Finding the Value of Suffering on the Road to Boston

Greetings friends!
I broke my ankle while training to run my first marathon. For two days, I told myself it was just a sprain until my wife forced me to get it looked at. A hairline fracture, a cast, and a stern admonition to stay off my feet.
That was the first time I did myself an injury while training. Oh, but it was far from the last. My journey to the starting line of the Boston Marathon would take me another six years.
The lessons I learned on the way have stayed with me ever since.
The reason people climb mountains and run marathons
Every year, people try to climb mountains and run marathons, alongside many other tough things. The mountain is there, scarcely changing in the face of heroic summit attempts. So too the marathons. No matter who comes and who goes, the marathons in Berlin, New York, and Tokyo carry on regardless.
Although the mountains and the events have a certain permanence, we humans do not. Whether the person succeeds or fails, the individual making the attempts is profoundly shaped by them.
Embracing challenges is one of the things that gives life meaning.
Thus, if you want your life to represent something more than the mindless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, you serve yourself well by seeking out challenges that require great effort.
You do not need to run the Boston Marathon to find meaning
We value highly that which we put effort into acquiring. You might think you’d appreciate $1,000 exactly as much no matter how you earn it. But accomplishment feels infinitely sweeter when you’ve toiled for it.
The gifted runner who breezes past the qualification time does not appreciate the accomplishment as much as the plodder who spent years getting there. There are two lessons in this:
- What will be meaningful to you is highly personal. Your proudest moments might be incomprehensible to others. And that’s okay. We each decide meaning for ourselves.
- You have bigger payoffs in satisfaction from attempting hard things. It is the risk of failure that makes the prize sweet. What anyone can do, you will not value.

Only you will know what types of goals are suitably challenging given your circumstances and which ones will bring meaning to your life.
It might be being the best parent or partner you can. It might be putting a smile on your face each day no matter your circumstance. It might be writing a story every day for a month or a year. The possibilities are endless.
When I started running, it seemed an endlessly uphill battle, but I had my reasons.
Running at all was a substantial hurdle
That I took to running in my early 30s was surprising. I’d never been athletic, preferring intellectual pursuits. I was sedentary through high school and for the next 15 years.
One day, I woke up overweight, out-of-shape, and headed for an early heart attack. It was an offhand question from my boss (“Hey, James, do you want to go for a run?”) that shook me from my complacency.
I hadn’t the faintest idea of the Boston Marathon when I ran my first tortured kilometer on the treadmill, which was accompanied by dark thoughts and a lot of gasping.
I was soon outside on trails, entranced by nature. As it sometimes does, one kilometer became three and then five, and then six months later I ran a half marathon. I ran my first marathon, the Zurich marathon, within a year of starting running. It took me more than four and a half hours.
After that first finish, I let myself enjoy a daydream: Wouldn’t it be something if you ran the Zurich marathon every year for 10 years? That would mean you stuck with your fitness and made it a priority in your life.
Accomplishments yield less and you find yourself wanting more
Just like running further seems like a good idea the more you run, accomplishing any goal comes with some downsides: While the accomplishment is real, you no longer achieve the same meaning from doing the same thing.
Running your first marathon is a big deal. Running your seventh or eighth might feel less profound. Unless, that is, you are mindful in setting yourself challenges. Without realizing it, by giving myself the challenge of running Zurich 10 times in a row, I created a whole new level of meaning in my life.
I was now working on my broader self-image as a person. Was I the kind of person who could live according to firmly held values? Could I keep up my commitment no matter how busy life got at home or work?

