Running A Marathon Isn’t Meant To Be Easy

Have you signed up for a marathon recently?

Then you already know: it’s not going to be easy. And honestly? It’s not meant to be.

If it were, everyone would do it.

Running a marathon is supposed to be hard — and that’s perhaps the greatest reason to run one.

Most people assume the hardest part is physical. But the real battle happens between your ears. When your alarm goes off at 5 am on a dark training morning, it’s hard. When you’re already exhausted, and the run is still waiting for you, it’s hard. And when you’re at mile 23, and your body is begging you to stop, it’s hard.

Physical discomfort is inevitable. But it’s your capacity to sit with mental discomfort — and keep going anyway — that determines whether you finish.

Some people call this grit. It’s the willingness to do difficult, unrewarding things today in the service of something meaningful tomorrow.

The marathon might be one of the purest tests of it that exists.

Seeking Out Hard Things

No-one brags about walking up a grassy slope, people brag about climbing Mount Everest.

Penn Jillette

Marathon runners are often told, “Wow, you must be really fit to be able to run 26.2 miles!”

Of course, you need to be physically in shape to cover 26.2 miles in one outing. But what these comments completely overlook is the perseverance required to continually push your body at a high rate of exertion for hours on end.

Regardless of your fitness and ability levels, no one finds running a marathon easy.

Whether you’re an elite runner competing for the podium or a walk-run rookie who is completing their first-ever marathon, everyone has to dig deep over those 26.2 miles.

The physical discomfort is unavoidable. But what really makes you a marathon runner is your ability to persevere, which is mostly a mental game over a physical one.

Those of us who sign up for marathons are actively seeking hard things in life.

We’re looking for personal challenges, inviting in the discomfort and hardship, knowing that we’ll find the process tough – but ultimately there’s something in that which makes it rewarding.

Marathon training can give us focus and purpose, which, in turn, can give momentum to other aspects of our lives.

What It Takes To Train For a Marathon

Signing up for a marathon is easy. Well, maybe not the Majors these days.

Log on to the organizer’s website. Punch in a few details, and – boom – you’ve got your entry.

The hard part is, of course, the training.

It’s easy to launch into marathon training with a jolt of enthusiasm. Those first few weeks of your marathon training plan are relatively light, and you often finish feeling you could have gone further.

But as the weeks and months progress, the volume of marathon training miles increases relentlessly. By the time your training peaks, you can be easily booking 40+ miles each week, training for hours on end.

This means waking up early to train. It means training on sore legs and tired bodies. It can mean sacrificing time with family and friends to go running when it’s dark, cold, raining, and unpleasant.

It means persevering when every part of you is looking for reasons to rationalize stopping and throwing in the towel.

It means sacrificing easy comfort and voluntarily throwing yourself into something challenging for a future goal.

But maybe that’s the point. If running a marathon were easy, wouldn’t everyone do it?

Don’t Show Up Underprepared

Marathon finishing times have never been slower than they are right now. There are two reasons for this, in my opinion.

The first is that more people than ever are signing up — including many who have little or no running background. That naturally brings the average finishing time down, and honestly, I think that’s worth celebrating.

Some of my favorite moments in coaching come from working with brand new runners who arrive at the start line having never considered themselves athletes. Increased participation has real trickle-down effects: on communities, on charities, on the health and confidence of people who needed just one reason to start moving.

The second reason — and I’ll be upfront that this is partly speculation — is that the average marathon runner today is less prepared than the average marathon runner of 20 years ago.

The data backs up part of this: the slowdown between the first and second halves of a marathon is becoming more pronounced. Positive splits are getting worse.

More runners are arriving at the start line underprepared — either undertraining and hitting the wall early, or without a pacing strategy that can hold up over 26.2 miles.

Fitness level doesn’t matter as much as preparation. Whether you’re planning to run the whole thing or walk most of it, you need to invest time in training your body to go the distance.

Showing up after a handful of half-hearted training runs doesn’t just hurt your time — it increases your injury risk, guarantees a painful day, and robs you of what the marathon is actually supposed to feel like.

Sure, you might limp across the finish line and collect the medal. But did you earn it?

That medal means something different depending on how you got there. To me, it’s not a reward for surviving one hard day — it’s an acknowledgment of the weeks and months of work that made that day possible. The early mornings, the long runs, the tired legs you trained through anyway.

There are no shortcuts here. No hacks, no winging it, no cramming the week before. Lean into the training. Do the work. Let the hard days be hard.

The marathon is supposed to test you — and we’re all the better for it.