On bonking.

I’ve run 4 marathons, I’ve bonked 3.

A bonk is when you hit the pain cave so hard you can barely find an exit.

Boston 2017 I had so little running experience I was just running to finish. It was 78 degrees with direct sun. I ended with a 5:20-something.

NYC 2019 I ran the race with my then boyfriend and when he was hurt at mile 17 I stayed with him. The death of you in a marathon is stopping, so those last 9 miles were hell. I think we did a 4:50 something.

NYC 2022 was the year Roe v Wade was overturned and I was pissed. I felt like I needed to do something. Running for Planned Parenthood felt like something actionable I could do. Raise money and talk about issues that matter. But I got another hot day in NYC and the gels didn’t sit with me after mile 14. Another 4:40 something.

Now, before I go on I need to state two things:

1. I was incredibly fortunate for my first three marathons to be majors. Two I applied for charity bibs and raised funds. One I was gifted a bib by a friend who works for NYRR.

2. I’m not sharing my paces to pace shame anyone else. Some will read these and think those times are fast, others will read and think they’re slow. The point of sharing this is that for me, these were slow. I knew I could have completed the distance faster, but it’s a marathon there’s a lot of time for many things to go wrong and for me they went wrong.

After three bonks I figured I was done. The marathon distance just wasn’t for me. I had fun chasing faster times in the half, and playing in the 20’s for a 5k. I didn’t have the time, or the will to figure out how to make it all work for 26.2 miles. I decided I was good without the distance but… left the door open for an opportunity. Working in the running industry, I decided that I’d only do another marathon if a special opportunity came along.

And then Strava called 7 weeks ago and asked what my spring race season looked like. Do I want to come run London? 

So here we are. Four days out from the marathon, with (less) creaky knees and an emotional heart. Because truly all I wanted out of this race was to not bonk.

With time and space, I’ve realized I had two great unlocks on this 26.2 journey.

Running is deeply personal. Your goals are relative only to you, the shoes you like your best running mate might hate, the distance you prefer others might not touch. But it’s this weird sport where we can all participate the same in a way few other sports can. We run the same races on the same days over the same course as the professionals, the absolute best in the world. No other sport is the same. I don’t get to play on the Wimbledon courts, or shoot hoops just after Caitlin Clark wraps up. There’s a same-ness, an approachability in running, that while the professionals are so much faster, we run the same streets, we wear the same shoes, we eat the same gels. So no, most of us are never trying to be professionals, but we are trying to constantly be better. And while we want to be better than we were yesterday, we also have a lot of access and data to everyone else who runs too. So, as much as we try, it’s easy to fall into a comparison trap of what everyone else just did in that exact same race you ran.

In a sport that’s deeply personal, it’s also incredibly public. Add on an Instagram account and we were finding the other factor that was causing me to bonk, the public eye.

That was the battle I’d lost for a long time. I compared my running journey to everyone else around me. Everyone else that has run for years longer than I have, everyone else that just picked it up last year. It felt like this thing I should be better at, always better, so even while I was improving, what was enough?

As I shared more of my running journey and the social media communities continued to grow, the pressure to race and share grew too. DMs often asking what race is next, what time goal I’m chasing, commenting on paces I had shared before. Sometimes it feels like a community I’m serving rather than a community I’m simply sharing with. It’s hard not to think about how others will perceive you when you live in public. It’s hard to not make choices based on them. I’ve often thought about how I’ve maybe lived my life differently these last 8 years because I decided to share it. Did I travel differently? Eat at different restaurants? Spend time with different people? Run different races?

At 32 that feels like much less of a factor now. Balance and boundaries I’ve mostly nailed, but I can’t say the same for 25-year-old Erin. And the weight of running a marathon with strangers tracking was crippling. I was scared they would see me struggle. I was scared of how that would change their perception of me if I did. And I did.

I had a lot of support these last couple of months to help me take the pressure off. Between training runs with Joe not going well, and my mom hearing the anxiety in my voice talking about the training, they helped me refocus. As I began to train more for how my body felt, and removed the impossible expectations I was gripping so tightly, things began to fall into place. 20-mile runs became enjoyable hours spent taking laps with my new audiobook. And as the day got closer, I felt less like I was having to perform for a community watching, and more like I had a really big team behind me.

As Matthew McConaughey would say, green light.

I used to think running was easier for other people than it was for me. That they didn’t feel the same pain I felt. They had trained harder and were more fit, and the more fit you became the less pain you felt. I just wasn’t fit enough. It hurt too much for me. So when I’d feel the pain, I’d back off.

I really love following the women of TeamBoss, a professional running team based in Boulder, CO. When I need motivation before a run I go to Emma Coburn, Cory McGee, or Emma Bates pages and just watch them run. It’s so beautiful. It looks so natural.

A few years ago Emma shared a post about pain and training I think about constantly. She said she used to train to avoid the pain. Now she seeks comfort in the pain cave, a training run is more about how quickly she can find that place and then finding out how long she can take it.

I had spent a lot of time trying to avoid a place others simply play in. 

Going in undertrained meant I knew London would be painful. So when the pain started, instead of letting it scare me for joining my journey earlier than I would’ve liked, I embraced it. And then I found myself telling myself this one thing over and over:

It’s not going to hurt less if you stop now.

I had found the pain, it was time to play.

It was mile 8 when I noticed my quads a little more than I would have liked.

Mile 13 when the new bliss of the race wore off.

Mile 16 I thought to myself, I only get 10 more miles of this. It was a thought I had never had in a race before.

When mile 20 hit, I stopped thinking about my legs altogether.

So it was mile 23 when I took the brakes off and let myself go, I had energy in the tank even when my legs were in pain. That was a feeling I’d only felt one other time, at the NYC Half last year. I could feel the pain, and I let it fuel me.

My avg miles were around a 9:05, my last mile was a 7:53. 

I finished the London Marathon (at 26.72 miles, lol the weaving) in 4:01:43 and I wouldn’t have done a thing differently. 

I’ve always loved movement. I’ve always believed it taught us physical strength that transcended the rest of our lives. When you start to surprise yourself with what you’re physically capable of, it just bleeds into the rest of your life. It’s why I became a trainer nine years ago. I had become addicted to that feeling and felt deeply attached to wanting other people (specifically women) to find that for themselves.

We can endure so much. 

Grateful for this really big team, and a much more familiar pain cave.