Mass

50 days to 100 miles

A note before you read this issue…

¡Venga! is supposed to be a quick publication. A low stakes DIY mini-zine where I can share my thoughts on running, with this ‘326 days to 100 miles’ series focussing on my build up to running the South Downs Way 100. Sometimes, despite trying to write quickly, I get stuck on a topic and go back and forth on the best way to approach it. That’s what’s happened with this issue and is why it’s taken so long to publish.

Heads up: I’m sharing thoughts on food, weight, and body image. That may or may not be something you feel comfortable reading, and that’s OK; you don’t have to read it. I’ve chosen to write about it, because it is something that is part of this whole process of training for an ultramarathon. To not mention it, to avoid discussing something tricky, would feel like I’m not telling the whole story.

These tulips have nothing to do with this article, but I wanted a nice photo to go with it. It was taken almost exactly a year ago, though, on the day of the 2025 London Marathon.

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We got rid of our bathroom scales over the weekend. They were the kind that sends a little electrical current through your foot and estimates your body composition. They still work, but had not been used in months.

Weight¹ and running is tricky and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on body dysmorphia, disordered eating, or similar, but I am going to share some of my experiences which will perhaps explain why, for me, I think it’s better not to weigh myself.

For most of my teens and into my twenties, my weight was somewhere between 70 to 75 kg.² In 2008 I ran my first marathon in 4:22 and a few marathons later had got it down to 3:06 by 2013. All of those marathons were within the lower half of the range above.

As a fan of road cycling (watching, not doing) I was tuned into the discussions about weight, especially around the Team Sky riders Bradley Wiggins and Geraint Thomas, who had switched from the track to the road. To win the Tour de France, they had to lose weight. At the same time, I read articles showing for every X kg of weight lost, you could run Z seconds faster (often these articles skirted over the health risks). As my marathon progression began to stagnate, the answer seemed clear: dip under 70kg and I can run sub-3. I didn’t obsess over this, and I didn’t stop eating, but it was on my mind. In the build up to Seville 2015 I did go through a phase of very boring lunches and trying not to over-eat. I got down to around 68kg and ran 2:59’22”. So did it work? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Correlation is not causation, and there’s more to that PB than my weight alone. In the last two months before the race I was injured and had to cut my running right back. I cross-trained by doing interval sessions on a rowing machine, lifting weights, and plyos. Physically, I was stronger than I’d ever been (except for the injured hip), which, combined with 8 years of aerobic development and a huge dose of motivation (to run sub-3 before I turned 30), was probably more beneficial than my weight. In fact, I now think if I had been a little heavier, and spent that block eating better, I could have trained more effectively, might not have got injured, and could have run quicker.

Three years later, I ran Valencia Marathon 2018 at about 72kg. I didn’t get ill or injured and put together a solid block of very hard training, running my PB of 2:58’52”. More recently, I ran 2:59’33” in Manchester 2022 (at maybe 73kg) and 2:59’46” in Seville last year.

For that fourth sub-3, aged 39, I don’t know what my weight was (I suspect it was close to 75kg) as I had stopped measuring it. Why? Because it was always higher than I would have liked, yet I felt better. I was sleeping well, recovering nicely from big sessions, my iron levels were where they should be, I didn’t get ill all winter, and was able to train consistently at a better level than I’d managed in a very long time.

The point of all this is not to get too detailed on my training, or to compare my weight to yours or anyone else’s, but to demonstrate that my weight is not the single most important indicator of my running success. For each of those races I had different jobs, different daily routines, and trained differently. Isolating just one metric is unhelpful and why I don’t need to know my weight before the SDW100. If my clothes fit, I’m OK.

The above is what I know, but not always how I feel.

I read recently how the Gen Z focus on exercise as a social pursuit might finally break the late twentieth century Boomer-to-Millennial association of exercise with weight loss. Whether or not this assertion proves accurate, there is a useful point to be recognised: for too long³ sport has been framed primarily as a means to lose weight, using language relating to virtue, often in tandem with chat about food. Good, bad, should, shouldn’t, earned, reward, treat. If you’ve grown up surrounded by all this, as almost all of us have, it’s inevitable that it will get lodged in the brain. This is unhelpful, unhealthy bullshit…

…RUNNING IS THE REWARD.

As much as I try to not get sucked into applying value judgements to exercise and diet, it’s hard to avoid when planning an activity (long distance running) that involves the burning of a gazillion calories, and in which what you eat and when can make a difference to your result. There are useful principles to follow (such as carbs before, protein after) and resources to make the maths easy (online calculators and calorie estimates from my watch), so it’s not difficult to devise a fuelling strategy. But, when combined with a wish to run your best ever race, it can also get uncomfortably close to notions of optimising and perfection that could become a stressful preoccupation if not a full obsession. There’s a very fine line between nutrient timing and transactional eating. “I can eat this because I’ve got a long run tomorrow.”⁴

Any notions of dietary guilt are complicated by the fact that even though I prefer good, health-giving food, it’s hard to run 100 miles on salad. Such an unbalanced activity can require an unbalanced diet. Carbs and sugar are an ultrarunning necessity.

The rational part of me is happy I have a body capable of running long distances, but I’m not immune to vanity and comparison. I get annoyed when the quick lads at the track run topless in the summer, telling myself it’s because they’re being gauche. That’s true - running shirtless is un-chic - but I’m also jealous that I don’t have their six pack abs. What’s the answer to all this? I don’t know, but binning the scales seems a good place to start.

1. I prefer mass to weight, as it better refers to the matter that makes up a body. I think that’s a more important consideration than weight. But everyone uses weight to talk about bodies, so I’ll use weight in order to be understood.

2. I was reluctant to put numbers in this because I know if I was reading this I might find myself comparing myself to them. Please don’t do this. Read on and you’ll hopefully see how the numbers without context mean very little.

3. Is it a coincidence that jogging and aerobics became popular with the post-war generation at about the same time as the growth of ultra-processed foods?

4. Can we ban all calorie numbers on menus, please? And any weight talk at meals?

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This is volume one, issue twenty-nine of ¡Venga!, a running journal by Jonathan S. Bean.

Volume one: ‘326 days to 100 miles,’ documents Jonathan’s preparation for, and participation in the South Downs Way 100 mile race on 13 June 2026. The journal is published on Substack and as a paper newsletter sent by post.

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