Run your own race at marathon

Social runners are now training like elite marathon athletes. If running at 4.30am is not an elite tendency, I don’t know what is. I mean who wakes up at 4am just to run for fun?

Social runners are not sleeping enough. We deprive ourselves of a good night’s sleep, and spending time with family and friends just so we can get that PB (personal best) time at the next race. We take supplements and go to the gym. Today’s social runner is out running at least five days a week, just one day shy of the six days most elite athletes do, and covering between 40-70km a week.

What happened to running 30 minutes a day, three to four times a week as suggested by health enthusiasts?

Being competitive happened. Take Caroline Wostmann as an example. She started running to lose baby weight, but ended up winning the Comrades Marathon. Running is contagious, especially to those with a competitive spirit. It is no longer about being fit and healthy; it has become about how fast one can run, and who clocked the most mileage the past week.

Although this competitive attitude is unspoken, we see it in social media posts and the updates on running apps. These apps can measure the distance you ran, how fast you did it and how difficult the route was and then rank you and your peers, encouraging competition.

These days social runners get injured more than professional athletes. We tend to do too much too soon to become competitive and put too much strain on the muscles which have not been properly developed to handle the amount of intensive training social runners are doing lately. Today’s social runner runs three ultramarathons and at least seven marathons a year.

But, progression should be gradual – getting better at short distances before moving on to longer marathons. Social pressure should not be the catalyst to your high mileage, it should be a personal journey and the pressure to perform should come from within.

A good friend of mine, a social runner with elite tendencies, says whenever he sees someone in long tights ahead of him in a race he makes it a point to pass them as he believes such people are not serious. This from a man who started running four years ago.

You must run your own race at the Soweto Marathon and push against your own boundaries.