Learning Experience in the Land of Lincoln

“This is stupid; just give me the hand tether!” That’s what I yelled at Ryan somewhere around mile 10 of this year’s Lincoln Presidential Half Marathon.

For the overwhelming majority of my training runs and races, I have used a hand tether. Basically, it’s a stretchy headband. I hold one side of it in my left hand; my guide holds the other side in his right, and we stay connected that way without actually touching.

There are pros and cons to this type of tether. On one hand, there isn’t much slack in the band, so I can easily feel when one of us is speeding up or slowing down according to the tension. I can also judge the sharpness of a turn to the left based on this tension. I have to rely more on verbal cues for right turns, since the tension disappears as my guide is moving toward me in those instances.

That’s all well and good, but there is one fairly obvious drawback. The hand tether restricts movement on whichever side it’s being held. I can’t swing my left arm; my guide can’t swing his right. Well, I guess we could try to swing our arms in some kind of bizarre, tethered synchronization, but this would look and feel rather strange. The waist tether solves this problem.

The waist tether consists of two loops connected by a single cord in the middle. One loop fastens around my waist, the other loop goes around my guide’s, and we can both run free and easy, swinging both arms in rhythm with our strides. For me, having both hands free in this way gives the sensation of not being guided at all, a feeling I am still getting used to, which was the reason for my sudden frustration at mile 10.

The Lincoln Presidential Half was only our second time racing with the waist tether. Aside from one other half-marathon, my only experience with it came on empty 400-meter tracks. Running the straightaways is easy. I know I’m going straight ahead, so I feel confident to lengthen my stride a bit and start pushing the pace. Turns are a different story.

I have some difficulty in judging the sharpness of turns. The turns on a track are always the same, so it is easy to anticipate them and make the proper corrections. On an unfamiliar race course, however, turns can be gradual, sharp, and scattered at irregular intervals throughout the journey.

My guides do a great job of describing upcoming turns, but my definitions of “sharp”, gradual” or “slight” aren’t always the same as theirs. Depending on the degree to which I overcorrect, I’ll either drift toward or away from my guide, which means I’m either crowding my guide or creating unwanted tension in the cord between us. In any case, I straighten out quickly, and there is no real impact to our race. Unless it’s mile 10 of a twisty-turny half marathon course, in which case it can begin to take a toll.

For me, the strain is more mental than physical. Turns are often accompanied by hills, noisy cheering sections, and congested aid stations, each of which contributes to a brief but disconcerting moment of simultaneous sensory deprivation and overload. I experienced a few of these moments in the latter stages of the Lincoln Presidential Half. Going in and out of turns on uneven terrain while you can’t see or hear anything (without the stability and reassurance of the hand tether) is much more taxing than gliding along a smooth, quiet straightaway, so stress began to accumulate by the end. Ryan and I got through it, though, finishing with a time of 1:38:18.

When I sat down at the computer today, my intention was not to provide an in-depth analysis of running tethers and how I use them, but my mind goes where it goes. If you’re still reading at this point, then congratulations on completing your own special feat of endurance. I will gain confidence as I continue training and racing with the waist tether, and I won’t have to subject you all to any more mind-numbing tether talk.