by Kai Deniri

Created on: March 31, 2009

No, my friend, it does not have to feel like a marathon. As a finisher of two marathons, I can tell you why one felt like a marathon and the other did not. The Steamtown Marathon in Pennsylvania felt like a marathon, while the Zurich Marathon in Switzerland did not. Why the difference? Because of a sprawling galaxy of highly individual and situational reasons that may or may not apply to any other runner but me. On the chance another runner can find any value in them, however, I'm here to share with you how a marathon that feels like a marathon feels - which you may well know - and how a marathon doesn't have to feel like feel like one.

Your first marathon will probably feel like a marathon no matter how well you train. You eat right, you read Runner's World and go to expos, pasta dinners, and even doctors. You study your pace, heart rate, and weekly mileage. You make marathon playlists for your iPod if you run with music, and you inspect your shoes or buy new ones. You get into the whole project of the event, of being a participant, of comraderie with elite athletes you'd never had much to say to before. Steamtown also felt like a marathon because it was my very first journey on foot over the distance of 26.2 miles. To train, I had only gone as far as 20-22ish. I had taken great time and care to train, because I'd grown up around marathoners and that was what they always did. The marathon was my all-consuming priority. Mentally, the experience was staggering, marathonlike, from the interminable bus ride that picked us up near the finish to take us all the way to the starting line ("how much longer?" I thought, "and when did I say I wanted to run this far?") to the course map on which I counted 14 towns I'd have to run through, and re-counted, because 14 didn't seem possible. Any runner will tell you how intensely mental the sport is. A marathon feels like a marathon when you exhaust your mind as much as your body.

The Zurich Marathon, by contrast, did not feel like a marathon until the next morning when I got out of bed. I can think of about a hundred reasons why Zurich did not feel like a marathon. #1 was - are you ready for this? - I did not plan to finish.

I'd signed up hastily - just 6 months after Steamtown - out of peer pressure. I worked 60-some hours 7 days a week as a nanny and ended up having no time to train. My farthest run since Steamtown may have been 9 or 10 miles, nothing more than I could do between 8am when the kids left for school and 2pm

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