The revelation is that challenges can be internally focused as well as externally focused. “I am the type of person who sticks to my commitments” differs from “I will climb X mountain,” although they may reinforce one another and are both valid goals.
A person might easily find themselves stacking up new challenges as they accomplish earlier ones. This could seem like a treadmill, a journey that never ends no matter how far you advance. But when accomplishment brings meaning, it is a treadmill you happily get on, over and over.
Thus it was, I found myself setting and pursuing a series of challenges:
- Could I run a marathon in under four hours?
- Could I run two marathons a year, one in spring and one in fall?
- Oooh, how about running some of the big-city races?
All that running had the effect of making me fitter and faster. I don’t remember exactly when the thought of Boston first entered my head. Looking at my training log, I suspect it was in 2006, after about four years of running. I ran Chicago in 3:48 and the idea of shaving another half hour off my time seemed hard but not impossible.
For the non-runners, getting into the Boston Marathon requires running a qualifying race below a certain time. The Boston qualifying times are age-based and change from year to year. In the year I eventually qualified, a 40–45-year-old needed to run a race in 3 hours and 20 minutes or less.
I suspect the runners here already spotted the error in my thinking. The first 45-minute improvement from novice to average runner was trivial compared to shaving another half hour from my time. The incremental improvements become tougher and tougher.
The next lessons were painful ones
How does one learn to run faster? By running faster (as in doing interval training) and running more (as in more miles per week).
One’s risk of injury rises with intensity and fatigue, which are exactly what results from running faster and more. I managed the increased load pretty well, and in spring 2007, I ran my fastest race yet in 3:34.
The fall race that year represented my assault on the summit. It was the Berlin Marathon, known for its flat, fast course. I had trained even harder and longer and everything was looking great.
My last long run before Berlin was a half-marathon the week before. And it was during the half that I felt pain in my knee and knew in my gut that I had pushed right to the edge and gone over. It was overtraining — an overuse injury.
I babied my knee and legs that week before Berlin and told myself it might still be OK.
The day of the race dawned crisp and bright, perfect running conditions. The Berlin course has several switchbacks, which means average runners and the elites cross by each other on several occasions.
That year, Haile Gebrselassie smashed the world record by 29 seconds, finishing in two hours, four minutes, and 26 seconds. He was 34 years old. To say it was inspiring to this middle-aged runner is an understatement. How many others felt like I did, lifted on winged feet like Hermes?
After 12 kilometers of perfect pacing, my knee suddenly announced itself. At that moment, I knew my dreams of Boston would have to wait. I didn’t do then what pros do differently: They stop running to avoid making an injury worse.
I carried on for 30 more kilometers of increasingly painful, stilted running. In hindsight, I know I was lucky not to do myself permanent damage. As it was, I could hardly walk for days.

The lesson from that day is that in learning to motivate yourself, all the tricks you learn to keep going can sabotage you if you don’t recognize when circumstances change.
Never give up is a great motto, unless circumstances change. Sometimes a goal needs to be abandoned, or paused, no matter how hard you’ve worked to achieve it.
The best way I’ve learned to prepare for this is to have multiple, complementary goals, never just one. While I may want to complete a race in a certain time, I also have an overarching goal of staying healthy and being able to train long-term.
The overarching goal now keeps me from focusing too narrowly on a race-specific goal.
The finish line is in sight
I was beaten down after Berlin, but not beaten. It took me more than a year to build up again but in October 2008, with the pace-setting help of a wonderful friend, I ran the Columbus marathon in three hours, 20 minutes, … and 37 seconds.
The Boston qualifying times for the coming race had a 59-second grace period built in, so I made the cut with 22 seconds to spare. Whew!
One more set of lessons and we’re done. Having multiple, complementary goals is a great way to push yourself. If you’ve set your goals well, you will accomplish at least some of them, while the others serve as a check on taking things to unproductive extremes.
None of this is easy. Pursuing challenging goals is much harder than coasting through life. You will ask yourself why you submit to self-imposed suffering, many times.
My answer is that pursuing hard things, even if you don’t reach everything you seek, makes your life meaningful. The pursuit is itself joyful because you are living with intention, striving, and risking failure.
I think that’s worth a little pain and suffering.
Be well.
If you like taking the lessons from my mistakes, I invite you to read more of them. I probably won’t run out of material anytime soon.
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