This is the real main course of the Seoul Marathon for me. The eight-second improvement means I finally reunited with my long-lost body.

Before the story begins, I need to briefly introduce the background. I am Xiaowai, I have been running for 5 years, I have run 5 full marathons, and I have dreamed of 330 minutes several times. My best full marathon time in 2022 was 3:39:49 , and my Seoul Marathon result was 3:39:41 . The improvement of 8 seconds is the most unforgettable thing in the past few years of training.

Back in November 2023 , three months before the Seoul Marathon, my body was in a state where I couldn’t even finish 5km at a pace of 5min / 5min , but what exactly happened?

The first warning signs of abnormal performance

The most obvious sign was when I participated in the Songhe Cross-Country Climbing Competition in May last year. Compared to before, I had some training, but I started to feel dizzy, tinnitus, and weakness in the latter part of the competition. It happened to be the time when I had a company health check. The thyroid data deficit in the report was particularly prominent. I checked the symptoms of hyperthyroidism and found one or two of the listed signs that I also had.

Seek professional advice and preliminary inspection at YOUNGER

In this era of Internet information explosion, people are easily influenced by information, so I consulted Coach Yan Qing, who suffered from hyperthyroidism. Following Yan Qing's advice, I started to do some tests for hyperthyroidism, but the results showed no abnormalities.

Diet adjustment and intensive training period

So I started to adjust my diet and reduce the intake of iodine-containing foods. In order to compete in the Xterra World Championships in September, I started intensive training for more than three months after the Songhe Cross-Country Climbing Competition. The training was in the hot summer with a temperature of 35 degrees and full humidity. It was particularly hard, but I was passionate at 35 degrees, and nothing unusual happened during the training. After everything was ready and I started to compete, I was in a very bad condition due to acclimatization. My results were far behind again. I returned home with a lot of disappointment. At the invitation of a friend, I ran a 14k small race.

Perhaps some things have always been there, existing in our ordinary days and encounters. They are just waiting, waiting for someone to discover them one day, to identify them by name, waiting for more people to gradually recognize their meaning in life.

Symptom recurrence and new awareness

I thought I could catch the tail of the peak after the race, so I ran 5K at the long-distance running pace. But I didn’t expect that 5K was my fastest 5K in the whole race. After 5K , my body was already slightly tipsy. The final result was 1hr 30min , with an average speed of 6:27 . I slowed down very badly afterwards, and I felt dizzy and there was only a white wall in front of me. At that time, I also took energy gels, which proved that it was not a problem of blood sugar and energy. At the moment of dizziness, I remembered Cao Chunyu’s sharing of the problem of iron deficiency before, and remembered that in the process of growing up, I often felt dizzy when I stood up after soaking in hot springs for a long time. Recently, my good friend’s blood volume has been decreasing.

"I seem to be iron deficient too?"

With this suspicion in mind, I immediately decided to take an iron supplement suitable for athletes (I won’t mention the brand for now). After taking it for two weeks, I successfully completed the Taroko Half Marathon in 1:57 (average speed 5:35 ). At the finish line, I was so happy that I had found the problem and cured it. I also ignited my fighting spirit to prepare for the full marathon training, and I was working hard to prepare for the Mizuno Relay Race in three weeks. In order to quickly find the lost sense of speed, I trained for three weeks. During the process, I rarely had symptoms of dizziness, but they still occurred. The training was harder than before for unknown reasons, and I lacked confidence. The day of the competition was finally a wake-up call. After running 3k in 4:40 , it was foggy and I couldn’t see. I stopped and burst into tears. Friends who have participated in relay races must know that the pressure and mission of relay races are completely different from those of individual races. At that moment, I blamed myself very much, but the mission of a relay race is not to forgive myself with just a sorry. When the fog in front of me gradually dissipated and the scenery came into view, I hurriedly stepped forward again, 5.7k with an average speed of 5:07 . Once upon a time, this was only my full marathon pace. Now I can’t even complete 5 kilometers.

