had no idea that Lilly would spend most of her free time not training for a marathon, but training to kill demons. John and Lilly were not all too different.

Habitual caffeine use such as drinking coffee every day causes the brain to “upregulate” its adenosine receptors. This adaptation makes the brain more sensitive to the action of adenosine so that fewer adenosine molecules must attach themselves to receptors to cause sleepiness and brain slowing. Habituation also makes the brain less sensitive to the actions of caffeine. For runners, caffeine habituation has the important implication that it reduces the drug’s benefit of performance enhancement.

effects of a ten-day high-fat diet followed by three days of carbohydrate loading on the fat-burning capacity and performance of trained cyclists. Her hypothesis was that fat loading would increase reliance on fat and decrease reliance on glycogen as exercise fuel, while subsequent carbo loading would maximize glycogen stores without negating the effect of fat loading. With more glycogen available and less glycogen being used, the cyclists would be less likely to hit the wall and their performance would improve.

Help me,” the girl pleaded softly. Sam knelt beside her. He recoiled in shock. “Bette?” The left side of Bouncing Bette’s face was covered in blood. There was a gash above her temple. She was panting, gasping, like she had collapsed after a marathon and was trying with her last ounce of energy to crawl across the finish line. “Bette, what happened?” “They’re trying to get me,” Bette cried, and clutched at Sam’s arm. The three dark figures advanced to the edge of the circle of light. One was clearly Orc. No one else was that big. Edilio and Quinn moved into the garage doorway. Sam disengaged from Bette and took up a position beside Edilio. “You want me to beat on you guys, I will!” Orc yelled. “What’s going on here?” Sam demanded. He narrowed his eyes and recognized the other two boys, a kid named Karl, a seventh grader from school, and Chaz, one of the Coates eighth graders. All three were armed with aluminum bats. “This isn’t your business,” Chaz said. “We’re dealing with something here.” “Dealing with what? Orc, did you hit Bette?” “She was breaking the rules,” Orc said. “You hit a girl, man?” Edilio said, outraged. “Shut up, wetback,” Orc said. “Where’s Howard?” Sam asked, just to stall while he tried to figure out what to do. He’d lost one fight to Orc already. Orc took the question as an insult. “I don’t need Howard to handle you, Sam.” Orc marched right up to Sam, stopped a foot away, and put his bat on his shoulder like he was ready to swing for a home run. Like a batter ready for the next fastball. Only this was closer to T-ball: Sam’s head was impossible to miss. “Move, Sam,” Orc ordered. “Okay, I’m not doing this again,” Quinn said. “Let him have her, Sam.” “Ain’t no ‘let me,’” Orc said. “I do what I want.” Sam noticed movement behind Orc. There were people coming down the street, twenty or more kids. Orc noticed it too, and glanced behind him. “They aren’t going to save you,” Orc said, and swung the bat hard. Sam ducked. The bat whooshed past his head, and Orc rotated halfway around, carried forward by the momentum. Sam was thrown off balance, but Edilio was ready. He let loose a roar and plowed headfirst into Orc. Edilio was maybe half Orc’s size, but Orc was knocked off his feet. He sprawled out on the concrete. Chaz went after Edilio, trying to pull him off Orc. The crowd of kids who had come running down the street surged forward. There were angry voices and threats, all aimed at Orc. They yelled, Sam noted, but no one exactly jumped into the unequal fight.

