A Marathon in 2063

How do I design the longest marathon plan ever created?

In December 2023, after running my first marathon (NYCM) at forty years old, I scheduled a call with Nick’s Substack, who would become my first run coach. The point was to see if we would be a good fit as a coach-runner tandem. Nick asked me a few questions to get to know me as a person and as a runner, but this one stood out: “What is your goal as runner?” “To still be running when I’m 80,” I said.

Even though my answer sounds pre-fabricated, I wanted to convey that running for me is not about proving anything—to me or to the world—to compensate for something (although my consistency owes a lot to the lack of progress in my professional life), or to beat myself to a pulp.

I want to improve my healthspan. That means to be able to go on walks with my kids and wife a few decades from now, to be strong enough to age with grace and strength, and to enjoy life. But I also want to learn and master the sport. Slowly. Patiently. With a purpose.

I’ve always been interested in the strategic, theoretical, and philosophical side of sports. I played football as a kid, then coached in my late teens and early twenties. I swam everyday for a few years and I read about it and watched an insane amount of professional meets. Concurrently, I trained in a boxing gym, hence I tried to learn about it—not only from books, also by watching decades-old fights on YouTube. But pools are either expensive or not around every corner, and boxing (and football, but more on that in the next weeks or months) is to violent for me now. I’m on a non-competitive, non-violent, phase of my life.

I’ve been reading books about running by runners and coaches. I consume a decent amount of running content. In a recent search, or a trip down a rabbit-hole in which I tried to understand my recent discontent with violent and dominance-based sports, I learned that running is a mastery-process sport, where the competition is internal, and the goal is to master execution. I loved it.

My plan to run a marathon in 2063 will include mastering the sport, on roads and trails, adapting, evolving and implementing other aspects of a balanced life as well, like nutrition. This year I started a plant-based diet, which means that 66% of my meals are vegan. I’m doing this after years helping nutritionists write their books and learning from them and the advantages of a plan-based (or Mediterranean) diet.

My plan is to approach this as 40 year-long marathon training block (37 left), or if you want to see it from a different perspective: a running base expanding 39 years and 8 months, followed by a 4 month build for that marathon in 2063.

But just like training for any given marathon, the gain won’t come from the actual race the year of my eightieth birthday, but from the cycle and whatever comes with it in the decades to come. The upside? I have a fair amount of time until then.