Mind Over Miles: Reflections from the Marathon

In this episode of Feeding Curiosity, host Erich Wenzel reflects on the journey and insights from training for and completing two marathons. He discusses the challenges and sacrifices involved, including balancing marathon training with a full-time job and transitioning to a new career. Erich emphasizes the importance of building new experiences, pushing personal limits, and the mental and physical discipline required for such a demanding goal. He shares practical tips on endurance training, managing expectations, and the broader life lessons from this transformative experience.

Show Notes:

00:00 Introduction and Podcast Update

00:34 Marathon Training Journey

02:41 Challenges and Adaptations

05:46 Training Strategies and Insights

12:24 Race Day Experiences

18:26 Reflections and Future Plans

25:17 Conclusion and Call to Action

Here is the transcript for those who would prefer to read my thoughts

 Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Feeding Curiosity. I'm your host, Erich Wenzel, as always. In today's episode, I wanted to explore where Feeding Curiosity has been, which is me. And the whole overarching story of this is based around me doing two marathons. We've only released one episode for the last year or so; except for the previous three weeks, we've been going over The Arcane season two deep dives. The lack of content around podcasts, in general, has been the choice to take on the marathon, and I've done it twice. So, in 2023 and 2024, part of the reason the podcasting world or podcasting has been going down to a crawl is very early; I decided I needed to commit to an aggressive training cycle.

I felt I couldn't spread myself thin between making content, working full-time, and training for a marathon. Something had to give. So, creating content was the one thing. Part of that was that I was going through a transition. I had a new job, a different career.

Learning that, I created a whole new routine. Also, I was repeating myself too much in the content world. I needed to get new experiences and try many new things. I needed to go back into the lab, so to speak, and come back with new things to say.

I think I've done that. Now, having done the marathon two times, and if you're a long-time follower of the show and the things I do on the website, you know I've spent a lot of time working with wearables, performance supplements, etc.

I turned 30, and part of that was to see if I could take everything I've been absorbing and learning about performance and physical training and say, okay, I'm not an athlete, but could I turn myself into an amateur athlete with everything I'm doing?

And apply that. I didn't have a coach. I used wearables and my gut instinct to figure out how to do a marathon, which is a crazy challenge. Adding in something like marathon training is no easy feat.

The other part of that is, could I do something crazy? Twenty-year-old me never thought I'd do a marathon, so 30-year-old me certainly would not have been feasible. And so I did it early on when you do this training.

This is the first five-mile run. This is the first 10-mile run. This is the first half marathon, and so on. So, everything is a new PR, no matter what. And I think running in many ways is one of those things that you can see your performance easily, right? Are you doing a faster pace with higher intensity?

Or Are you going further, and it gives you this kind of juxtaposition to be like, okay, can you? I have been adapting whatever that means and making different changes as a more weightlifting-focused person since my early 20s. It was a whole other skill set to be able to train for endurance, and I did ride my bike before this.

That got me the gateway into many of these things. But it was. They have entirely different sets of skills, and so the big question is, could I leverage these abilities? All the things I've learned to transform myself as much as possible in a year into someone who can run long distances were fascinating.

And I would say the most challenging thing isn't the fact that I never wanted to go into this running fast. It was more about managing my expectations in the sense that when you first start running, especially if you want to go fast and hit a certain pace, you want to go as fast as you can within the first mile or so.

And it's not about that. It's about installing a mental governor, not just going out and negotiating with yourself to pick up the pace. You're like, am I being too easy on myself or going too hard on myself? Can I manage this, given the climate? If it's too hot or cold or whichever you are dealing with, the trick and running to me is less about the externalities that matter to some degree, right?

Find shoes that you find comfortable. And I think a lot of these things. Aren't, you can't prescribe them in a cookie cutter sense that you might be able to point people in the right direction, but it's not so much of like, this, because this is the best, et cetera, et cetera. You are going into it in the most beginner sense possible, starting as comfortably as possible, meaning the most minor lift you can do.

But you're still pushing yourself a little bit. I committed to running around three to four miles daily to build volume and a base, which means pushing yourself to get your connective tissues used to the strain. And I think part of that awareness is potentially pulling away from the treadmill.

Especially if you get to go to a gym and things like that, treadmill running is not the same as road running, and running a marathon on a treadmill is impossible. You could do it, but you're not going to enjoy it. It's too monotonous.

So, I needed to train as close to the event as possible, which meant running outside. And I do that better for many reasons, like extra sunlight for vitamin D and just being out in nature, changing your environment. It's just better. You feel more natural doing that.

