A follow-up to A PhD is not a marathon – it’s like preparing for one

A few months ago I wrote about how preparing for a marathon is actually a pretty good metaphor for a PhD. The moveable finish line, the confusing signposts, the need for a flexible plan. What I didn’t mention at the time is that I was already quietly signing up to actually run one.

So here we are. I’m training for a marathon. And unsurprisingly – because apparently I can’t switch off the part of my brain that links everything back to academic writing – I’ve been noticing just how much the experience of training mirrors what I try to teach and support researchers with every day.

A bit of context

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you’ll know I started running in 2017, about six months after my MS diagnosis. It became a key part of my treatment plan and has stayed that way ever since. Running has been through a lot with me: a postdoc, a career change, a pandemic, a house move, and most recently, becoming a mum. I’m now training for a marathon with a toddler, a full-time job, and MS in the mix. The stakes feel different this time, in the best possible way. I’m also fundraising and you can support me here  and every donation genuinely helps keep me motivated on the hard days.

Getting a personal trainer: knowing when to ask for help

One of the first things I did when I committed to this was get back in touch with my personal trainer. And I want to be clear, this wasn’t a tentative “maybe I should try this” decision. I’ve trained with him before, when I was preparing to run the West Highland Way in 2022, and I already knew exactly what that support was worth.

That’s actually the bit I want to highlight. Knowing when to ask for help, and feeling confident enough to do it, is a skill in itself. I didn’t have to convince myself this time. I’d done it before, I’d seen what difference it made, and so when I committed to this marathon, a step up from my current circumstances if not my running history, reaching out felt like the obvious move rather than a last resort.

Because here’s the thing: I have actually run this marathon before. In 2021, as part of my West Highland Way training and this particular marathon was one of them. But the conditions could not have been more different. This was deep into COVID restrictions, and my life at that point was essentially work, run, sleep, repeat. No toddler. No juggling. A kind of relentless, stripped-back focus that I could sustain precisely because everything else had been stripped back too.

I am not that person right now, and that’s fine, genuinely. But it does mean I’m approaching a familiar distance in a completely unfamiliar context, which is exactly why having my trainer back in my corner matters. He already knows my history, knows how my MS factors in, and knows when to push and when to dial things back. That’s not something you can get from a generic training plan, however good it is.

My trainer doesn’t just give me sessions. He pays attention to how I’m doing, adjusts things when my MS is playing up, calls me out when I’m pushing too hard or not hard enough, and encourages me in a way that actually lands. Not generic cheerleading, but specific, informed support from someone who already knows my context.

Sound familiar?

This is exactly what good supervision, mentoring, or academic writing support looks like. It’s not just about having access to information or feedback. It’s about having someone who understands where you’re starting from, adjusts their approach accordingly, and helps you make progress even when your capacity fluctuates. And critically, it’s about knowing that asking for that support is not an admission of failure. It’s just good planning.

If you’ve had a good experience with a particular kind of support before, trust that knowledge. You don’t have to start from scratch every time a new challenge comes along – even when the challenge looks familiar on paper but feels entirely new in practice.

Setting up your environment for success

Here’s a confession: I’m getting a treadmill.

Now, if you’d told me a few years ago that I’d be voluntarily putting a treadmill in my house, I would have laughed. I’ve always been an outdoor runner. I like fresh air and not staring at a wall. But here’s the reality of marathon training with a toddler and a full-time job: getting out for long runs requires a level of logistical coordination that is frankly exhausting to even think about. The treadmill isn’t my dream scenario. It’s my realistic scenario.

And this is exactly the kind of thinking I encourage researchers to do about their writing.

We talk a lot about ideal writing conditions; the perfect quiet space, a blocked-out morning, the right notebook, no distractions. But most researchers are not operating in ideal conditions. They’re fitting writing around teaching, admin, caring responsibilities, health, and everything else life throws at them. The goal isn’t perfect conditions. The goal is functional conditions that you can actually access consistently.

I’ve written before about how I plan my week and the commitment inventory approach to understanding what time you actually have. The treadmill purchase is basically that principle applied to marathon training. What do I have? A toddler who goes to bed at 8. A partner willing to hold things down on weekends for a long run. A spare corner of a room. That’s what I’m working with, and that’s what I’m designing around.

Your writing environment doesn’t have to be beautiful. It has to be yours and it has to be accessible.

The people in your corner: support isn’t always dramatic

My partner deserves a mention here, and so does my toddler – even though he has absolutely no idea he’s part of my support system.

Training for a marathon is not a solo endeavour, even when you’re running alone. It requires someone to watch the toddler while you get a long run in. It requires someone to not roll their eyes when you’re meal prepping for the week or going to bed embarrassingly early on a Friday. It requires someone to say “go, I’ve got this” at 6:30am on a Saturday when every bone in your body would rather not.

