Breaking through the wall

Men's Fitness, April, 1999 by Michael Bane

Just when you think you can't go any farther ... you can

Ask any runner about preparing for the 26.2-mile grind of a marathon, and sooner or later - probably sooner - you'll hear about the Wall.

The Wall is a legendary thing. Usually encountered around mile 20, it's the point where the flesh weakens, the spirit sags and the will drains away into a little puddle on the ground. Legs turn to melting Jell-O and breath comes in short, gasping gulps. In all of sports, there is probably nothing as feared, or misunderstood, as this inner barrier where the unprepared run out of steam and can go no further.

Of course, the Wall is by no means an invincible structure; if you know why it's there in the first place, you can develop strategies to break through it. Two physiological causes are identified by Jeff Galloway in his classic 1984 book Galloway's Book on Running. The first involves glycogen, one of the basic fuels stored in muscle tissue. Glycogen is predominately a short-range fuel; the body's stores, even in a fit person, will get someone only, say ... 20 miles. Ideally, the body would burn fat for endurance; even a skinny person carries about 600 miles' worth of fat fuel. But there's a catch: Fat can only be burned aerobically, in the presence of oxygen. And as you approach your limits, that oxygen gets to be in short supply.

"When you run faster than you've trained, or farther," Galloway writes, "you overwhelm the muscles." Thus, precious glycogen is burned, waste products and fatigue poisons accumulate faster than they can be eliminated, and you end up hitting the Wall.

A second factor is that in many popular marathon-training regimens, the longest run is 20 miles. In the actual event, the extra 6.2 miles are uncharted territory; it's like providing a map of the marathon route in which the last six miles have no details whatsoever - just the image of a fearsome-looking beast and the inscription "Here be dragons."

Thus, Galloway advises, if you actually practice running 26 miles or more, you can avoid encountering, much less being felled by, that 20-mile wall.

Simple, reasonable explanations, to be sure. But do they really answer the entire question, or only a small part?

I have some thoughts on the matter, but first, it might be helpful to give you a little background.

The Wall and me

A few years ago, some friends and I created what we laughingly referred to as "the list," 13 athletic endeavors that could kill you. In the time that followed, I decided to do all 13 things (chronicled in my book Over the Edge: A Regular Guy's Odyssey in Extreme Sports, as well as in these pages). Accomplishing all 13 involved morphing myself from a seriously overweight couch potato into something resembling an athlete. Some of the items turned out to be easy (rock climbing), some terrifying (cave diving), some (climbing Mount McKinley) harder than I had ever imagined.

Early on in the process, I hooked up with Steve Ilg, author of The Outdoor Athlete and one of the best personal trainers in America. When I first met with Ilg in his small, dusty office on a back street in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he struck me as more of a shaman than a coach. I wanted to talk to him about training regimens - how far I should be running, how much weight I should be lifting. That was important, he acknowledged, but not nearly as important as what was inside my head.

From Ilg, I learned that all athletic endeavors have both a physical and a mental aspect. Imagine each of these components as lines on a graph. When a person first starts training, there's more physical than mental effort required. As we push ourselves harder, as we make the decision to test our own personal limits, that mental line - the mental effort necessary to accomplish our goals - increases faster than the physical line.

There will come a point, Ilg told me, where your success or failure, possibly even your life, will hinge not on the physical, but solely on the mental.

What does this have to do with the Wall? For most of us, I think, the 26.2 miles of the marathon represent the first place where the physical and mental lines on the graph converge. Yes, the physical effort of a marathon is tremendous, but it is the mental effort that will carry you across the finish line.

Unfortunately, we tend to approach mental training the same way we approach physical training - how much you should lift, how far you should run. There are numerous books these days on mental preparation for various sports. The bulk of them tend to offer sort of a brain prescription: two sets of visualization, three sets of relaxation, a quick two laps of positive thoughts and - voila! - instant sports nirvana.

If only it were so easy. As I moved through my list and beyond, I came to see that the closer we come to our own personal edges, the more we move away from the physical and onto a mental "landscape," one that is fraught with dangers, traps waiting for the unknowing. It is the place where cause and effect start breaking down, where time loses its grip - a place where chaos reigns supreme.