So that meant I had to get used to running in the cold here in Chicago, which is not fun. I started running around January, and it gets cold here. That meant figuring out clothing, layering, gloves, and hats were the most important things. That comes down to how your body regulates your temperature. That means your hands, feet, and head bleed off most of your heat, especially when you're running outside, and if you can keep those things warm, then the rest of it takes care of itself because you generate body heat as you move.

I found that buying Gore-Tex and Murano Wool is good. For these kinds of things, it's thin but also maintains heat and doesn't get sweaty and then get cold. Cause that's the biggest thing is you don't want to sweat and then become cold after the fact because that'll, you'll lose your soul real quick and you'll get sick hit those four miles or so even on the coldest days at the minimum, then I'm good. And most of my runs outside the weekends were during the week after work, five o'clock, six o'clock, seven o'clock, knock it out as fast as possible. Otherwise, it makes it much harder for me to rest and recover.

And so was more about figuring out what works best. I didn't want to become so intense that if I skipped a run, I would berate myself for not sticking to it. It was more of the, okay, here's the way to maintain a certain level of consistency to feel like some miles were better than no miles. And the other part is that you don't have to go out and do sprint runs all the time. If you're trying to do that, you will shorten your overall fitness gains.

The idea is that if you go out and run as fast as you can do sprints every day for a week, your body will just be so stressed out and gassed that you will shorten your endurance. And so, at that point, you need to figure out how you maintain your gains, which means what your training cycle looks like in a week. My training ended up more like doing a lot of zone two training because zone two training was enormous during my first marathon training cycle. It was becoming super popular, and people were rediscovering the benefits of this low and slow endurance.

And it hit me at the perfect time to understand what that meant. Along with the book The Comfort Crisis, which had an entire chapter on the benefits of rucking, rucking is just walking with a weighted backpack. You could get into your zone 2 heart rate by doing stair climbers or rucking with a weighted backpack.

You can get into a running pace, but it isn't easy to find that pace. It's like an awkward stride when you're out in the world. But I think that's for optimal health.

One of the big takeaways is that to improve your overall health, walk briskly, anywhere from a mile and a half to three miles. Whatever it is, 30 to 40 minutes of consistent effort is your sweet spot. People with pets like dogs walk a dog, depending on how fast you go. Walking a dog twice daily is perfect for hitting that zone threshold.

This is just a ballpark rule of thumb. It's one of the most exciting things because even though I've trained to perform at this marathon distance, it's given me more appreciation to understand what it means to be functional in a regular human aspect.

Because I understand that people are just busy and theyn't have as much time, even for me now, it's like, when I think about it, I don't feel like I want to train for two plus hours a day, and when I would do my long runs, right? For example, my goal pace was to hit 10 minutes per mile, which is nothing crazy.

I won't get to the Olympics being able to do that. But it felt attainable to some degree, or at least it would push me a bit more to get to that pace and stay over a marathon distance. From that standpoint, you can understand what it means to go further or less when you add more miles to that, so, for example, if you run five miles at a 10-minute pace, that's 50 minutes. Now, say you take that up to a half marathon.

That is about two and a half hours, so adding miles takes much time. And that's the unfortunate thing about running for endurance: A lot of this takes time, and my first time around, it was all firsts.

It was the first time I did a lot of these things. You don't have an awareness of what that means. And I think now that I've done it a second time mentally, you leapfrog yourself forward. You go from five miles to your max as you build your total endurance.

And then that's hard, and you're sore. Maybe you back down a little bit. And then in a couple of weeks, you go back up, and it's five. Then you're at your peak, back down a little bit, and you go to 10 miles and keep doing that. Then slowly push yourself forward and back and forth in this yo until your peak is around that. I only had done one 20-mile training run.

I have never done it before. Took me four and a half hours or something like that when I first did it. And then I go into my first marathon, and I don't know if I can do 26, too; I know I can do 20. But it's not fast 20. It's painful. I was exhausted after doing that. And so you hope your body doesn't fall apart because there will be adrenaline. There's going to be whatever factors on the race that you're there, And so when I get to the run, I'm in all the emotions, the adrenaline dump and everything like that, and I'm sustaining a 10-minute pace, but you don't know if you could handle that. I did it all alone because of how I did my training runs. So I don't have a good sense of, okay, this is a sustained 10-minute pace.

This is how it will feel around a crowd running around you because you feed off the energy of people around you. Okay, I can sustain this. I can follow someone. So, the lesson I learned there was that I got it. Like, I nailed it for the first 13.

