Hey I ran my second marathon this last weekend. I wrote about my first one. It was hard (btw people liked that post).
I made my race plan, kept to it while resisting temptation, got round without stopping to walk and without calf cramps (that was the goal), and got a new personal best: chip time 3:37:54.
I want to talk about being hollow.
I’ve written poetry to running in the New Forest. What a treat to do a marathon there.
A line of horses at a hard gallop across the open heath, racing to intercept and crossing the road just ahead of a group of us runners.
Into the trees and winding through the towering redwoods.
An emotional experience ngl. Suddenly recognising I was running over a common I knew so well and gazed out at for so long when I was single-digit years old…
Anyway, 26 miles, 2,000 ft elevation, roads and gravel bridleways.
What went well:
Yes, after the horrific boiling calf cramps in my first race - pain like I’ve never had before or since - this time I hydrated well and paid attention to electrolytes.
But also:
My mental unlock was realising that I want room to have choices at 18 miles.
So my mantra for the first half was to run “within myself.”
That’s not just physically, holding back from running the engine hot.
It’s also that I’m not very good at keeping on my own pace while others are passing me.
Which means I had to resist that - be comfortable with that - and remind myself that fatigue does not always feel fatiguing in the moment, it is also the accumulation of time. Restraint is its own effort.
(Whereas in a half marathon I can sit just below red-lining the engine the whole way, it’s more straightforward.)
After 3 hours this paid off, this delayed work as a gift for Future Matt, and I was able to hold a steady pace up hills and past others who (like me, last time) had started to walk, and choose what to do.
Similarly:
I wasn’t sure I was going to run at all till very late. I entered but didn’t commit, unsure of my readiness. So I trained over the summer in order to give myself the option. I didn’t want to disqualify myself through not putting in the miles.
Training not for a goal, but to earn a choice. I made a final call about a week out.
If I were to probe at what dark psychology makes a marathon so appealing for me:
When the capability of my body is stripped away after 26 miles and I have become a shell with a body on an automatic loop; when my psyche is peeled away and all that remains is will,
I feel like that is the closest I can come to seeing who I am.
An example…
Coming into the last half mile, I absolutely wanted to be done. My pace had faded some since mile 22, I had felt a twinge or two in the legs. The fatigue and the fear. Dig deep, keep going.
About 100 metres from the finish, the red hot boiling stones moving under the skin did in fact return – maybe my rhythm changed, my legs got confused, the neuromuscular fatigue set in, and that cramp started rising. I could feel myself stumbling and needing to stop.
I remember gritting my teeth and loudly telling my calves “no. No.” as I forced them to obey - when nerve signals fail all you have left is yelling - I refused the pain… and then forward across the line.
Was I sure that “no” would be in me? Not until that moment.
At least partially, that’s the moment I’m doing it for.
We have two hearts, it turns out:
After the run I lay for a while and that was fine and I walked around for a while and took some selfies and that was fine.
So I stood in line at a food truck but that was not fine.
I kept getting dizzy and had to crouch. And that came and went, and eventually my vision went high contrast I felt sick I couldn’t stay upright and I left the line and lay down immediately to avoid collapsing.
What happened?
Later in the hot tub I did some reading.
We used to call it heat exhaustion or dehydration back in the day.
It turns out it is now described as “exercise-associated postural hypotension.” i.e. low blood pressure after working out triggered by posture.
Like Philippides who ran from Marathon to Athens in 490 BC. Get this: he ran, stood still, announced Rejoice, we have won,
dropped dead.
Here’s the mechanism:
During endurance exercise, heart rate increases to account for subsequent increases in metabolic demand. Increased metabolic demand requires increased vasodilation for the high-demand muscle groups, usually the lower extremities. This vasodilation is offset by the lower extremity muscles functioning as a ‘second heart’ by moving the increased lower body blood volume back to the heart to support the high cardiac output needed during vigorous exercise. However, this ‘second heart’ effect is lost with the cessation of exercise. When done abruptly, such as upon crossing the finish line of a marathon, venous pooling in the lower extremities results due to impaired baroreflex control. When coupled with a quick return towards a resting heart rate as seen in trained athletes, insufficient blood supply results, creating a hypotensive setting.
Or to put it another way:
- Your blood vessels get wider during strenuous exercise, so blood return up from your legs is harder.
- The physical act of locomotion means rhythmically contracting your leg muscles, and that squeezes your veins; it’s a pump, a second heart driving the blood round.
- After: lying down is fine (blood return is no longer fighting gravity) and walking is fine (the pump is still active)… but standing and not walking means the blood pools in your legs: dizziness, nausea, collapse.
A heart outside your heart!
An exoheart that powers the running, pumping from the act of running itself!
The exoheart is a reminder that organs don’t exist:
Take Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen’s concept of extelligence which is all the elements of what it is like to be you which do not reside in that unlikely grey goo in your skull.
As I said in 2015:
Look, I know the time even though that knowledge is on the lock screen of my phone, not in my skull.
My second heart is the pounding of my foot strikes; my intelligent race strategy is encoded in the rate of being passed/passing others; my pace is the habit of my autonomous muscles – which, when asked to change their pace, rebel.
It is no wonder that by 26.2 miles I feel hollow, I have transformed into a body without organs.
A p-zombie is a hollow man.
A p-zombie, a philosophical zombie, is a person who looks identical on the outside but on the inside they have no subjective experience. Like an AI, maybe.
Here’s a deft and funny solution to why p-zombies won’t exist:
Just ask them to write things down on a notepad.
And then (SMBC comics):
Now it has a physical record of interiority. All you have to do it take that record, shove it up the p-zombie’s ass, and now it is literally internal.
Given my experience with my second heart, that tracks. I am inclined to see myself as a loose jumble of barely intelligent parts and looping processes with the illusion of coherent subjectivity.
