Ep.32: 5 Lessons I Learned from Running My Slowest Marathon Ever

This episode is for you whether you're a runner or not! Stephanie gives you a look inside why, after 14 marathons, her latest run was the slowest (by a LOT) of all time, and why it was also the one she's most proud of, and the 5 lessons she's taking away that can apply to anyone who has suffered a set back or hurdles on the way to a goal.

Hey there, welcome to episode 32 of the I'm the Problem podcast. My name is Stephanie Finigan, I'm your coach and host, and I'm excited to be back. I have taken a break from this podcast for a couple of weeks as other things have taken priority, and I'm excited to be recording a few new episodes today that I will release over the next few weeks as we come to the end of 2024.

So today's episode, I wanted to reflect back on something that happened a couple weeks ago, which was I ran and finished the Philadelphia Marathon. This was my 14th marathon, and it was also by far and away my slowest marathon. And that being said, I learned a ton of lessons from running my slowest marathon ever that I thought were applicable to you all, whether or not you are a runner. I mean, I know it's so unoriginal to talk about all the crossover there is between running and life and marathons or long distance running and life lessons, and there's lots of metaphors and all the rest. And at the end of the day, you know, it's all sort of cliche and boring, but it's also true. I find I've learned some of my greatest life lessons from running and many of the tools I use in coaching, I apply to not only my life, but also me as a runner. So I thought this would be interesting whether or not you have done a marathon, are a runner in any way, or do any sort of endurance or competitive sports. I am not a competitive runner, of course. I'm just your average, regular, not really a weekend warrior, but I'm really an average, regular runner.

So let's dive in. I'll lay the groundwork a little bit for where I was coming from with this marathon, and then I will give you the five key lessons that I think are most applicable here that I learned from running this marathon, which, as I said, was my slowest ever. So Philly 2024 was my slowest marathon by a significant margin, by about 40 minutes. And that's a lifetime in marathoning. There were a few reasons for that. One of them, I will just say out front, I love the Philly marathon. It was the second time I had run it. This time though, there was a challenge that I had never come across before, which was that there were simply not enough porta-potties. And they were just not stationed frequently enough. 26 miles is a long way to go, and there were thousands of people running this race. And to have that number of people running this race, and not enough porta-potties, was really a challenge. Where you did see them, there were tremendous lines for them, because there simply weren't enough. So I say that to say, for me, when I stopped at the Porta Potties, I actually hit my watch to stop my watch so I could see the difference between my run time and whatever time I was losing when I would stop to take a break. In doing that, I actually lost 25 minutes, which is a tremendous amount of time. It's a minute per mile. That said, all excuses aside, Porta Potty stops or stopping for water or GU or any of the things that happen along the race is similar to me, the like sports fans who complain, oh, my team would have won if the best player wasn't hurt. It's like, yeah, okay, but that's part of what happens. That's part of the season. And you have to learn to play without your best player, you have to learn to work around those things and still try and do your best. And same with marathoning, like stopping at a porta potty or any of the other things that happen along the race route. That is part of running. And even frankly, with that 25 minutes, it still was my slowest marathon ever.

And all that said, I also will acknowledge, as many people have told me, particularly friends and family who are not runners, you know, finishing a marathon is an accomplishment. And I know that. And I knew going into this training cycle, I was at a point where I have so much going on personally and professionally. I've made mention of this before, but it just truly 2024 was the biggest busiest year in my life, both professionally speaking as well as personally. And that includes just hours in the day that have been delegated and siphoned off to all sorts of other people and projects and things that were not in my life in the past. of ways 2024 was an amazing year because of that, but it also certainly made it a lot harder to train. And so I knew early on, and this will lead me to my first lesson that I learned, but I knew early on that my training was going to be as minimal as it frankly could be so that I could finish the race, but I knew I was not going to be doing any sort of good, strong run or great time. And I actually knew it would probably be my slowest race. So I had that expectation in my head going in. I had just decided ahead of time that I was going to be happy with just showing up at the start line because actually getting to the start line, doing the training, the bare minimum training that I needed to do to get there, that in and of itself was a major accomplishment.