It was awesome. Like I was like, okay, training did something. But then, around mile 16, the pain hits. And I hit this wall of pain. For example, my right knee started being painful, or my foot felt like I was getting a blister, and it's okay; here it is. Let's see what happens. And it got to this point where I was getting this crazy cramp in my calf, and it was okay, either I push it, and I get a crazy calf cramp and Kills the whole thing.

Or I could back off and walk, run it until, and that's basically what I had to do. The next day after the run, I was sore and not destroyed per se, but it was painful, just at the very least. My whole body had been pushed to whatever limit I could have done then, and I learned a lot, as you know so much about what you're capable of.

People like David Goggins, who I often listen to for these kinds of things, say when you think you're done, you have 40 more to give, and it would think about these things, and it's like you. When you hear those words, you internalize them, and you understand them to some degree, but

You don't know what that means until you're redlining yourself. Until you try to reach the absolute limit of your capabilities. And it can be whatever domain. It doesn't mean you have to do a marathon. Just find the thing that you want to push to an extreme.

I took a year to train for this both times. I knew I was going into it because the Chicago Marathon is in October, and you sign up in December, right around when this video is coming out. You figure out if you're going to commit to it like that. I probably had a longer training cycle on average than most people, but that was primarily because of the disposition for things. To build confidence, I need to develop a body of evidence. I'm just putting in the work, accumulating miles little by little until you get to the actual event, and you say, okay, I've done it, and you figure it out.

And I think that in those situations, you understand what it is. Can you commit to these things? And I know I always return to this microcosm of working out and lifting. Physical challenges are a microcosm of life. But I think it's so true. Because if you can commit to this, to do a marathon in a year, and all the challenges you don't know you're going to face, and how to figure out the different challenges, which is okay, how do I figure out my nutrition?

Like hydration, and what does your calorie intake look like? Like for me, one of the big things was that after a run, I just wanted to fill myself up with calories, which meant I would go to soda and other kinds of crappy foods. And it was like, okay, so that's not good because I'm just going to start putting a bunch of junk calories in.

It might not be that bad because I'm burning many calories, but it's okay if I care. I must be honest about what kind of calories I'm putting in. For example, I need to try to get higher protein. Do I do collagen? Do I figure out electrolytes? Or what do I take with me on the run, and how much can I carry with me?

That's not uncomfortable. So, it's playing around with different hydration methods, like water and Electrolytes. The biggest thing was electrolytes, just because the Chicago summers are hot and brutal. Maintaining that balance was useful.

Here's how you can structure your training to do low and slow cardio-like zone two: Don't try to kill your pace unless you're trying to hit a certain pace. But if you're a beginner and just trying to be more fit, categorically.

It's like zone two is your best friend because it's not so intense that you're going to kill yourself, and you're not going to be so tired the next day that you're going not to be able to function very well. You'll still feel like you did something and then figure out ways to boost your mood, right?

Because I wouldn't say I liked treadmill running, and if I did, I wouldn't want to continue, I figured out how to run outside. Being outside has a bunch of bonuses, with the vitamin D, the sunlight, nature, and just finding trail paths.

I have a bunch of forest preservers around here, so I could go and do those things. It was a bonus to be like, okay, cool. I get to go out and be in nature, look at these trails, or just be immersed more in an environment, which was always fun for me.

Okay. And then, on race day, what was cool here in Chicago was seeing the city differently because it felt like a big, long block party to be all around downtown Chicago and just be energized. And I think the biggest thing to push people to do a marathon in a big city like that is you get to feel like people are cheering you on.

Because most of our lives, unless you're a performer, you don't get a chance for people to feel like you're cheering you on to do something crazy. And again, it's not like most people are doing it because they're elite runners.

Most of these people have to sacrifice a ton of their time, effort, and money and take time off to do these things to be able to do a marathon. But it's really. It's different to feel like people are cheering you on to be there and supporting you in doing that. And I have these people you don't even know, and you know, I got to see friends, and my girlfriend saw me on my second run, which was fantastic. I think it's one of those things that you get to help people help you feel like you're accomplishing something crazy and training for something extraordinary. It's like once in a lifetime like it's a bucket list thing, and it shows you like, okay, can I make this promise with myself or push myself to this level that I thought was impossible?

I never thought I'd do this. It's a crazy thing to do that. And maybe it's just because I've immersed myself around people like Cameron Haynes and David Goggins, who are insane ultra runners and just gifted runners at that level. That's why not? It's crazy enough to believe that you can.

And it's You don't know unless you do it, unless you take the first step out the door and commit to figuring that out. Even though I think that's one of the crazy things about running in general, you might say some days that you don't like it. Even you might feel like it, but then you get out there, and it's a weird feeling where some days I'd feel like I didn't want to go, but then I start running, and I feel amazing.

