How to Run a Marathon

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WHAT WILL SURPRISE ME? Finke says there are three sides to marathon training: the physical side, the mental side, and the "dark side." The dark side is something rookies have to prepare for. It is simply the concept that sometimes training doesn't work; sometimes you can train perfectly and just have a bad day on race day; and sometimes there are marathon conditions that you have no control over and that can undermine you. She mentions one race in which several of her well-trained marathoners struggled to finish against 25-mile-an-hour headwinds. In addition to slowing the runners down, the stiff winds caused muscle cramps by speeding up dehydration. (Wind can evaporate sweat too rapidly, so that the body needs even more water than it normally would.)

IS THERE A SECRET TO SUCCESS? Williams's big maxim: No new is good new. What he means is that you shouldn't debut anything the day of the actual race. If the race has a hill on mile 8, put a hill on mile 8 in your training. If you wear shorts and a T-shirt when you train, wear them during the race. Running shoes should also be well broken in by race time. Try to make the race as un-novel as possible.

WHAT'S THE MOST COMMON MISTAKE BEGINNERS MAKE? Going too fast too soon on race day. "At the start the adrenaline flow is so significant that most people run way too fast for the first 4 to 8 miles and can't maintain the pace," says Williams. He tells racers to run with a watch to make sure they're going slow enough at the beginning. For first-timers, there should be only one goal: simply to finish -- comfortably -- and create a positive memory. Finally, you'll be a marathoner. You and Pheidippides, siblings under the skin.

Ilan Mochari is a staff writer at Inc.

Marathon (Business)man

Steve Costello, a former high school sprinter with a still-svelte frame and the ability to run in annual 10K races without much training, considered himself plenty healthy. But last April, when Costello learned that his cholesterol was holding at 249 after years in the 160s, he began to wake up -- at 5:30 a.m. to train, at the age of 43, for his first marathon. "Sometimes when I reach the trail, I sit in my car for 15 minutes because it's still dark," says the founder and sole employee of Blue Sky Strategies, in Louisville, Colo. "I hate running in heat. I like to hit the trail early and be done by 8."

Why a marathon, of all things? The challenge of training intrigued Costello, whose running life to that point had focused on shorter distances. Also, there was the solitariness of it. Costello describes himself as someone with "a DNA" for solo activities. "I was an only child. I played football and baseball in elementary school, but I gravitated to swimming and track in high school."

Having the flexibility to pursue his sometimes-solitary agenda is part of the reason Costello founded his company of one. At Blue Sky Strategies, Costello works as a branding-and-marketing consultant to large consumer-products companies. Business hops in the first and fourth quarters, when the Goliaths have budget money to burn. But summers are slower, and Costello takes advantage of them. Last year he took most of September off to complete his marathon training. In 2000 he spent June and July working on the primary campaign of a friend who was running for district attorney. "[Campaigning] was just more important to me," he says. "And I'd never done that before."

In training, Costello became a devotee of the RunnersWorld.com site. There he found a list of the 10 best marathon courses for first-timers (supportive crowds, few hills). His 18-week training program came from HalHigdon.com. As the weeks bled by, leading up to the September 30 marathon in Portland, Oreg., Costello noted a few parallels between his race preparation and the way he conducts daylong brainstorming sessions for his clients. Often, for example, Costello follows a straightforward mental exercise (say, strategy work) with a relaxing one (thinking of slogans or stacking Legos). He applied a similar principle to his training, where "you always follow a hard day with an easy day to give the body and mind a chance to recover," he says.

Before the race, Costello feared that he'd go stir-crazy between miles 4 and 26, as he had during practice runs. But that didn't happen, thanks mainly to the peppy Portland crowd. He finished in under 4.5 hours without a hitch. Of course, his main concern had never been exhaustion. It had been boredom.

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