Why everyone should run a marathon

It's not just pounding wet streets when you'd rather be in bed

There was a time when running a marathon was a big deal. It was the stuff of legend – Pheidippides ran to Athens, delivered his message and dropped dead from the effort (depending which account you prefer). Running 26 miles was truly the preserve of superhumans, or those obsessive, skinny, miserable-looking people who do nothing but run and seem to think and talk about little else.

These days, not so much. If you tell people you ran a marathon this weekend they might show polite interest, or ask ‘which one?’ They might wonder how fast you ran, so they can judge you in their minds or compare you with the one they ran last week. They might even think ‘just the one marathon?’

Don’t be fooled. For all the normalisation of distance running in recent years, running a marathon is still a huge deal. It’s still one of the greatest achievements you can work towards in your life; it’s likely to be one of your most significant memories. And, counter-intuitively, almost anyone can do it.

It’s certainly not just something for young, very fit people. Based on a completely unscientific poll of people about my age I talk to at work, on the school run and beyond, endurance sport is one of the most common pursuits – that includes running, triathlon, open-water swimming and anything else where you basically move really slowly for a really long time. Marathons are (almost) the new golf.

Full disclosure, I enjoy running, so it’s easy for me to advocate for it. But I know many other people who run, and I’ve met very few who run and don’t like it – there are many more that hate the idea of it, but who have never really given it a go (but maybe that’s true for everything).

Running a marathon is not just about the day of the event itself – really, it’s a journey of many months from the start of a training programme, through the inevitable tweaks and niggles, the dips and highs in morale and the progress you make, until you finally find yourself on the start line.

Training for a marathon (or any major event) is a great way to get through the winter – it’s a proper goal, something that gets you out the house four times a week. Setting a medium-term goal is more powerful than a resolution that you aim to hold for the rest of your life.

Spring marathons are great for this as you can start training on Boxing Day; but Autumn marathons can be great if you prefer to train through the summer months.

And one of the best times to start training for a spring marathon is right now (as I publish this in mid-September). Most structured training programmes last 12-16 weeks, which makes them ideal to pick up at the start of the year, but there’s no point in starting that from scratch – you need to have a certain base level of fitness already and you’ll need to be used to running. Ideally you should already be able to do 5-10 miles in relative comfort.

And that’s the bit to get done between now and the end of the year.

If you’re genuinely starting from scratch, do a ‘Couch to 5k’ programme. They are fantastic, and they have been successful in getting thousands of people into regular running, many of whom thought it would never be for them. If that’s where you are, by all means have a marathon as the long term goal, but realistically you want to be taking a year to get all the way to a marathon from scratch, if you want to do it sustainably, without getting injured and if you want to do any more than ‘just get round’.

So far I’ve run four marathons, and another four races longer than marathon distance. They have all felt epic. And like everyone else, there was a first day of training when I gasped and wheezed round two miles, with bursting lungs and sore – everything – and couldn’t imagine being capable of anything more than what I’d just done. It was a horrible, sobering twenty minutes or so, but I still felt glad I’d done it. And two days later I did it again, slightly further and slightly less noisily.

And you just keep doing it, making a little more progress each time.

I’ve also fallen over the finish line, broken and exhausted after many hours of hills and mud and sworn I will never do this again – only to sign up for something else within a couple of days. That’s how they get you.

So here’s nine reasons why you (yes you) should consider training for a marathon:

That Start line feeling. There’s nothing like it. Everyone there has worked for months to get to that point. As you start the race, you’ve done 99% of the work already. Getting to the start line is genuinely the hard bit and, look around, every single person there has already been on a journey, with a story that means the world to them.

Competing – not with the other runners, but against the version of you that didn’t do this. Proving something to the person you used to be. Every time I’m out early on a Sunday I think about the lazy oaf (other me) that stayed in bed.

Raising money for a great cause – you don’t have to do this, but if you’re going to go to all the effort of training for a marathon, why not spread the love and do some good while you’re at it? It’s also a good way to get guaranteed places at some of world’s most sought-after events, including London (now 16x over-subscribed in the most recent ballot). If you can raise a couple of grand, you’re in.

The journey of the race itself – you’ll be out there for anything between three and six hours, and along the way you’ll meet new people, see the sights, hear bands, be cheered by strangers, have dark moments and spectacular highs. You’ll have problems, and find a way through them. You’ll shake your head in disbelief as you go past the ’20 miles done’ sign. You may well feel like you can’t run another step – but you still will. It feels like life in a day and you’ll be talking about it for weeks.

Inspiring yourself and opening doors – the people you meet, the opportunities you create and the things that you always thought were impossible (or never thought were on the radar for you) now become possible. You’ve trained to be able to run 26 miles – is that hurdle you’re facing in your work life, home life or something else really that big? You can do anything now.

Inspiring others – you’ll get tons of support on your social pages and from friends and family, but you’ll also inspire people in ways you might not every realise or see. Your kids will think you’re amazing (even if they don’t say so). Others will realise that maybe they could do this too…?

Health benefits – guess what, you’ll be in better shape, and you’ll have bags more energy than before. Once you’ve regained the use of your legs, have re-learned how to walk downstairs and have stopped shouting when you get out of bed in the morning (it only takes a week, I promise), you will find you’re still really fit, and it’s so much easier to keep that topped up than it was to gain that fitness in the first place.

That Finish line feeling. The relief, the euphoria, the exhaustion, the disbelief, the strange quietness (if you’ve just finished a major city marathon). The realisation that you did it, you actually did it.

The actual medal – it’s a funny thing, getting a medal for taking part. In any other avenue I’d say it was pandering to an anti-competitive culture and lowering the level of human resilience (don’t get me started), but in this case it really is about inclusion – every single person crossing that line has worked hard for months to achieve a goal, and has achieved that goal. It’s celebrating resilience, not lowering it.

The race medal is more than just a lovely memento of what you did, it’s proof to you every time you look at it that you can achieve great things, that you can train hard, overcome adversity, push through difficulties, motivate yourself and accomplish things that you set out to do. I have a small rack of medals in my garage and they help motivate and distract me when I’m training there. And they’re just for me to look at, not for showing off about.

I won’t talk here about ultramarathons, which take that intensity to a whole new level – that’s for another article, another time.

Vassos Alexander, the sports broadcaster, author and runner, says (and I agree) that almost anyone can do a marathon if they put in the training. That probably means you.

So if you fancy that start line and finish line moment, next spring, if you want to discover what you’re really capable of, why not make a start today? Go on, get your trainers on and get out there, you won’t regret it.