What you can learn from training for a marathon.....

Now hear me out, I'm not suggesting you need to or have to run a marathon especially if you've never run before but I am saying there are some amazing take a way's from going through the process of training for a marathon.

Firstly a marathon is no mean feat, it's an event that if you think you can just turn up to the start line and complete it with no training you'll soon realise that was a grave mistake and that you're in for a rough day. Depending on your fitness you're committing to up to 20 weeks of training, 3-4 runs a week, weekends taken up by regular 20km plus runs and various aches, pains and overuse injuries. So the first thing you can learn from training for a marathon is setting and committing to a big scary goal!

Like I've just said training for a marathon will require you to stick to a structured training plan, especially if you have a goal time in mind. You'll get to the point where some days and weeks you'll have to plan your life around when you're going to complete your runs and plan your nutrition to eat at the right times before or after you run. So the second thing training for a marathon will teach you is the ability to commit and stick to a structured plan to achieve a big goal.

Now this process of training for a marathon isn't going to be easy and there will be many obstacles, you'll have to get up early, run in the dark and cold, run on sore muscles, run through niggles and small injuries and give up on social events for many weeks. The third thing training for a marathon will teach you is the ability to push through adversity and teach you a good lesson in resilience.

When training for a marathon you usually won't run the full 42Km until race day, so during the actual event is the first time you've ran that distance. Again it won't be easy and you'll be going through a range of emotions before you get to the finish line, like in training you'll be asking yourself "Why am I doing this?". But you'll definitely get to the finish line and you'll complete your marathon and you'll learn your last lesson of running marathon and that is that anything is possible. There's a real euphoric feeling after completing such an arduous task and knowing that everything you committed and put into achieving that goal was worth it and that you've now joined the 1% of the human population that has completed a marathon.

I started this conversation by saying I'm not suggesting you run a marathon but I truly believe a human is capable of anything and that includes running a marathon if they commit to it. So I'll finish this conversation by saying I challenge you to run a marathon and see for yourself.