What abides?
No more than three irreducible notions: belief, desire, and their point of pure application, pure sense.
Belief and desire.
The start and end were the same location.
So I see the race as a kind of travelling into myself.
Anyway, so.
Physically I am rinsed in a way I wasn’t last time around. I guess that, because I got bottlenecked on calf cramps last time, I didn’t push everything else to its limit, and this time everything else was indeed pushed?
I was 83rd of 727 runners. Of men in their 40s, 17th of 111. I beat my PB by approx 2 minutes.
Mainly: I made a plan, kept to my plan, and given my goal of “get round with no stopping and no drama” I got round with no stopping and no drama. And that is very satisfying.
Hey I ran my second marathon this last weekend. I wrote about my first one. It was hard (btw people liked that post).
I made my race plan, kept to it while resisting temptation, got round without stopping to walk and without calf cramps (that was the goal), and got a new personal best: chip time 3:37:54.
I want to talk about being hollow.
I’ve written poetry to running in the New Forest. What a treat to do a marathon there.
A line of horses at a hard gallop across the open heath, racing to intercept and crossing the road just ahead of a group of us runners.
Into the trees and winding through the towering redwoods.
An emotional experience ngl. Suddenly recognising I was running over a common I knew so well and gazed out at for so long when I was single-digit years old…
Anyway, 26 miles, 2,000 ft elevation, roads and gravel bridleways.
What went well:
Yes, after the horrific boiling calf cramps in my first race - pain like I’ve never had before or since - this time I hydrated well and paid attention to electrolytes.
But also:
My mental unlock was realising that I want room to have choices at 18 miles.
So my mantra for the first half was to run “within myself.”
That’s not just physically, holding back from running the engine hot.
It’s also that I’m not very good at keeping on my own pace while others are passing me.
Which means I had to resist that - be comfortable with that - and remind myself that fatigue does not always feel fatiguing in the moment, it is also the accumulation of time. Restraint is its own effort.
(Whereas in a half marathon I can sit just below red-lining the engine the whole way, it’s more straightforward.)
After 3 hours this paid off, this delayed work as a gift for Future Matt, and I was able to hold a steady pace up hills and past others who (like me, last time) had started to walk, and choose what to do.
Similarly:
I wasn’t sure I was going to run at all till very late. I entered but didn’t commit, unsure of my readiness. So I trained over the summer in order to give myself the option. I didn’t want to disqualify myself through not putting in the miles.
Training not for a goal, but to earn a choice. I made a final call about a week out.
If I were to probe at what dark psychology makes a marathon so appealing for me:
When the capability of my body is stripped away after 26 miles and I have become a shell with a body on an automatic loop; when my psyche is peeled away and all that remains is will,
I feel like that is the closest I can come to seeing who I am.
An example…
Coming into the last half mile, I absolutely wanted to be done. My pace had faded some since mile 22, I had felt a twinge or two in the legs. The fatigue and the fear. Dig deep, keep going.
About 100 metres from the finish, the red hot boiling stones moving under the skin did in fact return – maybe my rhythm changed, my legs got confused, the neuromuscular fatigue set in, and that cramp started rising. I could feel myself stumbling and needing to stop.
I remember gritting my teeth and loudly telling my calves “no. No.” as I forced them to obey - when nerve signals fail all you have left is yelling - I refused the pain… and then forward across the line.
Was I sure that “no” would be in me? Not until that moment.
At least partially, that’s the moment I’m doing it for.
We have two hearts, it turns out:
After the run I lay for a while and that was fine and I walked around for a while and took some selfies and that was fine.
So I stood in line at a food truck but that was not fine.
I kept getting dizzy and had to crouch. And that came and went, and eventually my vision went high contrast I felt sick I couldn’t stay upright and I left the line and lay down immediately to avoid collapsing.
What happened?
Later in the hot tub I did some reading.
We used to call it heat exhaustion or dehydration back in the day.
It turns out it is now described as “exercise-associated postural hypotension.” i.e. low blood pressure after working out triggered by posture.
Like Philippides who ran from Marathon to Athens in 490 BC. Get this: he ran, stood still, announced dropped dead.
Here’s the mechanism:
Or to put it another way:
A heart outside your heart!
An exoheart that powers the running, pumping from the act of running itself!
The exoheart is a reminder that organs don’t exist:
Take Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen’s concept of extelligence which is
As I said in 2015:
My second heart is the pounding of my foot strikes; my intelligent race strategy is encoded in the rate of being passed/passing others; my pace is the habit of my autonomous muscles – which, when asked to change their pace, rebel.
It is no wonder that by 26.2 miles I feel hollow, I have transformed into a body without organs.
A p-zombie is a hollow man.
A p-zombie, a philosophical zombie, is a person who looks identical on the outside but on the inside they have no subjective experience. Like an AI, maybe.
Here’s a deft and funny solution to why p-zombies won’t exist:
Just ask them to write things down on a notepad.
And then (SMBC comics):
Given my experience with my second heart, that tracks. I am inclined to see myself as a loose jumble of barely intelligent parts and looping processes with the illusion of coherent subjectivity.
What abides?
No more than Belief and desire.
The start and end were the same location.
So I see the race as a kind of travelling into myself.
Anyway, so.
Physically I am rinsed in a way I wasn’t last time around. I guess that, because I got bottlenecked on calf cramps last time, I didn’t push everything else to its limit, and this time everything else was indeed pushed?
I was 83rd of 727 runners. Of men in their 40s, 17th of 111. I beat my PB by approx 2 minutes.
Mainly: I made a plan, kept to my plan, and given my goal of “get round with no stopping and no drama” I got round with no stopping and no drama. And that is very satisfying.