My journey from Running 0 miles to a Marathon in 150 days

Running a Marathon was an ultimate dream for me. I still remember that December 2019 evening when I was watching running documentaries on Amazon Prime and thinking how cool it would be to run a Marathon. Deep inside, I knew I was dreaming, because, I was never a runner in my life. This just goes on to show how important your consistent efforts are to achieve anything in life.

In this post, I will try to cover the pedigree of successfully running a Marathon. Please note that this worked for me, so, take it with a grain of salt. If this post inspires at least one reader, I would feel grateful to have spent time to actually jot down these points.

Make a plan and stick to it
I cannot tell you how important it is to plan everything that you do in your life. I am an adamant follower of this rule and my life runs by all the plans that I make. I rarely do anything in the spur of the moment and like to do things by having some plan in place.

Running a Marathon is no small feat and you must have a proper plan in place. When I was thinking of running one, I made sure I do proper research before actually drafting out my plan. To do this, the first thing I did was to join the slack channel at work dedicated to running. I think that was the smartest thing I did, as it introduced me to marathontraining.com and their two-part Marathon preparation plan. I cannot tell you how important this step was. I got to sit down, think about the days that I had in my hand before my Detroit FreePress Marathon, and draft out the plan, which looked like this.

Now, when I drafted this plan, I was obviously not aware about the current COVID19 pandemic that we are dealing with.

This is where the second part of Make a plan & stick to it comes into play. Due to COVID19 spread, you can definitely say a lot of planning went downhill starting mid-March. However, that didn’t mean that I completely lost the will of running and stopped. No sir! In fact, I started running even more and with more dedication as my CrossFit sessions were also cut off due to Government shutdown. Skipping CrossFit “helped” me focus more on my running, which helped tremendously to expedite my Marathon preparation plan. I know COVID19 is a serious threat to our daily life, but I took the shutdown as a good sports and tried working out more and keeping my body in shape.

This brings us to the second important step in my Marathon preparation – tracking my progress.

Track your progress
This has been a visual experience for me. I am a Data Analyst/Engineer by profession, so I have always been a visual guy. It was a no brainer for me to keep records of my run. I chose to keep an excel document to track my progress and it has been a good decision so far.

It is so important to keep track of your progress. I know it becomes a little hard with your job and other obligations in your life to keep track of what you are doing. But, it is very important to reflect upon all things that you are doing to achieve something and whether the strategy is actually working or not. This is very important to check if you need to change something to perform better and produce better results.

The thing that worked for me the best was to keep track of my weekly progress. As you saw above, the plan that I had drafted initially focused on weekly goals, so it was no brainer to go with the weekly checkpoint and I am so glad that I did it. Over the last more than 20 weeks, I have tried keeping my progress consistent with the plan and I could do that for most of those weeks.

Invest in proper gear
This portion of preparation I didn’t think was important initially. It took sore knees and toes to realize how important it was to have proper gears to achieve the dream of running a Marathon.
When I started my preparation, I had my training shoes that I used for CrossFit. I used to use the same shoes for running, and after running for a week or so, I realized, those shoes will not give me the comfort and performance I need for running, so, I decided to do some research and tried finding out an affordable pair of good running shoes and then I stumbled upon these ASICS shoes. The two good things about these shoes were they were in my price range and looked cool too. So, after purchasing these, the only thing to figure out was are they worth it?

After running almost 100 miles with those shoes, I realized, they helped me run better, sometimes faster, and are extremely lightweight as compared to other shoes that I have had. The most important thing about these shoes are/were they made me run more and I sort of used to get drawn to them.
Having said all these things, the one downside to running is that you have to change your shoes after every 250 miles, because of the wear and tear.

As I have run more than 300 miles now, I am in the market for new shoes and researching my way through the available options. Let us see which one I go with. Please let me know if you have a good suggestion for me.

Keep *real* expectations
Keeping your expectations real is very important self-realization that you need throughout this journey.

Many times, I am sure this happens with the best of us, we start watching these running and marathon documentaries and watch a couple of extra-ordinary people finishing the Marathon distance in 2-3 hours and we start daydreaming about achieving the same. This is a positive reinforcement; However, one thing that we fail to realize the number of years they have put in behind these incredible feats. It is a good thing to know what you want in life, but setting unrealistic expectations for yourself sometimes lead to extreme wear and tear both physically and mentally. If you set yourself for a failure like that, it will have more emotional adverse effects than the physical ones.

I am being very careful here while putting my words together. I don’t want to imply that it is BAD to dream or aim for big things in life. All I am trying to say here is to have somewhat realistic expectations which are both gettable and possible for you while doing the preparation.
Hope I was able to put my point across the way I wanted.

Eat Healthy and fresh food
Even if you are not preparing for Marathon, IMHO, the most important and positive thing that you can do to your body is to eat healthy and fresh food. When I wrote this article, I stresses a lot of eating clean, healthy, and fresh food.

Eating good and healthy food does wonders to your body even though you don’t exercise that much. I realized this when my parents were visiting me last Summer. I stopped going to CrossFit for 2-3 months and I wasn’t running during this time to spend more time with my parents. Even after stopping my physical activities for more than 2 months, I did not feel that many changes in my physical appearance and I weighed the same. Throughout these 2 months, I mostly ate the home cooked, fresh, and healthy food. I admit we went out to eat whenever we travelled, but, apart from that, I strictly dined at home and loved every part of it.

You must have enough energy to run a Marathon and food and drink is the only way to obtain that energy, so, you have to make sure whatever your intake for food and drink is good, healthy, and fresh – ALL THE TIME! You will be amazed to see wonderful results these small changes will have for your body.

Most important – Friends who support you
This is a treasure. This is a must. This is a need. Without your friends, IMHO, you won’t be able to accomplish what you want to – be it a Marathon or climbing Mount Everest. If you don’t have friends who support you achieve your goals, then the first thing to do is to get such friends and spend time with them. Once you cement these relationships, then you certainly can help each other achieve your dreams.

I have talked on numerous occasions about the importance of friends and their positive support to achieve your dreams, and I would echo myself one more time, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, FRIENDS ARE A MUST. Humans are social animals and we can’t survive without each other, without the social aspect of the life, so, the sooner your embrace it, the better.

I have been blessed to have such friends in my life – Monika and Anupam. When I talked about my Marathon plans over the Memorial Day weekend, Anupam graciously volunteered to accompany me during this run, hoping to finish his FIRST MARATHON along with me. And, what do I say about Monika? She made sure we are hydrated and well fed during this unprecedented feat and made sure we are emotionally okay during this monstrous distance.
Manju also helped me by lending her running gear and providing important feedback when needed.

That brings us to the end of a small pedigree that I thought is necessary for running your first Marathon.
I might have missed a few points here and there, so please let me know. I always like to improve and would be happy to do so again.

Showtime
Now, to “listen” how the actual Marathon was, you might wanna click here. I didn’t want to bore with so many details in a single post.
For now, have fun, enjoy and see what we will accomplish together in future!
Many more things to come.