After being hit by the relay race, I finally made up my mind to make an appointment for a functional medicine test that I had always thought was too expensive. I convinced myself to treat it as a physical examination. In fact, the cost is about the same, and compared with a physical examination, functional medicine can detect what I want to know better.

The test results came out at the end of December. I remember when YOUNGER's COO saw the test results of my body's iron content, he said:

"You must have had a hard time."

I realized that the iron supplement I originally took was probably just the tip of the iceberg of what my body needs. According to the YOUNGER team's professional data on athletes' ferritin, the normal value should be 50-150ng/100mL , but mine was only 21.79ng/100mL.

At this time, there were only 12 weeks left before the Seoul Marathon. Following the team's advice, I began to supplement the nutrients that my body lacked. JC also made substantial adjustments to the class schedule. Most of the previous runs were easy aerobic runs, which would be very helpful for me to enter my peak period. I observed and adjusted at the same time. It is better to leave the class schedule to professionals. After all, no one knew how far my body could run at that time.

Miraculously, after taking the required dosage, I never had dizziness again in the next month and a half. Although the schedule was mostly aerobic, I could finish the meal smoothly, and my heart rate returned to its previous peak during easy running. It was not until the last month that I slowly increased the amount of long-distance running and pace running. As the amount increased, I began to feel slightly dizzy. Although the schedule was still completed smoothly, I still made an appointment for a follow-up visit to see the changes in my body during this period. The result was surprising. The iron content only increased slightly. The faceless man who had been hungry for a long time lived in my body. The CEO concluded that the iron I supplemented might be directly equal to the iron I consumed during exercise, so that the value did not improve at all. Later, I adjusted the dosage and followed their recommended diet one month before the game to welcome the unknown peak period.

Four weeks before the Seoul Marathon, I accidentally picked up the Standard Chartered Marathon bib of an injured runner. I thought, I could take advantage of the dopamine atmosphere of Standard Chartered to run a 30K T+Long. Well, the atmosphere of Standard Chartered was great. The average speed of 31K was 5:13, which was the best long-distance run I have ever run. I was still able to finish the run, so I rekindled my dream of running at a 5-minute speed. A small warning, although I ran 30K at a 5-minute speed in the Seoul Marathon and then had cramps and slowed down (see the experience article in the future for details), but thinking back to the state three months ago, through the supplement of nutrients, I returned to my original state. My body has walked so many roads and fallen for so long, but now it can hold its head high and walk with its chest held high, defeating the demons in my body, and no longer afraid of falling drunk on the battlefield. These helpless but beautiful days have been truly preserved, and time seems to have been frozen in these sweaty days, those wonderful days that belonged to that time and cannot be replicated.

We are all amateur runners. We cannot have a medical team, sports protection team, etc. around us like real national athletes. The process of finding solutions when encountering problems during training is relatively difficult. Functional medicine is a shortcut to quickly find the problem . I hope that my experience can help everyone or people around me who have similar problems as me. Nutritional loss during training is invisible. Maybe you are not lacking iron, but something else.

I started to get involved in cross-country running in recent years. Later, when I recalled the days when my nutritional index was lost, I thought it was closely related to my involvement in cross-country running. If calculated by exercise time, the physical burden of running a mountain is far greater than that of a full marathon. This is also a small thing that I have always ignored.

I felt very conflicted during this training cycle. I really wanted to break through myself, but I was also worried about the strain on my body. Sometimes I was optimistic that I could just finish the Seoul Marathon, and sometimes I was unwilling to keep stagnating. Although there was only a small breakthrough in the end, after the run I always felt that 330 was closer to me. I believe that soon I will see the number 32X on the arch.

If dreams were that simple, they wouldn’t be called dreams, right?

For the full text, please see Xiaowai & JC's Running Diary - Seoul Marathon Training - Physical Condition Awareness and Nutritional Supplementation