How do you know when you are ready to train for a marathon?

The other day, a runner reached out to me with a question. “How did you know when you were ready to train for a marathon?” Well the short answer is, I didn’t know. I wasn’t a runner who ran one half marathon and decided to take the plunge for the whole shebang right after.

I ran my first half marathon in 2014, and was over the moon with that accomplishment (as you should be). Immediately after, people were asking when I was going to run a full.

I said never.

I said never for FIVE YEARS. During that time I was content with running distances up to 13.1 and felt fulfilled. I had two young kids at home, I worked, and I thought I never would have the time to train for a marathon. Marathon runners to me were like, super serious runners who got up every morning at 3am and ran double digit training runs before work four times a week.

The summer of 2019 I was all signed up to run the Philly Half Marathon like I usually do in the fall. But this time it felt different. I had a goal time, but I wasn’t inspired by that goal like I had been in the past.

I started thinking to myself, what if I did sign up for the full? What would that training look like for someone like me, an average runner who ran about 80 miles or so a month? This went on in my mind for a few days. Then one night I got some liquid courage in the form of a couple glasses of wine and amended my Philly Half registration to switch to the full distance.

I talked to my coach about my fears of these long runs every morning at zero dark thirty. He told me I had a pretty good base, and as a consistent 4-5 day a week runner, the only thing that was really going to change for me was the distance of my long runs each week. Are there marathoners that do run double digit long runs every day - yes absolutely. But a first timer does not need to do that in order to successfully complete the marathon distance.

I can always transfer down to the half if training for a full becomes too much, I told myself. I even had the date of the transfer deadline marked on my calendar.

Turns out I didn’t need that deadline.

I made it through the training cycle, still having two young kids, a husband, a house, and a job. I ran the Philly Marathon and a few months later, COVID shut everything down.

In those early months of the pandemic, I kept telling myself how glad I was that I took that opportunity to run the marathon when all the races around the world got canceled for months on end.

So the moral of the story is, it’s like any other scary decision in your life - am I ready to have kids? Am I ready to buy a house? Am I ready to change careers? Sometimes you just gotta hold your breath and take the plunge.

If you are interested in my race recap from my first marathon, you can find it here: 2019 Philly Marathon.