Runner Stories | Karichi Santos
Signing up for a marathon was really a snap decision just to maximize the ROI of my recently purchased Garmin. During the peak of pandemic isolation, I found myself needing some semblance of purpose / mission – perhaps something to break the monotony of staying at home and to commemorate coming out of COVID-19 era alive. To my mind, conquering the distance of a full marathon ticks all those boxes and was a fitting culmination for an unprecedented life amidst a pandemic.
I’ve only ever ran fun runs before taking on the marathon training block, the longest being 10km. While I consider myself fairly active, my aerobic base is practically zero. The fact that I have a penchant for chasing the hard things and a special talent for finding meaning in suffering made the 42.2km challenge all the more alluring.
Recounting the marathon training block with CK and my first full marathon experience still leave me misty-eyed. It was grueling, demanding, and all-consuming. It entailed sacrifices and significant investment of time, energy, and resources. For one, Saturday night outs were of the question as CK needs us to be up and literally running way before daybreak for our Sunday long steady distances. I did look forward to those long runs as it also doubled as my personal quiet time. At the same time, I have never been more conscious about keeping my overall health intact and staying hydrated than during the marathon training block. We knew these hardships coming in to the training but it was a different thing actually going through the process.
I was the backest back of the packer in the team so I just made sure that what I lacked in endurance or speed, I made up for in attendance. I showed up when I didn’t want to or didn’t feel like I could. Like what one of the cheer posters along the Berlin-Marathon race course said, “you did not have to do this!”. And yet I did. It was a voluntary, self-imposed hardship, yes. I figured though that the more I showed up for myself and do CK’s assignments, the stronger I became not just physically but more importantly, mentally. So much that every dreaded run workout almost always ended with an internal monologue that goes like “See, that wasn’t so bad. You didn’t die. You won against yourself again.” At some point, ticking off the run assignments became synonymous with conquering my inner demons. Do it frequently enough and it feels damn good.
CK helped a great deal on the mind-game, motivational, and willpower front. He (and the WeKenRun team, too!) constantly believed in me when I couldn’t and wondered if I even deserved to be at the start line. My biggest fear really was that I would be the combo breaker, the only one in the 17/18 strong WKR Berlin delegation who will not make it to the finish line. That thought alone was enough to power me through the race.
Getting a DNF or DNS** was not an option for me. I stuck to my 1:30-45s run/walk intervals. I cut up the distance into a half marathon, 1 km recovery and then two rounds of 10k time trials. For each “segment” of the race, I forced my brain to forget about all the efforts and energy expended from the previous segments. I tricked my brain into thinking that I’m running on fresh legs for each segment. Whenever my legs felt like they were giving out or my inner demons will tell me that I am not good enough for this, I shushed them away with self-pep talks that “you trained for this” and “you got this”. I kept repeating form cues from Sir Rene “arm swing” “knee drive” “relaxed shoulders” and repeated the timestamps when I should take my gels and saltsticks (1:30, 2:15, 3:00, 3:45, 4:30 and so on). That was the moment I realized the immense power of self-efficacy.
Before I know it, I was at km 41 when I chugged Coke. Bad idea. My upper body froze and felt like I was having a cardiac arrest. But nope, I wasn’t about to give up at this point when I’m approximately 10 minutes away from the finish line.
I trusted the training and thought about not letting down the people who believed in me. In 06:52:29 (average pace of 09:47 min/km), I completed my first full marathon and earned my first World Marathon Major Star, ranking 11,481st out of 45,527 participants.