From start to finish, here's how hitting the pavement affects you mentally and physically.
When it comes to , Gina Kolata listens to her son, a seasoned marathoner who inspired her to take up the sport in the first place.
So when Kolata, a 67-year-old medical reporter at The New York Times, was preparing for her first last year, she took note. “Now mom,” Kolata remembers her son telling her, “you’re going to feel like you’re just going to fly in the beginning – it’s all downhill.” But, he continued, “it’s a huge mistake to let yourself go because your quads are going to be killing you [later]."
Per usual, he was right. Despite holding back early on, pain struck when Kolata reached hills around mile 18. “My quads were killing me,” she recalls. “I said, ‘What did I do to myself? This is ridiculous!’” Kolata , but clocked her personal worst time.
Welcome to Boston.
“It’s not the kind of course where you can just start running a consistent pace and put yourself on autopilot for 26.2 miles,” says Brian Young, a 36-year-old lawyer in the District of Columbia who finished the Boston Marathon in 2009 and attempted it again in 2012, but dropped out after the first 10 miles due to the . He's running the marathon again today. “You have to be aware of where the hills are, and you have to have a plan of when you’re going to hold back and when you’re going to run hard.”
In other words, Young says, “to run that course well, it’s really a cerebral challenge.” Of course, it’s , too. Here’s why.
The Start Line
Before even stepping there – or any marathon’s start line – runners need to . That means eating anywhere from 400 to 800 calories of carbs about three hours before the race, drinking about 13 to 20 ounces of water or a sport drink about two hours ahead of time and another 7 to 10 ounces of fluid 10 to 20 minutes before the gun goes off, says Michelle Walters-Edwards, chair of the Department of Health and Human Performance at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, who works with professional and Olympic athletes. “Pre-event fueling will ensure that the body’s limited stores of carbs are optimized, and this is the first critical step to success,” she says.
For Young, who’s run more than 10 marathons, eating a bowl of granola and a banana when he wakes up and then a half of a bagel closer to start time does the trick. “A lot of this is through trial and error,” he says.
This year, Young is staying with his wife’s family close to the start line, so he doesn’t have to leave the house until about an hour before the gun goes off. Most runners aren’t so lucky. “Folks at the start line – especially this one – are ... waiting for a long time and there’s music and there’s a race director yelling at everyone to get to the line and it’s just kind of chaotic,” says Joseph McConkey, head coach at the Boston Running Center who has coached hundreds of Boston Marathoners each year over the past 12 years.
That chaos can take its toll if you get overwhelmed by it, McConkey says. “Your hormones shift, and that can impede normal cellular function,” he says. Newbies in particular are prone to start-line , which can make them fidgety – using energy better expended on the road, McConkey says. “Excitation and excitement is good, [but] we don’t want to let it impede our race plan.”
Miles 0 to 4
And they’re off! The first several miles of the Boston Marathon are, on a whole, downhill. Sounds nice, huh? Not so fast – literally. “The eccentric contractions are the most taxing to the body, and that’s what downhill running emphasizes,” McConkey says. “You’re actually having to contract and stretch a muscle at the same time.”
So while the decline may feel breezy, it’s really just a farce. As Kolata experienced, your muscles will speak up – or cry out – later on. “I was shocked how much my quads hurt,” she says.
McConkey’s advice? Don't worry too much about running precisely at your planned pace so long as you keep a consistent “stride rate” – or number of steps per minute – that's neither too fast nor too slow. “If you do that … you’ll feel it when you start turning around, and you start going uphill later in the race.”