And that is the first lesson that I learned from all of this which is just this idea that like, you know getting to the start line getting to the place where the big thing you've been building towards is finally happening or is finally here just getting there before you even accomplish that goal That is the win if you let it be so I completely changed my mindset when I started training this summer and I decided, okay, I am going to be happy and proud that when I am at the start of this marathon, because I know I will have done my training during arguably the most challenging year in my life to do training of any kind. So just getting to the start line is the win. So that's the number one lesson that I learned that I wanted to share because I think everybody whether you're a runner or not you likely have something going on or some goal or something that you're shooting for and just getting started just making the choice and making the commitment to do it and getting yourself to the starting line of whatever that is that in and of itself can be the win if you let it be. So that's the first lesson.

And the second lesson, which is very closely related to that, became, okay, I'm going to decide ahead of time how I want to feel at the finish of this race. So this is a tool that I learned early on when I started to get coaching. And it's this idea that you get to decide ahead of time how you want to feel, who you want to show up as, how you want to react in any situation in your future. So you can't control how you showed up or how you felt in the past. You can control how you think about it now, but you can't control what actually happened because it's done, right? You absolutely can decide ahead of time to show up a certain way at something in the future and show up that way. And the easiest way to do that is to think, how do I want to feel at the end of this race, if everything goes as I think it will, if everything goes as expected, or you can even say if everything goes as the worst case scenario or the best case scenario. I don't really love thinking about things in those terms. I also just really don't love particularly thinking about the worst case scenario and showing up because my brain does that by default and I've worked really hard on my brain to make sure that I recognize when I'm falling into that thought pattern and I course correct it because I just don't want that energy. But think about whatever the thing is. For me, it was the finish line of the race. For you, it might be the end of some massive presentation that you have at work. Or for you, it might be the end of your weight loss journey or the end of paying off your mortgage that you've been trying to pay off for a long time or whatever the thing is that you're working towards, you can decide ahead of time how you want to feel about it then choose to feel that way by organizing your thoughts so that when you get there, you feel that way already.

What I did was really think about how do I want to feel at the finish line. I knew I just wanted to feel proud that I had finished. I knew I would finish the race. I knew it would be tough. I knew that there was a chance I could feel very disappointed in what my time was and very frustrated and have a lot of story around that. Instead, I decided, you know what, I am going to feel proud of myself that this was my hardest training season ever in terms of my ability to commit to it. And I committed to it anyway. I did the best I could with the situation that I was in, and at the end of this whole thing, I am going to feel extremely proud of myself. And I would say that when people were asking me how training was going, I would say, I'm not training as much as I want to. I don't have the bandwidth to train the way that I really want to, but I know I'm gonna be so proud of myself no matter what the time is, because this has been such a tough training season. And that was all true, and that, as always, our thoughts create our results, right? That is exactly what happened. I finished the race, and it was my slowest time ever by a significant margin. And I also was the race where I was so proud of myself crossing the finish line. I burst into tears, and I was hysterically crying for a few minutes, which sometimes I cry after marathons. It's just exhausting, and you just kind of, all the internal stuff just comes up and that's normal. But I also, I really was crying because I was just so proud that I gutted it out and then I got there with everything that's been going on since most of 2024, particularly the last few months.

Okay, so lesson number three is maybe my favorite of all of this, which is this idea in running or in anything in life, and if you follow me at all on Instagram, you know I'm really passionate about this topic that like we're sold this narrative that, you know, life sort of ends, particularly for women around 40 or around midlife or, you know, when your kids leave the house, there's not a lot of expectation that there's going to be a lot more growth. And that basically everything that comes after that is kind of a bummer. Whether it's in your personal life your professional life, whatever it is. You're in this specific career, or you've never had a career you're a certain weight or this is kind of where you're at in terms of your family life or your you know your money or where you live or whatever it is and There's no real opportunity for you to change very much now like you've made your bed You're gonna lie in it and I firmly strongly believe this is complete bullshit. And my favorite expression being fuck the narrative. You know, I don't believe that that's the case. I don't believe we need to stop at 30 or 40 or 50 or any age. I think it's actually ridiculous. And I think it's there's a lot of real old reasoning that's tied to a lot of patriarchal thinking. So the way that I've been thinking about this in terms of my marathon was you know, the narrative is like, well, at some point you're going to slow down and you're running. You're not going to get faster. The older you get, you're going to slow down and you're not going to be as fast as you were when you were 25 and blah, blah, blah. Sure, maybe that's the case. Yes, there is like a natural progression, the natural slowdown physically that can happen when you age. And sure, there's lots of science to tell you that. But there's also a hell of a lot of science that will tell you most of that is not inevitable. Most of that is a choice, right? We assume we're going to slow down or gain weight or not be in such good shape or whatever it is when we get older and then we kind of lean into that assumption and we just live that out as opposed to saying like, no, that's not the case. And I know, personally know, a number of women in their 40s that are in better shape now and more fit now and more healthy and faster than they were in their 20s, myself included. And so fuck that narrative, right? That's the first thing. The idea is this, there's always room to improve. And the way that I know this to be true, because I think about like, okay, I finished that race and it was in a slow time, but you know, a thought did come across my mind. If we take my porta potty adjusted time, I'm like, I don't know, maybe this is just who I am as a runner now. Maybe I'm not gonna get much faster than this because I'm in my 40s and whatnot…