And I'm like, this is one of the best runs I've done in months. The days you feel great and then you don't feel great at all, and you're like, today was terrible, but you still have to show up. It's Similar to what we've discussed in the past and other episodes about the muse, Where you have to make the conditions for the muse to appear. So, if you're a runner and want to run well, you must run a lot. Some days, you're just not going to perform for whatever reason. On other days, you're just firing on all cylinders, and everything's great.

Everything was smooth, and it was just awesome. You just hit that Goldilocks training zone or whatever. For me, the big story about that was the biggest success. It wasn't even the marathon running for me for the second time this last year. My biggest win overall was running the half marathon. I nailed my goal of a 2:15 half marathon, and when I ran it, it worked.

I couldn't return to that because the weather just got too hot and intense. So, I couldn't maintain the pace that I wanted to, but leading up to it, the conditions were just perfect. It was cool, not too hot, not too humid, and I could just go at whatever pace I wanted to.

When I ran the half, everything just fired on all cylinders. My friends had asked me who was running it with me. We were like, Hey, what's your goal pace? And I said, two 15. And I nailed it within a couple of seconds. Even though I did my marathon faster than I did last time, it was like 18 minutes faster, still nothing crazy.

Doing a two 15 half marathon is still the most exciting thing about this. Cause I like to prove to myself that I could do a 10-minute marathon and do that. And it feels fantastic to do those things. A lot of just learning what your body needs for yourself and how you make it work. I'm a little bit at a loss of words. After all, I'm trying to step back from being so specific to just marathon training because I want to just evergreen this life stuff because I think that's what it is. It's like learning strategies for yourself to play the long game of life, Be successful, and build tools and resilience to perform in the long game.

I guess maybe there's a way to think about this. I'll have to come back after I think about it; more like just a general life advice type thing because there may be zone two for life, not zone two for cardio, is like a zone. What's life zone two? I think it would be interesting to encapsulate this because I feel you have to understand what works best for you in the sense that I could do long runs.

One of the things that made it enjoyable again for me was to put on music or podcasts and audio books to learn and absorb things. And part of that was knowing that engaging motor neurons while you're listening to something like a podcast or an audio book helps you learn because it gives your body more ways to remember what you're absorbing through your ears.

And maybe for some people, that won't work, but it was like a way for me to put hours into listening to audio that I found enjoyable; maybe that's part of why this works for me because I have the outlet to do intellectual things while Immersed in a physical challenge. And I like to see what's the texture of my own mind where I can figure out, okay, where am I getting frustrated or why, like, why am I being overly hard on myself for X, Y, or Z reason?

Cause sometimes you would get in, You'd have a bad run, and you're like, Oh my God, I'm trying to do this thing, and I can't even run a nine-minute pace or 10-something pace. And you're like, what the heck am I doing? Cause you could quickly get into that negative spiral where you're like, dude, you're wasting your time to save seconds off of your pace.

Maybe that's the game in some sense. Your overall time is not measured by the minutes but it's by the seconds. And every second you can do it faster adds up to minutes. And so that if I got tired or wanted to go too fast, I would return to it and lock myself in. So I would pay attention to my stride and not get lazy because being lazy with form means putting stress in places, and tightness and pain could arise if you're not paying attention to that.

And it was the slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And I always would go back to that because instead of thinking like I'm not going fast enough. It's okay. Can I be? Slow to smooth so that I was being efficient with my energy instead of being tense and scrunched up because if you watch people who ru,n it's like you will want to scrunch and get like really tense, especially if you're trying to go fast and that's not really what you want to do especially when you're going long distances is that leads to weird pains and potentially terrible form or you get sloppy with your form I am now with two of these marathons under my belt. I don't know what's next. I'm not doing it again next year. I haven't committed to it because I want it. I want to do this. I want to be able to talk about these things in a general way and teach people some lessons.

And life endurance is really what I'm trying to achieve here. So I'll pass it off to you, is now that I've done marathons, and people who've stuck with Feeding Curiosity this long know how much I care about the performance, categorically, what resonates with people, to tell you more about the lessons that I might be able to shed light on, or questions you might have.

Or whatever it might be that helps you. It's good to be back to talk about these things because it's a good outlet to get out of my head. If I can step away from it and be a hypercritical overachiever, it's not worth doing it if I don't do something perfectly.

But I don't think that's true. Because if I came out here and said it was easy and I expected everything to happen that happened, then clearly I'm not trying hard enough, so I think for this first lesson from the marathon, I'll leave it at that.

But I hope this opens a dialogue with everyone else.