So training smart, training effectively, involves cycling through the three zones in any given week or training block: 75 percent easy running, 5 to 10 percent running at target race paces, and 15 to 20 percent fast running or hill training in the third zone to spike the heart and breathing rates. In my 5-days-a-week running schedule, that cycle looks like this: On Monday, I cross-train. Tuesday, I do an easy run in zone one, then speed up to a target race pace for a mile or two of zone-two work. On Wednesday, it’s an easy zone-one run. Thursday is an intense third-zone workout with hills, speed intervals, or a combination of the two. Friday is a recovery day to give my body time to adapt. On Saturday, I do a relaxed run with perhaps another mile or two of zone-two race pace or zone-three speed. Sunday is a long, slow run. That constant cycling through the three zones—a hard day followed by an easy or rest day—gradually improves my performance in each zone and my overall fitness. But today is not about training. It’s about cranking up that treadmill yet again, pushing me to run ever faster in the third zone, so Vescovi can measure my max HR and my max VO2, the greatest amount of oxygen my heart and lungs can pump to muscles working at their peak. When I pass into this third zone, Vescovi and his team start cheering: “Great job!” “Awesome!” “Nice work.” They sound impressed. And when I am in the moment of running rather than watching myself later on film, I really think I am impressing them, that I am lighting up the computer screen with numbers they have rarely seen from a middle-aged marathoner, maybe even from an Olympian in her prime. It’s not impossible: A test of male endurance athletes in Sweden, all over the age of 80 and having 50 years of consistent training for cross-country skiing, found they had relative max VO2 values (“relative” because the person’s weight was included in the calculation) comparable to those of men half their age and 80 percent higher than their sedentary cohorts. And I am going for a high max VO2. I am hauling in air. I am running well over what should be my max HR of 170 (according to that oft-used mathematical formula, 220 − age) and way over the 162 calculated using the Gulati formula, which is considered to be more accurate for women (0.88 × age, the result of which is then subtracted from 206). Those mathematical formulas simply can’t account for individual variables and fitness levels. A more accurate way to measure max HR, other than the test I’m in the middle of, is to strap on a heart rate monitor and run four laps at a 400-meter track, starting out at a moderate pace and running faster on each lap, then running the last one full out. That should spike your heart into its maximum range. My high max HR is not surprising, since endurance runners usually develop both a higher maximum rate at peak effort and a lower rate at rest than unconditioned people. What is surprising is that as the treadmill

There’s a difference between nutrition knowledge and food knowledge.

Rested, Refreshed, and Ready to run, the three Rs of peak performance.

Long distance races ceased to be daunting, single entities – 12K, Half Marathon, Marathon. As if solving a riddle, I deciphered their true nature: incremental miles over time.

We’re unquestionably more at risk the hour a day that we run,” says Paul D. Thompson, MD, director of preventive cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, “but the other 23 hours in the day, we are much less at risk. In balance, you’re much safer exercising than not exercising.

That legend—and it is more legend than historical fact—inspired a race in 1896 at the first modern Olympic Games over approximately the same route. Only 17 runners participated in that first race. In 2010, 20,000 runners appeared for the 2,500th anniversary celebration.

For one thing, more and more women are running, outnumbering men in more and more marathons and half-marathons.

It can be said that the first half of the marathon is 20 miles long; the second half, 6.2 more.

after you’ve been running for several years and begin to shave seconds instead of minutes off your PRs, or if you start to slip backward, it is time to turn to speedwork.

It is not how much training you do as much as it is how well you recover from it. Because if you do not recover adequately, you will become either injured or sick or chronically fatigued, with resulting poor performance. Thus, while everyone has a different number of miles per week that they can tolerate (due to weather, terrain, biomechanics, lifestyle) without breakdown, the secret to success is not to exceed that threshold.

You’re a runner. You probably don’t eat carbs, do you?

The miracle isn’t that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start. —JOHN “THE PENGUIN” BINGHAM

Beet juice is rich in dietary nitrates, which are precursors for nitric oxide, a chemical that the body uses to cause blood vessels to dilate. Consuming beet juice before exercise increases vasodilatation and blood flow and reduces the oxygen cost of exercise. These

Interestingly, slushie ingestion not only delayed the point at which the subjects reached a critically high core body temperature, but also allowed a higher tolerable core body temperature before exhaustion was reached. In other words, the slushie let them start colder and get hotter.

eating enough carbohydrate every day will allow you to train harder, better absorb the stress of your training, and perform better in important workouts than you would without adequate carbohydrate intake.

runners with very heavy training loads need more carbohydrate than runners with more moderate training loads. The more you train, the more carbs your body uses, and the more carbohydrate your body uses, the more carbs you need to eat to maintain adequate muscle glycogen stores.