And then I looked at the stats in my age group to see how many women in my age group ran the marathon and finished it and how many of them were faster than me or slower than me. Where was I in the rankings? And I was disappointed initially and then very happy when I thought about it to realize I was very much like in the bottom, I think I was in like the bottom 30% in my age group in terms of time, meaning that there was like 70% of the women in my age group that ran that race ran faster than me. And all that told me was that I don't have to get slower just because I'm getting older every day. I looked at that and I thought, wow, all those women were faster than me. It's not about age. I wonder if they all had a lot more training under their belt, if they all came to the race a lot more prepared than I was. Do they have other nutrition plans that I don't know about? What's their work? What's their cross training? What's their recovery look like? I mean, I started looking at it, not like I'm some sort of failure, or like, oh, it's just inevitable that I'm going to be slow. I looked at it as like, wow, there's a huge opportunity for me to keep getting faster. Rule number three, to sum it up, is really just fuck the narrative. There's always room to improve. I don't care how old you are. You want to improve at something, there is always room to do so. And my marathon really reinforced that for me.

Okay, lesson number four, which kind of relates to the first two lessons that I spoke about. But this one is about this idea of lowering the bar versus moving the bar. When I started training for this, as I said, I knew I was going to be training a lot less than I typically had, and so I assumed my race would be slower than it typically would be if I had had more ability to train more. So in my head, I thought, okay, I'm lowering the bar, right? And there's something kind of disappointing about that. Lowering the bar is not something I'm used to doing, and it's not something I'm comfortable doing, and I felt kind of disappointed that I'm just gonna have to lower the bar for this race. And then I started thinking about it and realized it's not actually lowering the bar, because it's not like an apples to apples comparison. If I'm trying to compare this slowest time, if I listed out all my race times and I was to take like the middle to top times, they're still about 90 minutes faster than what I did on this race. Me saying I'm going to run, you know, 60 to 90 minutes slower than my best times. Well, okay, that is lowering the bar. If everything in my life and all of the circumstances were the same back then, as they are right now, right back when I was running those type of times regularly to right now, but they're not. When I was doing that with a full-time job, a boyfriend, or like an active dating life, and that's about it. Like that was pretty much what I had on my plate, which meant I could focus on my social life, which was a blast and great. I could focus on my work life, which was okay, great with paying the bills, and I could go running and I could plan a lot of my life around all that. Now, if I look at everything I have, I have, I don't have a dating life, I have a marriage, I have a job, I have a business, I have a non-profit, I have multiple things going on professionally, I have multiple dependents in my home that are relying on me, I have so many more things in my life that are happening right now, that it's not really fair for me to say, well, I'm gonna lower the bar as if there was some sort of apples to apples comparison of my time then to my time now.

