By Coach Adolfo Salgueiro

 If you ran a marathon or know of someone who has, most likely you’ve heard about “hitting the wall”. And if you ever wondered why they call it a wall, imagine yourself running and hitting one. Head-on. Yes. No exaggeration. You may hit it because you ran too fast and burned out, because you’ve consumed your body’s main fuel source, carbs, because you got dehydrated or a combination of those.

What is left after such an encounter is yourself trying to finish your race or run in a depleted state. A failure after a hard cycle of hard training.

Just like this, but without the benefit of the padding

Meeting with the wall is not always a physical process. Sometimes you may be mentally fatigued, or unprepared for the task at hand. In his book The Runner’s Brain, Dr. Jeff Brown states that “your brain is a pretty awesome organ, but it\’s no magician. If you didn\’t train properly or if you starved yourself for a week, you\’re asking to hit the wall no matter how great and powerful a mental organ you possess.”

But if you have trained with diligence, most likely hitting the wall will be a physical rather than a mental event. In general terms, your body doesn’t have the resources needed to run a marathon. Yet, thousands upon thousands of runners complete one or more every year. How do they do it? They fuel and hydrate their bodies during the race, and they’re mentally prepared for the challenge they’ll face.

If you are not intentional about your fueling strategy and plan to depend on whatever they’ll serve at the race, you can’t be surprised when you start having issues. We’ve all seen someone jet-puking fluorescent green liquid, not unlike the girl from The Exorcist, because they overdid it with the Gatorade.

Of course, there is always the possibility you started too fast and exhausted yourself beyond recovery. That would be an error in strategy which will also lead you to the wall. But that is another issue for another day. Not the one discussed in this post.

In a recent interview, legendary ultrarunner Scott Jurek was talking about the importance of fueling your body for a marathon and stated: “Rather than how do you deal with the wall at mile 20, don’t let the wall happen at Mile 20. Yes, I know it is easier said than done. But when you are out there tomorrow [in your race], if it is the muscular fatigue thing, you probably went too hard, but it is usually the lack of carbohydrates.”

HOW TO PROCEED ONCE YOU HIT THE WALL

Yet sometimes you’ve prepared yourself physically, mentally, and fueled properly but still hit the wall. What to do? In “The Runner’s Brain”, Dr. Brown talks about choosing between four wall-busting mental strategies so you can deal with the issue at hand. Read again: Deal, not overcome.

INTERNAL ASSOCIATION: A total focus on how the body feels while running. Tuning into the contraction and relaxation of your muscles, the mechanics of your arm movement, your breathing, your heart rate, and so on. Internal association\’s boundary is your skin, and your focus stays inside of it.

INTERNAL DISSOCIATION: Doing just the opposite yet staying inside of yourself. This strategy distracts you by hitting the mental replay button on a great song, thinking of upcoming projects, or counting your steps. Runners around you may be surprised to learn that you weren\’t thinking about running.

EXTERNAL ASSOCIATION: Your focus is outside your body and outside the act of running itself, yet you keep track of important aspects of your run. You may pay attention to jockeying for position in the race, negotiating water stops, split times, etc.

EXTERNAL DISSOCIATION: means focusing outward but on events or stimuli unimportant to the race itself. You may focus on the scenery, cheering crowds, flowers, counting the number of times someone along the route yells the name written on your bib or someone dressed in a weird running outfit.

It would be easy to finish this blog post stating that I wish you never have to figure out if it really feels like hitting a wall, but if you keep training long distances, you will eventually figure it out yourself. It is inevitable. The key is to learn from such an experience, so it doesn’t happen again. It is only then that hitting the wall won’t be a checkmark in your loss column.

What is your experience hitting the wall? Let me know in the comments.