My toddler, for his part, has started running towards me with his arms out whenever I come back from a run, which is the most effective post-run motivational tool I have ever encountered. He has no idea what a marathon is. He is, objectively, the best thing.

The point is: support for big long-term projects often looks quiet and undramatic. It looks like logistics covered, flexibility offered, and someone believing in you on the days you’re not quite managing to believe in yourself. This is true for marathon training and it is absolutely true for academic writing.

Researchers often underestimate the role their environment, people included, plays in their writing. If you have people around you who make writing possible, tell them it matters. If you’re in a position to create that kind of environment for the researchers you work with, whether through protected time, community sessions, or just genuine encouragement: do it.

(If you’re looking for a structure that builds writing community, by the way, the Power Hour of Writing is exactly that. Peer support and protected time, in a format that fits into a working day.)

Intermediate goals: the half marathons

Something I’ve done differently this time is build in intermediate goals. The marathon is in October, but before that I’ve signed up for two half marathons, one in June and one in September. These aren’t warm-up events I’m vaguely planning to do. They’re structured into the training as proper milestones, each one serving a purpose in the overall plan.

The June half marathon is an early checkpoint, a chance to see where I am, what’s working, and what needs adjusting before the heavier training block begins. The September one is closer to race day and will give me a much clearer sense of where I’m landing. Both of them give me something concrete to work towards in the shorter term, which, if you’ve ever stared at a distant deadline and felt completely overwhelmed, you’ll know is enormously helpful.

This maps almost perfectly onto how I’d encourage researchers to approach a long piece of writing. A thesis submission date, or even a journal deadline, can feel so far away that it loses its motivating power entirely. Breaking the journey into meaningful intermediate milestones, a draft introduction, a completed literature review, a methods chapter your supervisor has actually seen, gives you checkpoints that are close enough to feel real. They also give you information. You find out what’s working before it’s too late to adjust.

The half marathon in June isn’t the marathon. But it will tell me something the training alone can’t.

Rest and recovery: the bit that’s easy to skip

Here’s something I’ve had to consciously plan for, and which I’d have ignored entirely a few years ago: rest.

Rest days are built into my training plan and I’m treating them as non-negotiable. Not as days I failed to run, but as days the training is still happening, just in a different way. Recovery is where a lot of the adaptation actually occurs, and pushing through when your body needs rest doesn’t make you more dedicated, it just makes you more likely to get injured or burnt out before you reach the start line.

I also know from experience, both running and MS, that my energy is not a renewable resource that resets overnight. Managing it well across a week, a month, a training block, is what makes the whole thing sustainable.

Researchers often treat rest the same way I used to treat rest days: as something you do when you’ve earned it, or when you physically cannot continue. But rest isn’t a reward for productivity. It’s part of the process. The thinking that happens when you step away from a piece of writing, the connection your brain makes in the shower, on a walk, in the fifteen minutes before you fall asleep, that’s not wasted time. That’s part of how good writing gets made.

If you’re not building downtime into your writing schedule, I’d gently suggest that you’re not being more productive. You’re just borrowing against yourself.

What the hard days will teach me (I’ll let you know)

I want to be honest: I’ve just started training, so I haven’t hit a genuinely bad day yet. The early weeks have that lovely quality of feeling manageable and even enjoyable, where everything is new enough to be interesting and the distance hasn’t got long enough to be daunting.

But I’ve done enough running, and enough big projects to know they’re coming. The run that feels awful from start to finish. The week where life intervenes and the plan falls apart. The point somewhere in the middle of training where the finish line still feels very far away and the novelty has completely worn off.

I’m not dreading them, though. Because I also know, from the WHW training, from years of managing MS, from seeing researchers through the messy middle of a thesis, that those days are where you actually learn something useful. They teach you that consistency matters more than any individual session. That adjusting the plan is not the same as abandoning it. That showing up imperfectly is still showing up.

When they arrive, I’ll handle them the same way I’d encourage any researcher to handle a difficult writing week: acknowledge it, adjust where needed, and keep going. The plan survives bad days. You just have to let it.

(I reserve the right to write a follow-up post when the bad days do arrive, mostly to prove I practise what I preach.)

Finally: why I’m doing this

I’m running this marathon to raise money for Shift.ms — the online community for people living with MS that I joined the day I was diagnosed and which has been a genuine lifeline ever since. You can read more about that on my fundraising page, and if you’d like to donate I would be genuinely, enormously grateful.

But I’m also doing this because, and I think this connects back to everything above, there is something really important about setting yourself a big, slightly terrifying goal and building the systems, support, and environment to actually pursue it. Not perfectly. Not without difficult days. But with intention and with the right people alongside you.

That’s as true for a marathon as it is for a thesis. Or a paper. Or any piece of writing that matters to you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a long run to plan and figure out which treadmill to buy.