“All heart. Grit. Grind.” – Tony Allen, sage
If ultra marathons are run with the mind and body, road marathons are run with the heart. There is no time to ponder the vast insignificance of your cosmic experience, as one might do when power hiking up a lonely incline during an ultra, when your only goal is holding on to lactate threshold for 3-plus hours.
Running a road marathon requires an ability to convince yourself that achieving the impossible is actually quite possible. So long as you’re willing to suspend your own disbelief. The only way to condition your mind in this manner is by submitting to a 3-4 month training process that is as physically draining and mentally challenging as many of us are willing to endure.
Week after week and month after month, through marathon training you will come to know what it means to suffer as an athlete. Via trial and error, you will realize that fighting through self-inflicted pain is of limited utility. What works is making peace with your discomfort, thus negating the emotional power such feelings have over your convictions. In that way, marathon training is the art of proving to yourself that limits are as arbitrary as your potential is limitless.
I was thinking about all of this while hammering away at a 3 percent incline on the treadmill the other day. I’m not sure what it is about treadmill workouts that provide such moments of existential clarity. I’m glad they exist, and grateful that I get to do them.
For half a mile at 3 percent grade, my goal pace was 7:40. Then for the next half mile, I dropped the incline back to 1.0 and reclaimed my race pace of 7:10. I did that two more times for a total of three reps, which approximated the late-race climbs I’m going to experience in the Newton Hills toward the end of the Boston Marathon.
With each successful pass, I became more and more confident in my own abilities, which naturally led me back to Tony Allen’s immortal phrase at the top of this piece. “ALL HEART!” I yelled into the void of an otherwise empty house. “GRIT. GRIND.” I can only assume the neighbors didn’t hear my homage.
T.A.'s inspired verbiage not only birthed an identity for his Memphis Grizzlies – aka, Grit ‘n Grind – it also defined an era of Internet basketball coverage that delighted in long discourses involving the weird, the strange, and the esoteric. Let the talk shows blather on about the Lakers, we’ve got TA and Z-Bo to keep us entertained. I’m rather partial to that time period since it was also my era as a national NBA writer for SB Nation.
I first got to know Tony when we were both trying to carve out space for ourselves in the NBA. He as a player with the Boston Celtics, myself as a beat writer. TA was at times a 2-guard, a small forward, and for one very confusing moment, a point guard on a team that already had all of those things. I was a reporter, a columnist, and for a briefly confusing period, a radio and television personality.
We were talking about his never ending search for a defined role one day. Or rather, I was asking him questions about this dynamic while he kept repeating the same thing over and over: “I just want to play.”
So do I. After a six-year hiatus during which I embraced life as an endurance athlete/stay-at-home dad, the time has come to announce my return to basketball writing via a new newsletter entitled Hoopology. (That link takes you to an introductory post where you can sign up if you’re so inclined.)
My intention is to keep Running, Probably as a separate newsletter with the same twice-a-week publishing schedule. Speaking of RP, the rest of this week’s Shakeout is for paid subscribers. We’re talking final training tuneups, race kits, and whatever comes next.