Something special: my 26th birthday

It’s 7:17am. The national anthem of the USA is playing. I am in Charlotte, North Carolina. My parents are a few meters to my left. They’ve come here from two different continents (my father from Peru, my mother from Spain). Because today, 15th Nov 2025, it’s my 26th birthday. And in 3 minutes, I’m running 26.2 miles.

I’m enjoying the start of my postdoc at UGA, but this post is entirely a personal update, probably only interesting for runners!

Why?

In 2022, I ran my first ever running race: The Helsinki Half Marathon (HHM). I had started running a few months earlier, so unsurprisingly it was painfully long. Since then, I’ve developed a lot as a runner: going from very slow to just slow.

I’ve raced three other half marathons and distances as short as a mile (plus a couple of cross-country races, and a trail race). Unlike in the HHM, for these races the goal wasn’t finishing, it was running fast. I knew I could finish them, because I had run that far before. But as I stood at the start line of the Charlotte Marathon, it was different. For the first time since the HHM, I was meant to run farther than I ever had before.

When I finished the HHM, I couldn’t even contemplate the idea of running farther than a half marathon. In fact, I had no interest in running another half any time soon!

It took 1.5 years until I did again, at the Cambridge Half. After the HHM, I had mostly chased college-rowing-glory, and I was running just as cross-training for fun. But I took training for the Cambridge Half seriously (while still rowing). I surprised myself by finishing very strongly in the last kilometres (with a 45min personal best, although that says more about my HHM performance), feeling that I could have kept running.

A few weeks later, I saw on my Strava feed an activity titled “26(.2) miles for 26 years”. Someone I followed had run a marathon on their 26th birthday. I was sold on the idea: I’d run my first marathon on my 26th birthday.

Training

It was March 2024, so I had a long time to get ready for it. But I didn’t want to just crawl to the finish like in the HHM: I wanted to be fit and prepared. From June 2024 when I “retired” from rowing, I planned all my training towards the longterm goal of racing 26.2 miles on 15th Nov 2025. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of intermediate goals (race times or weekly mileage to hit). And the process itself was very enjoyable.

My first goal race without rowing training getting in between was London’s Big Half on Sept 1st, 2024. A sub-2h half marathon on a warm day was promising. However, my subsequent running performances were a mixed bag. Perhaps most notably, on April I bonked the Madrid Half Marathon with a 2:13, as I struggled with the heat and the hills (despite 50-mile weeks and heat-training runs in Limassol, Cyprus).

My fitness started to come back at the end of the spring. But with a month of travelling around the USA for conferences, building a strong aerobic base was all I could do. I kept base-building through the summer (I swear the week I ran, in total, 50km inside a cruise was tougher than any week of actual marathon training).

The day after I got back from oxygen-less Mexico City, I started my marathon training. It’s all public on my Strava. I followed Pfitzinger’s 12/55 plan, from the fourth edition of Advanced Marathoning. The main changes I made were:

• I ran 6 days a week, distributing the easy mileage in whichever way was more convenient for my schedule. I always took the day after the long run completely off from training.
• I did weight training almost always twice a week, on hard days. So once in the middle of the week after a workout or a medium-long run, and once after the weekend long runs. This is what works best for me, but it’s probably not for everyone!
• I swapped the recovery week with the week after, so that the recovery week was the week I was moving to the USA. I didn’t do the LT workout scheduled for the recovery week, as I had plenty of life stress going on!
• For the tune up races, I ran two 10k time trials in the local high school track, just by myself.

Deciding on a pace

Training had gone relatively well. I had survived the taper (only one niggle came up, but an extra day off got rid off it). Although it was going to be warmer than average, the weather forecast for race day wasn’t too bad. Now I had to decide on a time goal.

Two weeks before the marathon, I had run 46:38 on my second 10k time trial, which “converts” to roughly a 3h45min marathon. Also, I was barely tapered for the 10k (and supposedly, my fitness was better suited for the marathon as that was the distance I had trained for).

But I was never going to go out in 3h45min pace. Charlotte is a hilly course (318m of elevation gain). The question was: do I go out with the 4h pacers (~5:40min/km) or with the 4:15 group (~6:00min/km)? For me, that’s the difference between a pace at the top of my heart rate Zone 2 (of 5) or well into my Zone 3 (if running flat terrain). In theory, I should be able to run sub-4h even with the hills and heat.

However, so many things can go wrong in the marathon. Especially on your first one. I know that “you have to respect the distance”. I’m a bit of running nerd (in case you can’t tell already), and this fall I’ve watched professional runners have awful (for their standards) marathon debuts in Chicago. But I’ve also watched professional runners have brilliant marathon debuts in NYC. Ultimately, nobody cares if you ‘hit The Wall’ and blow up your first marathon. Even finishing is an achievement. And you only run your debut once: you might as well go for it.

