The heat finally showed up this week, and the long runs changed with it.
In cold weather I can run more or less all day. The body just goes. You settle into the work and the miles take care of themselves. Warm weather is a different animal. The legs are usually fine. What goes first is the will. Somewhere in the middle of a hot long run, every mile turns into a negotiation, and the other side of the table is not interested in being reasonable.
That negotiation is what I want to talk about.
The heat didn't invent the problem. It just turned up the volume on something that was always there. A long run is partly a physical event and partly a mental one. When conditions are easy, it is simple to forget the second half. Cool morning, legs underneath you, nothing to manage. Then summer arrives and reminds you that staying out there is a decision you have to keep making, over and over, until you are done.
I have been running most of my life, and for most of that time I would have told you the mental side was something other people worried about. I trained the body. I watched the pace, the mileage, the shoes. The mind came along for the ride, and I never thought to ask it to do any work.
The marathon corrected me.
Mile 19 of the Chicago Marathon. It was hot, we were out in full sun, and for the first time as a runner I did not think I could keep going. I slowed down. Then I stopped and walked. My legs were tired, but the legs were not the real problem. The problem was the voice telling me to quit, and I had nothing to say back to it. I had never been tested like that, and I still had six miles to go.
I had trained the legs for that race. I had not trained for the conversation that started late in it. In my first one or two marathons I treated the mental part as an afterthought, and the wall found me both times. It was not a fitness problem. It was a problem I had never once practiced for.
Here is what took me too long to accept. The mind is trainable, the same way the legs are. It is not toughness you either have or you don't. It is not a pep talk you give yourself at the start line. It is a set of skills you can practice, badly at first and then better. "Just suffer" is not a plan. It is what people say when they don't have one.
A few things that have actually worked for me.
Break the distance into pieces you can believe in. On race day that means aid station to aid station, not thirty-one miles. On a hot long run it means the next mile marker, or the next patch of shade, the turnaround, or even just one more step. Thirty-one miles is a number designed to talk you out of starting. The next mile is not.
Keep a phrase you come back to. It does not need to be clever or inspiring. The good ones rarely are. The point is that when the negotiating starts you already have your answer ready, instead of trying to build one from scratch at the exact moment your judgment is the worst it will be all day. My go-to phrase is "calm and strong." Two plain words, nothing you would put on a poster, and that is exactly why it works when nothing clever would.
Practice being uncomfortable on purpose. This is where the heat earns its keep. Instead of treating a hot, miserable long run as a day to survive, treat it as the rep. Notice the moment you start wanting to quit, and then practice not reacting to it. Stay calm. Keep the effort honest. The skill is not making the discomfort go away. It is being on speaking terms with it.
Expect the low patch. It is coming. The runners who fall apart are usually the ones who are surprised by it. Name it when it shows up, take the obvious actions (drink, ease the pace, walk the hill, eat something), and give it a mile to pass. It almost always passes. Learning that it passes is most of the training.
Run the process, not the finish line. The finish is too far away to help you when you are hurting. The next aid station, the next gel, the next climb are the right size to hold onto. String enough of them together and the finish takes care of itself.
You do not get a separate session for any of this. Every long run is mental reps whether you count them or not, and summer hands you a stack of extra ones you did not ask for.
If you want the research behind any of this, two books are worth your time. Jason Koop's Training Essentials for Ultrarunning has a good section on the brain's role in endurance, the short version being that the limit you feel shows up well before the limit you actually have. And Steven Magness's Do Hard Things takes apart the idea that toughness means clenching your jaw and gutting it out. In his telling, real toughness is something you prepare for, not something you white-knuckle in the moment. You build the answer ahead of time so it is ready when the hard part arrives. That is roughly what "calm and strong" has been doing for me all along. I came to most of this the slow way, by getting it wrong in races. Both books would have saved me a few bad afternoons.
The heat is going to keep finding the cracks all summer. That is fine. That is the work. The plan is that by the time I am standing at the start of the Grindstone 50k in September, the mountain will not throw anything at me I have not already rehearsed on some hot Tuesday nobody else saw. None of this is mystical. It is rehearsal, done early enough to count.
