Strategies for Breaking the Wall

Runners can be divided into two types on how they choose to deal with the wall while running long distance runs - Associative runners are runners who play close attention to body sensations such as muscle tension and fatigue, breathing rates and stride lengths and disassociated runners are those who break the wall by distracting themselves by looking at the surroundings or thinking about something really pleasurable. The big question is what effect do these different strategies have on your running performance. I use a combination of both these strategies. When I am running by myself and I don't see any girl running next to me, I try and motivate myself , think about running strides and use the associative strategy. I try and act all cool and shit when I find a cute girl running next to me and usually have a smile on my face, think about her and thus use the disassociative approach. Sometimes, I think about the fun feeling of sipping my first pint of beer after a hard week's of work

Since the wall is an inevitable part of every long run, it is important for you to understand what strategy suits you better. When you choose a running partner make sure he also has a similar strategy as yours. A runner using an associative strategy can easily distract a runner who is using the disassociative approach.

Lessons from the Chennai Marathon

Over the last ten days, I have been going through personal issues that have devastated me both physically and mentally. My training sessions have not been upto the mark and runs have not been smooth. I enrolled myself for the Chennai half marathon but did not get a wink of sleep on saturday night. The only reason I pulled myself out of bed to run it was because my parents were more excited than I was to watch me run.

The entire family was there - dad, mom and sister. The run started off pretty strong and I went thorugh the first 10.5k in less than 1 hour despite the heat. After I touched the half way mark, I started making up reasons such as heat, no water etc and decided to drop out. Within minutes after dropping out, the guilt hit me - the real reason was not lack of water or the scroching heat, the real reason was life pushing me down and punching me on my face. I had to get up and and keep getting hit until life got tired of making me bleed.

Abhijit Shome, was running the full marathon. He arrived at the place where I was standing with my head low and almost burst to tears. He did not want to go further. For me, that was simply God yelling out, asking me to go take care of things that need to do be done. I said to Abhijit "do you want to finish the race?... I'll help you finish it". He cheered up. We ran and we ran hard. At the 38th km, he said "I feel like I have broken the wall"...we ran harder after that. Abhijit and I finished the run in 4 hours and 8 minutes. However, it was my half marathon and it was his full marathon though !!! I helped Abhijit finish the race and Abhijit helped me get stuff out of my basement.

A lot of things can pull us down in life - job, kids, girlfriends, education etc. There will always be a huge brick wall that will stop us from going further. There are two things you can do here - keep going and keep hitting the brick wall hard that it will crumble into pieces or you can make up excuses and say that "life got hard and I decided to give up". You decide what you want to do?