The main overcoming is the training itself, in the process of which the body adapts, as well as the rest, including lifestyle, daily habits and everyday life. I am sharing my list of typical "household" symptoms during marathon training.

Alarming symptoms?

Weekend plans are built around long training, not around entertainment, social life, solving household problems and other cultural leisure of normal people. All this time has to be flexibly fit into a rigid schedule: sleep-eat-run-eat-sleep-eat. At the same time, the food and the horizontal position are so attractive that they often win over the rest of the plans.

If suddenly a trip is planned for the weekend, the main part of the luggage will be occupied by running shoes (including in anticipation of sudden global warming and cooling!), And the most urgent question will be "where to run?".

Going out for training on Sunday morning, you tell your family that today is fast, only 20 km, feeling like a freebie. Anything less than 25-30 km is no longer considered a long distance, and running more than a half-marathon every weekend is becoming the usual norm of life.

You honestly try to hold back, but…

How do you know that a person has run a marathon? Don't worry, he will tell you about it

When you can hardly reproduce the number of your mobile phone, but you easily remember the training plan for the week, which consists of something like this (this is one workout): 3200 m at L-tempo + 2x(10-12 min at P-tempo + 1 min of rest) + 16 km at L-tempo + 15-20 min at P-tempo + 3200 m at L-tempo. And, of course, you remember the exact numbers for all these L, P, M, I tempos.

First, every day you check the forecast for a week ahead, figuring out how to combine training with weather conditions (especially relevant for winter running). A couple of weeks before day X, the symptom worsens: the checks become more frequent, up to several times a day. On three different sites, probably.

When you know the distance from your house to the nearest intersection/park/bridge, as well as the distance between all objects in the district and on city routes, suitable for running, to the nearest meter. The city begins to seem very compact, and you can easily estimate how long it will take to run to any point in it.

That big piece of cake is no longer a calorie horror or a way to treat yourself to something tasty, but a valuable source of glycogen for tomorrow's training. And half a can of Nutella, swallowed after a workout, is not ugly fattening, harmful excesses, but the closing of the carbohydrate window.

Having suffered on a couple of runs with digestive discomfort and alternately aching sides, you begin to control everything that is eaten the day before. A list of "what I don't eat before training" appears, and sometimes it causes strange reactions from others.

At first, you wait all week for the planned day off, and when it comes, it seems that you haven't run in a long time, and you've learned something that's clearly missing.

The load on the washing machine is about the same as having a baby who has begun to master the skills of independent feeding. Sports clothes that dry/ventilate are always present in the interior.

In a few months, you seem to get used to living with all these strange things, and your loved ones are humbled, and then HE comes - PMS or pre-marathon syndrome. This thing often accompanies the taper period, which begins 2-3 weeks before the marathon. Someone becomes gloomy or psychotic, someone falls into social phobia, someone panics "everything is lost, I can't run anymore", someone practices particularly severe forms of perversion in the form of a marathon diet. And so on. Personally, I still traditionally have a toothache, it always goes away in the morning before the start. All this is reminiscent of the legendary PMS in the original - when you understand everything, but it is not very possible to control the reactions of the nervous system.

Do you have any symptoms during preparation?