If you’re not prepared, a running bonk shatters your stride, drains your body, and messes with your mind.
Running From Substance Abuse Toward Recovery “bonk,” you ask? You’re lucky if you’ve never heard of it; it’s a race finish so bad, so arduous, you feel as if an enormous cartoon boulder has just fallen on your head.
Most of us never forget a bad marathon finish. One that I remember vividly happened on the 21st mile of a race in upstate New York. Without warning, BOOM! It felt as if someone handed me a baby grand piano to carry to the finish line. Those last few miles were like a death march, and I’ve never been so glad to finish a race. That day, I won the battle of mind over body—and somehow managed a marathon personal best—but I needed to understand why this happened to prevent a painful finish in future races.
The first step: understanding what’s going on internally when you feel yourself Health & Injuries. At its essence, it means you’ve run out of carbohydrates in the leg muscles and in the liver, which depletes glycogen stores and means your body starts burning fat—not a good thing for long distance running. Unlike carbohydrates, fat is not an efficient fuel source. It makes the body work harder pumping oxygen to the muscles to keep moving forward, which means the runner—me—slows down dramatically.
I thought I had been carb-loading properly during the days leading up to the race to prevent my glycogen level from dropping. Still, even with proper prerace fueling, the cause of my bonk might have been something else.
Maybe my immediate pace was too fast, which would have caused lactic acid to build up in my bloodstream. If so, this lessens the amount of glucose that I could metabolize later in the race, leading to nausea and weakness—and the zombie-like finish I can barely remember.
In comparison, two years after running my marathon PR, I ran the Marine Corps Marathon and I experienced She Runs to Reclaim Her Identity After Assault. I didn’t run my fastest time, but my hard training paid off. With 10K to go, I was passing people and feeling great. What did I do differently from my other marathon? Nothing, actually. So I may never know the cause of my miserable bonk. I do know that the real race begins after 20 miles into the marathon: that’s when you enter unchartered territory and anything can happen if you’re not prepared.
Be sure to do your homework: getting in long runs, eating a balanced diet, and learning to pace yourself for a strong—and bonk-free—finish.
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Lori is part of the Runner's World Challenge (soon to be Runner's World VIP) group headed to the Marine Corps Marathon. To learn how you can be part of the RW VIP program, visit runnersworld.com/vip.
