My first three marathons. All in the same year, 2022.

I was still young, run-wise. 2 years of running age.

I was still young, run-wise

I was already feeling strong and confident with long distance running in 2022. I had already reached the stag

e of comfortably having a high weekly mileage which included at least a long run between 28 and 32 km on weekends. 

So I decided it was a good time to start running marathons and signed up for the Luxembourg Night Marathon which takes place at the end of May. Few weeks later, I signed up for the Freiburg marathon which happens in April. 

The Freiburg Marathon 

To start with, the common denominator in all my first three marathons was making rookie mistakes. I'm grateful, however, because I took the learnings from them. 

I started to train for the Luxembourg marathon following a free online 12 weeks plan. One of the mistakes I made was to not adapt and take a proper taper for Freiburg. 

The day of the race I was super hyped started off too fast. I did the first half-marathon in 1:28:44 at the time which became my personal best at that distance. I paid the price for it later. The main learning here is that it doesn't make sense "to bank time" because the "interest rate" in the second half of the race is generally higher than what you have "saved" 

I didn't feel like having hit the wall but I was already slowing down at km 28. About two kms later I started to feel a terrible pain on my right calf, probably due to, among other things, the bad hydration strategy. 

Later at km 38 I met Yannick, literally the first time. We pushed each other to the finish line with a decent pace since then and a time of 3:11.15. I can live with this for the first marathon. 

The Luxembourg Night Marathon 

I was determined to improve my strategy and run a better race, from an execution perspective, although I knew Luxembourg is a much harder course than Freiburg due to its elevation gain. In fact it feels more like a trail if it wasn't for the tarmac. 

My main mistake here was my pre-race nutrition. I literally ate and drank too much. At approximately 25 my stomach started to complain. From here up to km 42 I felt like I was in the trenches fighting with a wound on my sides and not running a marathon. I finished with a time of 3:32:32

Frankfurt Marathon 

After Luxembourg I took a little break to recover, meditate… and sign up for the next Marathon. Frankfurt in October. 

At this point I was paying more attention to my running form with focus on running economy. I did some changes which I'm not going to do in detail here. 

The first 30 km of Frankfurt were good, from a strategic perspective. I was on an average pace 4:16 min/km. Then I got greedy, made the first mistake, and started too early to try to go progressive. The second mistake is that I didn't take the weather conditions into account. It was too hot, 25 degrees at some stages of the race, to speed up. At the aid station of km 37 I grabbed a sparkling drink. No clue what exactly it was but it made me remember the experience in Luxembourg. My body forced me to stop and walk for 200 / 300 meters until I was capable of running again, slowly. It felt like being in the battlefield and being caught on the side by an arrow, or two. 

I ended with a time of 3:19:25, my second fastest marathon to the time of this post. 

Will I just stop? Or will I take these learnings to further improve myself?