Maranoia and Marathon Q&A

Maranoia, aka marathon paranoia. I’m pretty sure every marathon runner at some point suffers from maranoia. I generally experience two periods of maranoia during my marathon training, somewhere halfway during my training and during taper.

There is always a point halfway during my training that I start to get the feeling that something will go wrong. During my training for Berlin this was due to not training enough. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to finish. And during my training for Paris I did train enough and was in good shape, but I was convinced I wouldn’t be able to keep up that shape for another three months. I was afraid something would happen and mess up my training.

And then there’s tapering. You’ve been training so hard for months and about 3 weeks before the marathon you decrease your mileage so you have time to recover and you can save your energy for race day. But at the same time you’re wondering if you’re not training too little or too slow during these 3 weeks. Are you losing all that fitness that you’ve worked so hard for?

And currently I’ve got a new nemesis: the weather! Last week the prediction for race day was 9 degrees but dry. Then it got up to 11 degrees, then 14 and even 17. And then it all of a sudden became 20 degrees with light rain, and even 23 degrees and no clouds! And now the prediction is back to 17, but with lots and lots of rain! It is driving me crazy. If it gets really hot I won’t be able to run a PB, but running a marathon in the pouring rain doesn’t sound that much fun either. I guess I just have to wait and see.

I know a lot of you are currently training for a spring marathon or considering doing a fall one (or maybe you’ve already signed up for your fall marathon. I have, but I’ll blog about that some other time). So I asked on social media for everyone that had any questions about running a marathon to submit them and I’d do a Q&A. I answered them live on Instagram and you can watch it below.