Body weight is the enemy of running performance. Running is, after all, a continuous fight against gravity. With every stride you take your body must be lifted completely off the ground, because all of the progress you make when running is made while your body is airborne. What’s

What’s more, your body also must be accelerated forward with every stride because it loses momentum upon each foot landing. The

Refined grains (regular old spaghetti being an example), fatty meats (hard salami), sweets (blueberry pie), and fried foods (bacon) are not poisonous. They are foods that just happen to be less wholesome than some other foods. There

There are two types of nutrition that have the potential to significantly enhance performance when consumed during running: water and carbohydrate. It is no accident that these are the two main ingredients in almost all sports drinks intended for use during exercise. Most

runners throughout the first half of the twentieth century generally avoided drinking anything during long races because they believed that submitting to their thirst would cause them to become “waterlogged” and slow down. One expert of the time wrote, “Don’t get in the habit of drinking and eating in a Marathon race; some prominent runners do, but it is not beneficial.

my own all day long. Just as all the other boys joined in the wheelbarrowing – a chaotic tangle of shrieks and skinny limbs – the mayhem came to a halt. Massimo strode down the garden, dressed in a proper goalkeeping outfit, clapping his hands and barking out an authoritative, ‘Right, gather round.’ I’d been trying to get their attention for the last half an hour. It was still a man’s world. But right now, I was glad this particular man with his child-taming abilities was here. He ran through the rules of the splash and score game involving transferring water from one dustbin to another before shooting at the goal. ‘Two teams, you’re the goalie for that one, Nico; I’ll be the other.’ Not for Massimo the ‘Ready, Steady, Go, let’s all enjoy ourselves’ approach. Oh no. He blew a whistle and launched into a stream of team encouragement that made me feel as though he was trying to cheer an Olympic marathon runner to the finish line rather than a gaggle

Within the past couple of years I’ve switched from water to beet juice for prerace hydration. I know it sounds weird, but it has a benefit that is lacking in any other hydration choice and I encourage all runners to try it. Beet juice is rich in dietary nitrates, which are precursors for nitric oxide, a chemical that the body uses to cause blood vessels to dilate. Consuming beet juice before exercise increases vasodilatation and blood flow and reduces the oxygen cost of exercise. These effects translate directly into better race performance, even in highly trained endurance athletes. A 2011 study conducted by researchers at the University of Exeter found that consuming half a liter of beet juice 2.5 hours before cycling time trials of 4 km and 16.1 km improved performance by 2.8 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively, in club-level cyclists.

Then one day I was sitting on the toilet and I couldn’t get up without holding the wall. Three years before I had run a half-marathon. So I got back into it. I was shocked at the difference just a few years made, and devastated after my first few runs. But I did what I tell my own patients—start with a ridiculously little amount of exercise, just keep at it every other day.

The time spent warming up and cooling down should be included as part of your total workout. So for a one-hour aerobic run, spend fifteen minutes warming up, fifteen cooling down, and a half hour in the maximum aerobic zone.

But if you want something you’ve never had, you must do something you’ve never done.

Psychological recovery is as important as physiological recovery.

Make your mistakes in workouts or unimportant races.

You gotta dance with the one that brung you!

What we can recommend is intervals at your target marathon pace in addition to regular slow jogging. Try five to ten repeats of a half-mile to a kilometer at your marathon pace.

Generally recommended marathon strategy for more advanced runners is the negative split, which means running the second half of the marathon slightly faster than the first half. This recommendation is based on the physiological facts of glycogen depletion explained above, observation of the most successful elite marathoners, and Professor Tanaka’s personal experiences.

And therein lies another key difference between walking today and in ancient times. If I walk ten thousand extra steps to place my body in negative energy balance, it is literally a piece of cake for me to wipe out the extra cost of such a walk. The ease of refueling with a donut or a Gatorade or just by sitting at my desk for the rest of the day helps explain the counterintuitive result we just saw from the DREW study in which the women who exercised the most lost less weight than predicted: they ate more.36 Happily, more than a dozen studies on the effects of exercise, food intake, and non-exercise physical activity on weight loss found that modest doses of prescribed exercise rarely cause people to spend the rest of the day as couch potatoes erasing the benefits of their exertions.37 However, several experiments that required large doses of exercise (one involved training for a half marathon) did cause exercisers to eat more.38 When the body regulates energy balance like a thermostat, it apparently does so more through diet than through physical activity.

