I was trundling along, reasonably happily, 19 or so miles into the 2022 Manchester Marathon. My training hadn’t been anything like perfect but, having done around 20 marathons before, I reckoned I’d be OK.
I was wrong. Horribly wrong.
My legs started to feel so, so heavy, my breathing started to go all over the place, and I was insanely hungry.
I’d hit “The Wall”.
Never before had I experienced it. Everything felt just so wrong, all I wanted to do was stop, curl up into a ball, and wake up some place else. But the finish line was still 7 miles away, and that’s a long, long way if you suddenly become incapacitated.
And I was.
Buit what had happened? Why did I suddenly hit The Wall when it had never happened to me before, and what exactly is The Wall?
Let’s look at it in really simple terms. To move, we use calories. Roughly 100 per mile, whether we walk, run or jog. I doesn’t seem that many does it? But they soon build up. And here’s the kicker, our bodies all hold roughly 2,000 accessible calories. That means we can go around 20 miles before the tank is empty.
And that’s where things get messy.
We can carry on, but to continue powering our muscles, our body needs to find those extra calories from somewhere else. That somewhere else happens to be from the muscles themselves. We basically start “eating ourselves from the inside”, taking calories out of the very muscles that we power by burning them. We are, quite literally, burning our muscles as we use them.
Ouch! Very Ouch!
The only way to stop this is to stop. Once the wall has been hit and this process begins, it’s really too late to eat and replace those burned calories with new, available ones. So we suffer, and have to push on through, adjust everything about the race and decide whether to push on through or settle for a DNF.
For me, there’s never a choice. DNF is not an option. So I decided to endure the pain and make sure that I finished the race. I did. Just.
So what can we do to avoid this horrible experience?
I’ll let you know next time.
Until then, fuel up well, and keep loving your running!