Annie & The Unknown
- codykoontzcpt
- Jul 30
- 6 min read
A 20+ minute PR, no injuries, and breathing with the entirety of your soul.
It was a dark and stormy night…
Correction, “is a dark and stormy day.” I’m finally sitting down to process and report on a supremely fulfilling (and educational!) 21 weeks.
At the end of last November, one of my athletes mentioned that his wife (Annie) was toying with the idea of run coaching. I had worked with Annie before the marathon she just completed, helping her manage some pain that came up in time to disturb her marathon training build and change how she ran that race–somehow she still managed a PR.
Fast-forward through lots of texts and running files, past the OKC Memorial Marathon in April, and we have an Annie who:
PR’d the marathon by 23 minutes
Secured a Boston Marathon qualifying time
Is uninjured!
Finished a 14-mile interval run only 3 weeks after OKC saying, “I felt really strong!”
Oh, and she already signed up for another marathon--planning to yet again PR!
Coaching Blurb
Blurb, hehe
What a weird word. But it fits, I guess? I haven’t been coaching for nearly as long as some, but listening and belief are two of my greatest strengths–Annie has some serious running giftedness. She really just needed someone to look at her and say, “WOW YOU’RE REALLY GOOD AT THIS.”
Annie’s Training Takeaways
Intangible discipline and grit far outweigh the importance of anything I did with Annie. All I did was emphasize the difference between easy and hard running, assign tons and tons of strides, and not overshoot mileage to help make her BQ possible. And fueling was crucial!
“Your brain knows what it doesn’t know, and wants to remind you of what it does know, which is that you’ve never been here before and haven’t proven that you can do it. Don’t lean into certainty!”
— Me to Annie, mile 14ish of OKC Memorial Marathon. Pacing prose always makes more sense in the moment.
Into Uncertainty
Every training block, race, and grocery trip has an element of the unknown. In our first coaching meeting, Annie told me her #1 goal was to qualify for the Boston Marathon at the OKC Memorial Marathon. She didn’t know if it was possible and asked what I thought.
Here’s what I said, as recorded in my notes:
“Annie needs to have a PR of almost 25 minutes to meet A [referring to Goal A, snagging that BQ], which is a big deal. However, she has already accomplished a lot with insufficient training methods AND injury, so I believe this goal is possible.”
After just a couple weeks into coaching Annie (and 1 run together to make sure easy was easy), it was obvious that she has loads of talent. I was shocked that she hadn’t run much before! I think the hardest part of her training was holding back, avoiding attempts at proving she could do it.
Prolonging Uncertainty
It would have been much more comfortable for me to have Annie throw down some baller times in workouts or hard long runs to prove to her and myself that she could meet her goal. The problem with that, in my mind at the time, was the risk of overtraining for the sake of certainty.
I tried to stay more focused on building all of the tools she would need to meet her goal on race day–getting to the start line in the first place! I can’t thank Annie enough for trusting me during this process. She dove headfirst into every workout and kept me in the loop on how she was feeling.
There was one week she got sick and had to miss a few workouts, including the all-important long run for that week. She could have ignored my advice and tried to make up for that work the next week, but she didn’t. She avoided the trap of certainty before the race.
I’m not trying to toot my own horn here, just highlighting how hard it is to train for a goal so far outside of what you know without getting the comfort of certainty.
To clarify–there’s nothing wrong with structuring workouts as proving grounds for race day (in fact, for this next marathon Annie has been doing some pretty big workouts!). I’m talking about the certainty that other voices try to get you to believe. For instance, the notion that logging 50+ mile weeks is necessary to run a fast marathon. Reaching for certainty from these kinds of sources instead of trusting the process she was in might have kept Annie from being able to give everything to reach for her goal when it mattered.
Pacer Picking
Months before the big day, I had been dreaming of pacing Annie at OKC. I didn’t want to impose, but being part of the entire experience, running ahead and filling bottles, having a front row seat to the show sounded SO FUN.
Jeric (aforementioned athlete who’s married to Annie) had been wanting to pace Annie, but hadn’t done a marathon yet. To his credit, he did a sub-90 minute half marathon last year and is barely scratching the surface of his potential! I told him I was convinced he could run those paces, but due to some scheduled weekend busyness with his work they asked me to come along and pace the marathon! I WAS THRILLED.
Embracing The Unknown
To really embrace the unknown, we had to define what was known. That included:
The course
How many collective pockets we had for carrying gels and hydration
This is already getting too long for me to go into the ridiculous amount of gels and hydration packets that were in my pockets, so quick math shows Annie did about 1200mg of sodium in something like 24oz of water and about 170g of carbs over the course of her 3 hour, 21 minute marathon.
This little fueling blurb (hehe) is not instructive in nature, just informative. Fueling strategies change with training and conditions.
I mapped out a plan for the course, separating it into 3 sections. The first was 8 miles, the second was 10 miles, and the final section was 8.2 miles. My main goal was to find the net downhill sections of at least 1 mile and make note to increase speed on those so we could distribute effort pragmatically over the first 22 miles, then send it into the finish.
The first 8-mile section flew by. We had a delightful group with us and had some laughs despite being locked-in on pacing. Something unique about Annie (that I had to practice so I could be a good pacer!) is that she is supremely metronomic in her self-pacing. I think we hit back to back miles at exactly the same pace and the next were only 1 or 2 seconds off from the other miles.
The middle section, 10 miles, was when the mental game kicked in. We cruised through miles 8 and 9 and Annie’s brain started pointing her to the fact that she hasn’t done this before.
She’s never run this fast, this far. And she still had so far to go.
Thankfully, she had prepared some mantras for exactly this moment. Those got her through the brain game of doubt and through the longest section of the race. One of those was “breathe in courage, breathe out fear.” Or something like that. It’s important for later, so remember it.
The final section is where Annie gave up. No, she didn’t stop running. She gave up the battle of trying to find certainty about what was possible, and fully embraced the unknown.
There’s a 4-mile hill before the final 2ish miles of OKC Memorial Marathon’s course. It’s brutal, with a conglomeration of half marathoners, aid stations, and a solid headwind to boot. Annie was holding pace so well, pushing up and over the hill. This is where the urge to just stop becomes nearly impossible to resist! Your brain only knows that you haven’t done this before, and that you can stop. Right. Now. Every step is one more than you already didn’t have to take.
She didn’t stop. She completely embraced the unknown and relied on Jeric and I to believe that she could do it when she really didn’t know what to think. I told her to exhale audibly, which helps in a few ways, and she really latched onto that. You could tell every breath was taking her deeper into the unknown, exhaling fear to make room for courage.
The last 2 miles of that race are burned into my memory. Annie accelerated through those final miles and through the finish line alongside Jeric, who immediately burst into tears.
Running is never just about running
I don’t think I’ve been face-to-face with anything so courageous as that. I know it’s silly, because it’s just running and no one made her do it. She’s not a paid athlete. People run faster marathons than that. Annie herself can run a faster marathon than that! But, this time, in a way she’ll never get to experience again, she has fundamentally altered her relationship with the unknown– and much more so her understanding of what she is capable of accomplishing.
Running is never just about running, it magnifies the things that are the most important to us and is the perfect canvas on which to rewrite ourselves.
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