Many organs in our bodies make molecules and release them into our bloodstream as a way to talk with other organs. These endocrine organs include the pancreas, the pituitary gland, the ovaries, and the testes. But few had thought of muscle as an endocrine organ until Pedersen’s work. Interleukin-6 was just the start. Scientists have now discovered over a hundred molecules that our muscles make and release into the blood as we walk. Pedersen’s team discovered that one of these, oncostatin M, shrank breast tissue tumors in mice and could be yet another reason why exercise is beneficial to humans with breast cancer. In 2003, Pedersen coined a name for this amazing family of molecules: myokines. As a myokine, interleukin-6 is an anti-inflammatory. Among other roles, it helps shut down the problematic tumor necrosis factor (TNF). It is the body’s natural ibuprofen. Pedersen’s team also discovered that interleukin-6 can mobilize cells called “natural killers” to attack and destroy cancerous tumors, at least in mice. For some reason, this myokine needs to be produced by muscles during exercise in order to work. But that does not require walking. Can the 3 million Americans in wheelchairs generate myokines? Yes. Researchers at the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at Wakayama Medical University in Japan have discovered elevated interleukin-6 levels, and lowered tumor necrosis factor, after wheelchair half-marathons and basketball games. As Juliette Rizzo, 2005 Ms. Wheelchair America, said, “Walking is a way to get from A to B, and I do that.” Myokines, however, are not magic potions. They cannot be injected or swallowed. They are made only when the body is in motion, and in modern societies it often is not.

But the endurance that barre builds is possibly more psychological than physical. What it’s really good at is getting you in shape for a hyper-accelerated capitalist life. It prepares you less for a half marathon than for a twelve-hour workday, or a week alone with a kid and no childcare, or an evening commute on an underfunded train. Barre feels like exercise the way Sweetgreen feels like eating: both might better be categorized as mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony.

Though you may not be half as peculiar as I am, if you separate out your vanities and illusions, the petty titles to which you hold fast and by which you are defined, the abstract and insensible money in your accounts, your bogus theories, and your inane triumphs, what have you other than a body that, even if you are now as healthy as a robust, will eventually war against you until you are left with nothing but memory and regret? You may run quadruple marathons and do one-arm handstands, but only blink, look up, and see yourself hobbling about like a bent insect half-crushed under a heavy heel. That's me, who can hardly walk, struggling each day to the highest points of the Parque de Cicada, a thousand feet up in the quiet and the clouds, to green platforms overlooking the sea.

Dr. George Sheehan once said, “We are each an experiment of one.

we avoid pain and seek out pleasure. I contend that true happiness and fulfillment come from seeking pleasure through pain. Not injury-causing pain, but pain in the sense that your will is put to the test.

running does not cause injuries; it illuminates our weak links and shows us what we need to work on.

To run faster, you need to run easy most of the time and really hard a fraction of the time.

It is not about thee who goes out the fastest; it’s about thee who slows down the least.

Remember, running is not bad for your joints and injuries are not unavoidable. Running exposes our individual weaknesses and, if we wish to continue running, forces us to strengthen these weak links. Running, therefore, can truly help us become the best that we can possibly be.

Although making decisions by testing God with fleeces is generally a bad idea, sometimes it can look similar to setting reasonable goals. For example, suppose you are considering running a marathon. But you decide that you won’t sign up for the 26.2 mile race unless you first lose fifteen pounds and finish a half-marathon. In a way this sounds like laying out a fleece, but it is really just prudence and good goal setting. Humble goals and loosely held plans are good. Expecting God to do tricks for us is bad. Don’t pray: “God, if You want me to go out on this date, then make my professors cancel all their assignments for the weekend. If You don’t do that, I’ll just tell Josh that it wasn’t the Lord’s will that we go out.” The whole fleece approach to life is dangerously close to violating Jesus’ admonition, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7). Now, I know Gideon asked God for some special dew. But there are good reasons to think Gideon’s request is not a normative example. For starters, Gideon didn’t have a Bible. More than likely, he didn’t have a single page of God’s inspired Word of his own. More importantly, the book of Judges generally does not provide a good example of much of anything. When the theme of the book is “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25), we should think twice before copying whatever practices or attitudes we find in its chapters. Gideon’s request was probably an indication of cowardice and unbelief more than faithful, wise decision making.

Studies have shown that 50° to 54°F (10° to 12°C) is the ideal temperature range for running marathons and that performance slows by 3 percent for every 7.2°F (4°C) above that. And the slower you are, the more affected you are by the heat.