So I went out with the 4h pacers. I had no idea for how long I could keep that pace, but we were going to find out.

The race

The first uncertainty I had about running a marathon was if I’d have to use the toilets during the race. In my long runs I always have to pee. And about 5k into the race, I wanted to pee. I wasn’t the only one. Many runners were queueing on the portable toilets. Waiting…for minutes I could not afford to lose. I told myself to hold it until the next toilet. All had queues. I told myself that I had peed just minutes before the race, that it was a fake sensation due to my pre-race coffee (caffeine is a diuretic, but also a legal performance enhancer). I told myself that I needed to save some liquids in my body – to be able to sweat later as it was going to get hot (no, I don’t know if that’s how it actually works). Eventually, the urge to pee went away.

Somewhat relatedly, my second uncertainty was how well my stomach would tolerate all the gels I planned on taking. During training, I had struggled with gastrointestinal issues, thus limiting my intake of carbohydrates within long runs. Luckily this time it went without issues. I took gels every 4 miles (just before the water stations), alternating non-caffeinated and caffeinated gels. It works out at about 65 grams of carbs per hour, or 72.5g if you include the 6 small dates (~30g of carbs) that I had 15min before the start.

We hit the halfway in 1:59:52. I was tucked behind the 4h pacers, almost in perfect Kipchoge formation. Making it on pace this far was already a success. By then, my legs didn’t feel too great, having a slight discomfort in my right hamstring. And my heart rate was in the 160s beats per minute (over 80% of my max HR, which is about 200bpm).

Rather than an even effort, the pacers were keeping an even pace. Since I didn’t want my heart rate to go into threshold/Z4 too soon, on the uphills I was letting them go. On the downhills, I Sifan Hassan-ed my way back to them. At around 27k, there was a slight downhill and I was feeling okay. I let myself run ahead of the pacers, but still behind other runners (there was a considerable headwind in this part of the course). The plan was that the pacers would catch me on the way back (uphill). Somehow, I ran the uphill and got to 31k still ahead of the pacers. Not by much, as I could hear people cheering them ‘four-hour-pace, four-hour-pace!’ (the cheer stations at 20miles was also insane, as well as the one at mile 6.7!).

After 20 miles, I was in unknown territory (my longest run had been 20 miles), my heart rate was sitting in the 170s (Zone 4/ threshold), and it was only getting hotter. I also had some pain in my right shin. I told myself that it’d disappear (throughout the rest of the race, it came and went, but it wasn’t anything extremely painful). I knew there were some hills still to come, so I kept the gap on the pacers even though I was working hard for that. But most importantly, I kept waiting for the (in)famous ‘Wall’ to come.

I’m very proud of how I managed the race psychologically. I only started counting down miles left after 20miles (which is the true half-way in the marathon). Before that, I was just thinking about running the mile I was in. One mile at a time (just like ‘one thing at a time’ had become my mantra during peak training and move-to-the-USA stress). If I needed distractions during the Nth mile, I had planned to think about my life at N-years old. I did that a few times during the race. And while I was prepared to face The Wall, I didn’t scare myself by its prospect. I told myself that it might come. But I also told myself that it might not come, because I was doing high-carb fuelling (for someone my size, over 70 grams of carbs per hour is on the high side, at least relative to traditional standards).

The Wall never came.

After mile 24, I started to truly believe in the sub-4h (I was still ahead of the pacers). But I didn’t want to risk it. I didn’t want to get heatstroke or injured by running harder than needed too early. Only after mile 25, I let myself go fast.

The distance from the mile-26 marker to the finish seemed an eternity. I tried to mentally convert .2miles to meters, to make sure I was running fast enough for the sub-4h (I was ahead of the pacers, but there’s always a small chance they don’t hit the goal time). Unsurprisingly, at that point my brain couldn’t do the mental calculation. I told myself ‘Maria, just run as fast you can’.

Conclusion

3:58:42. I was (and still am) delighted. Everything finally came together on race day, and so far I would call this the best race of my life. Of course, in absolute terms it’s nothing crazy. Based on my 10k and my strong finish, I might have been able to sustain a slightly faster pace. And I think my personal best for 2k on the rowing machine is a better athletic result, as well as a more painful one (if I had to choose, I would rather go again through the pain of the almost-4-hour marathon rather than the pain of the less-than-8-minutes 2k, and it’s not even close). But after so many months with that race on the calendar for that date (my birthday), it was an absolute dream day.

Thank you to my parents for their help during the marathon weekend, and to Athens Road Readers (/Runners) for listening to parts of this story.