The reality is I am moving the bar and that's how I started to think about it. I just thought about moving, like literally just thought about a bar and thought about moving it horizontally as opposed to lowering it. So for this marathon, yeah, like my time's going to be slower. I'm just moving the bar. I'm changing where it is, but I'm not lowering it because lowering it compared to what? Back then, if I was running like under four-hour races and had everything going on in my life that I do now, sure, now we can make a comparison and say, all right, I'm going to lower the bar a bit and like, you know, account for X, Y, and Z. But that's not what happened, right? I have a lot more in my life that makes training and running, it's more of a challenge, but also it's way more important to me and way more rewarding for me for so many reasons. There's not a lowering of the bar, it's simply a moving of the bar. It's not a complicated mindset shift, but it felt like that for me. It felt like a big, important mindset shift because when I started thinking about it that way, I was no longer disappointed that my training runs were slow or disappointed if I had to stop and walk sometimes. Like I wasn't disappointed in that because there was nothing to compare it to. I simply was changing my goal, was changing the bar. From there, I could be like, okay, now knowing that I'm in this situation and now knowing that I have this goal instead of that goal, okay, now what are we gonna do? And now how do I wanna handle this? And it was a really important mindset shift for me.

All right, and lesson number five. This one is a little bit, I think, typical of your running as a metaphor for life type of guidance, but it really did hit me in a way that was just so painfully obvious I just had to include it in this list. Which was this idea to keep going because you never know when the 16th mile downhill will come. So let me explain that. So as I was doing this marathon, I've had marathons before where I blink and I'm at mile 8 and I blink again and I'm at mile 14 and I remember distinctly thinking like, oh my god this is gonna be over soon and being sort of shocked about that, right? And this was not the case in Philly this year for me and was highly aware of every step, every mile, every city block, every sign I saw. I was acutely aware of where I was. I was not ever in a place where I was zoning out mentally or just shutting off my brain and just running and like really enjoying that, just kind of the freedom of that. mile 11, 12, 13, 14, it started to really suck. I hit crazy walls at that point, which is early in the race. I'm not even, I'm just about the halfway point at that, at that mileage. I thought even if I finish this, this is going to be like a six hour nightmare. What am I, why am I even doing this? I'm never going to do this again. And I just got very down mentally. That is one of the things of the marathon, much like life, it will throw everything at you. You will run the gamut of human emotion when you run a marathon and that is exactly what happened to me. And I kept going and kept going, just sort of shuffled and I walked a little bit and I was miserable and I had the worst attitude and it was all awful.

And then out of nowhere, all of a sudden, I look up and I realize there's a downhill coming. And I start going down the hill myself. And the downhill is long. And it is fairly steep, enough so that I felt like I could lean in and pick up a little bit of pace. And while runners will know, kind of running downhill at the end of the day is actually much harder on your body than running uphill. And at that moment, I needed the break. I needed a downhill, and I had no idea that it was coming because I didn't know the course that well. Last time I ran it was like 15 years ago. And it really was like this shot of adrenaline that I needed to completely get me out of that like crap mindset that was weighing me down and push me forward. And so the hill finally ends and it emptied out onto like a straight road and I was in such a better mood and I was like, oh my God, I love running and this is so much fun and I'm going to do millions more marathons and I can't wait to start training again. And of course, your emotions go up and down and there's extremes during the marathon. But I say all this to say, you just never know when that 16th mile downhill is coming. You just never know when you're going to have a pick-me-up that you didn't expect. I know that's so cliche and sort of typical and not very interesting guidance or coaching in any way, but I just say that because it was a good reminder to me. In my own life, I'm going through a couple of personal marathons right now, and it's just a good reminder to just keep going. You just never know what's around the corner. You just never know when an unexpected downhill is going to pop up that's going to kind of give you the boost that you need to get you out of whatever mental mindset drama you're in that's dragging you down.

So that's it. Those are the five lessons that I learned from running my slowest marathon ever. I am, as I said, extremely proud of myself for finishing this race. I am also extremely excited to see what type of training I can do between now and then. No matter what, I also know I have the ability to decide, even right now, how I want to feel at the finish line of that next one, and I am looking forward to all of that. All right, I hope this was helpful to you, runner or otherwise. If you ever want to coach on running or mindset or obviously any other life challenges you are having, goals you want to hit, any mindset drama you have right now around whatever it is that you're looking to accomplish. I would love to set up a consult with you. My consults are always free and I use them as 60-minute coaching sessions so you will really get a taste of what it's like to work with me. So head on over to MakeYourPivot.co and you will find all the information you need as to how to sign up for a free consult as well as all the different ways that we can work together is all consult as well as all the different ways that we can work together is all over on the website so head over there and I will see you guys on the next episode.