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Some people run marathons to PR, or to break a time goal. Kelly Roberts runs them to finish and have a good time doing it.
It wasn’t always like that for her. After spending a lot of time in race queues, she achieved a level in running that she never thought she could. But it genuinely sucked the joy out of the sport for her. “I was no longer having fun; I was too outcome goal-oriented,” she says. “I had slipped into disordered eating habits and my body image was suffering; I wasn’t taking care of myself.”
After she finished her last marathon in 2019, Roberts says she vowed, “I will never run a marathon again unless I get the help I need and I do it solely for myself to have fun.” She added: “I wanted to find the joy in movement and running again, and have it not just be a way to stay in a body size that wasn’t healthy for me.”
In 2020, with so many planned races canceled due to the pandemic, Roberts took the time to learn how to run without concentrating on the numbers: pace, weight, mileage. It worked. Now that races have resumed, she says, “I genuinely am in a place where I’m really happy running again on my terms, doing speed play and having fun, not chasing times.”
After living in New York City for nine years, Roberts said she wanted to experience the city’s marathon joyfully: Stopping and hanging out with friends, jumping in with others as they ran by, all day long. The goal, she says, was “just to be with my people.”
This year, Samsung asked Roberts to run her sixth hometown marathon wearing the Galaxy Watch5. Here’s what those 26.2 miles looked like through her smartwatch.
The First Half
Roberts’ marathon got off to a totally inauspicious start. It was awful. “My first half I just felt like dirt. Everything hurt in a way that it shouldn’t that early in a marathon,” she recalls. In the excitement of the day, she first forgot to start the workout tracker on her Samsung Galaxy Watch5, but because of its Auto Workout Tracking feature, it started automatically.
Beyond not feeling well physically, she wasn’t living up to her vision of a take-it-all-in run. “It took me a minute to get out of that, ‘I’m running a marathon’ mindset,” she says. For instance, she wishes she would’ve stopped more and started to walk earlier than she did. “I was on the Verrazzano Bridge [Editor’s note: the first two miles of the race], and I thought, ‘It’s too early to walk. Don’t walk. You can’t walk,’” Roberts recalls. “Looking back, I think: Why couldn’t I have taken a one-minute walk break if I really wanted it?” It was her community that finally broke the marathon mind-set: “Luckily, my friends were the ones who said, ‘No one cares. This is your day. Just be selfish.’”
It was for this reason, Roberts just wore her Samsung Galaxy Watch5 and let it record her race. If she had stayed in the marathon mindset, Roberts says she would have used the split function to record her pace for each mile, checking to see whether she was on track to reach whatever time and pace goal she would have set prior to stepping up to the starting line. But since Roberts approached this marathon as a celebration of running, her community, and finishing 26.2 miles, she did not consult the numbers. She let the Galaxy Watch5 record the data so she could enjoy everything about the day, and relive her run afterward.
Miles 14 to 26.2
“Something switched when we were on the Queensboro Bridge, and I just had the most fun I think I’ve ever had in a marathon or running even,” Roberts says. For the marathon’s latter half, Roberts never ran alone. “Slower runners are my people,” she says. Whereas Roberts started in wave three, once waves four and five started catching her, people started coming up and talking to her. She began chatting it up while running and walking intervals.
In addition, Roberts was running into friends. “I would just straight up stop for 10 minutes at a time,” she explains. “Then I would run a very strong 800 meters to two mile section, and then I would stop again. And I just felt great.” Her whole race wasn’t planned. There weren’t any intervals and there wasn’t any pace—the graph of the race shows this erratic pace. “Once I started getting totally in the moment and I made that conscious decision to enjoy myself, it was just the most fun,” she says.
And her Galaxy Watch5’s data reflected this in its up-and-down nature in her heart rate. Roberts was able to see that her heart rate averaged 150 beats per minute—exactly where it should be on a conversational paced run—during the race. “But there were so many times where I would be running slow and look down to see my heart rate was 174, which is max for me,” she says. The day of the marathon, temperatures were in the mid-70s and the dew point was 63 degrees F—which means that it was harder for sweat to evaporate and cool runners. This could have contributed to Roberts’ high heart rate at times. “It was nice to run a race like I did—walking a significant portion of it— and see that my heart rate was 150,” Roberts says. “It kind of validates the day we had and how gnarly it was out there.”
One tool Roberts was happy to have at her disposable on this hot and humid day is the sweat loss tracker. Estimated on body size, age, gender, heart rate, and ambient temperature, the Galaxy Watch5 helped Roberts keep an eye on her fluid needs. “Having that information in your arsenal to dial in your hydration has been a total game changer for training,” she says.
Roberts finished around 6:30 in the evening, and then went back out to help others finish. For the last six or seven years, Roberts cheers all the runners crossing the finish. “My biggest fear was that I wasn’t going to feel good enough to be able to go find my finishers who were back of the pack,” she says. Luckily, she felt great after her 26.2 miles and continued to cheer on runners until 9:30 p.m.—basically, as long as she could until she needed real food. One thing that didn’t need to recharge was her Samsung Galaxy Watch5. Its battery can last 24 hours with the GPS on, and 80 hours for general use.
Knowing how the day ended up—hot and humid but also fun—the data that the Samsung Galaxy Watch5 collected reflects Roberts’ marathon in terms of speed (a pace of 14:06), heart rate (an average of 150 beats per minute), and intensity (an easy, breezy, conversational run with lots of stops and starts). “It’s surreal to look at that day through the data,” she says, because it is so reflective of how she ran those 26.2 miles. “I’m really glad I gave myself permission to just run how I wanted. It was so much fun. It was everything I’d imagined it to be and more.”
Carey Rossi is the Senior News Editor for Prevention and Prevention.com. You can follow her @CareyRossi.
