At my doctoral orientation, we were told (repeatedly) that our time in graduate school was a marathon, not a sprint. I was not a runner; I could not fathom running a marathon. I had spectated marathons, cheering as people completed what to me was an awe-inspiring and insurmountable distance. From that vantage point, I understood the advice in mostly superficial terms—well-meaning faculty were telling us to pace ourselves, not take on too much too soon, and know that the distance would be long and we had plenty of time. Unlike a sprint, which entails giving your all for short bursts of energy, a marathon requires endurance and stamina, skills we would need to cultivate to survive and thrive in graduate school and beyond. This seemed an apt metaphor for navigating academia and teaching, and when I transitioned to being a faculty member, it was a phrase I repeated to students with whom I worked. About five years ago, I became a runner. I began volunteering for Students Run Philly Style, an organization that supports young people through distance running and mentorship. The organization pairs volunteer running leaders with school-based teams of middle and high school students. Despite not having run before, I joined as a volunteer running leader, building my own strength and endurance alongside our team of incredible 6th-8th grade students and completing multiple 10-miles runs and two half marathons.
This past fall, I ran my first marathon. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. One of my biggest takeaways, was that running a marathon is much more than the 26.2 miles on race day. The training was the realmarathon; the race was the reward. In this article, I share three reflections on that training, connecting my running journey to my work as a mathematics education scholar and mathematics teacher educator. It is my hope that these reflections support us as MTEs to better understand what it means for our work to be a marathon, not a sprint.
Ambitious Goals Are Met Through Smaller Improvements that Build
When I made the decision to train for the marathon, the longest distance I had run was a half-marathon. The mental leap from 13.1 to 26.2 miles was daunting; doing a half-marathon was a lot, but doing it twice? I struggled to see a path toward doubling my longest distance. My training plan included a weekly long run to build endurance and to train the body to withstand long distances. Each long run added one additional mile to the prior week’s distance. Instead of fixating on how much more I needed to be able to run before I could run the full 26.2 miles, I began to focus on these small increments. I rationalized that if I had run 13 miles one week, I could run 14 miles the next week. I started to see each week’s long run as doable because it was only a little farther than the week prior.
This kind of incremental improvement—modest changes that build and bridge to more ambitious outcomes—is one way to think about our work improving mathematics teaching and learning. Our field has long advocated for ambitious teaching that supports students to develop deep conceptual understanding of mathematical ideas in classrooms that support and affirm students’ mathematical and cultural identities. Yet while these ideas have permeated “pockets” of schools and classrooms (Arbaugh, 2024), they have not taken root at scale (Hiebert et al., 2005; Litke, 2020b). Thus, a persistent question has been how to best support teachers to shift practice toward these aims. Scholars have begun considering how we might think about more incremental approaches to improving mathematics teaching (Otten et al., 2025; Star, 2016). Such approaches reframe improvement not in terms of transformation, but as the accumulation of smaller, modest changes that accumulate over time. My own work has considered how a focus on more incremental changes can support teachers to teach in ways that improve students’ learning opportunities in algebra (Litke, 2020a) and to develop more affirming mathematics classrooms (Litke et al., 2025). Modest does not necessarily mean easy, but through the accumulation of smaller shifts, we may see our way toward transformative outcomes.
Hydrate and Fuel Yourself
In the first few months of training, at some point during each of my long runs, I struggled mentally and physically. Runners call this hitting a wall. One of the most important ways to avoid hitting a wall is through an intentional focus on hydration and fuel. To sustain long distances, the body needs sufficient fuel and nutrients; without them, the body depletes its stores and literally runs out of energy. I changed my fueling strategy, making sure to eat every 45 minutes regardless of how I was feeling and running with a hydration backpack. Fueling and hydrating proactively while running—before I started to feel depleted—sustained me and allowed me to complete long runs without hitting a wall.
As mathematics teacher educators, we would benefit from a similar emphasis on fueling and hydration. Our work is hard, in the present moment especially so. Consider two of AMTE’s long term goals around supporting MTEs to “engage with and take action on issues of social and racial justice,” and supporting the “high-quality preparation, recruitment, retention, and diversification of mathematics teachers across the variety of educational spaces” (AMTE, 2024). A recent issue of Mathematics Teacher Educator noted that we engage in this work in the context of a fundamentally and structurally inequitable system and affirmed a commitment “to do better, to broaden who is supported in learning mathematics, and to expand the notion of what is school mathematics” (Hallman-Thrasher et al., 2026, p. 69). Yet the current political climate positions this work and our commitments as radical and dangerous. Funding for this critical work is rapidly dwindling and those who publicly engage in these commitments have faced grant terminations and risk scrutiny and attack. In this context, we need to continue to proactively fuel and hydrate, to identify the communities and commitments that nourish and sustain us. As educators and scholars, we can choose to work on projects that energize and excite us. We can choose to work with colleagues that fill our proverbial cups, those with whom collaboration is not only generative, but joyful. We can choose to read, cite, and teach scholars whose work is under attack, whose ideas fuel our fire. This is how we avoid hitting the wall.
Moving From “I Have to do This” to “I Get to do This”
I approached marathon training with nervousness, but also excitement. I had visions of the outcome—the medal on race day—but not of the process it would take to get there. The reality of marathon training is that it is often a slog. It is waking up early to run enough miles, strength training and physical therapy, running in miserable weather, dealing with a slew of minor injuries and setbacks, and battling a lot of self-doubt. About halfway through my training, the grind began to wear me down. One cold and rainy Saturday morning, as we warmed up before dawn, I turned to another, more experienced running leader and said, “I woke up this morning and my first thought was I can’t believe we have to run 14 miles today.” She commiserated, but then asked, “What if instead you thought, ‘we get to run 14 miles today’?” The simple reframing changed my entire orientation toward training. I began to see training as a privilege; it was still hard work, but this perspective allowed me to begin to find joy in the challenge. I saw the work I was putting in and the small improvements that resulted. I started paying attention to how much I had done and not how much I had left to go. I looked forward to conversations with the students and other running leaders. I found beauty in our running routes. Training was still hard, but it started to be fun.
The needs in mathematics education are great and the work is challenging. As MTEs, we are tasked with a combination of generating knowledge that supports all students to be mathematically successful, translating research into usable knowledge for practitioners so that they are equipped to support students’ opportunities to learn, providing learning experiences for teachers that allow them to deepen their craft, supporting novice teachers to learn mathematics and how to teach mathematics, and more. This is a daunting set of tasks, and we are often in contexts where it feels impossible to do all we want to do, where the day-to-day work feels like a slog. When the article deadline is looming, when the pile of lesson plans needs to be graded, when the transcripts are waiting to be analyzed, how might shifting the internal narrative of “I have to” to “I get to” allow us to see the work differently and to reinvigorate our commitments? To find more joy?
Training for a marathon showed me that strength isn’t something you have, it is something you cultivate, it reinforced the importance of identifying what sustains you, and it highlighted the need to center joy in challenge. The medal came on race day, but the training was where the real work happened. Finishing a dissertation, submitting a grant application, completing a multi-year study, writing an article, delivering professional development, developing a new course—these are the reward. The dissertation is so much more than the document submitted to the committee, the tenure dossier more than the portfolio sent to the provost, and the published manuscript more than the 9,000 words published by a journal. The work is the marathon. On the day of the race, at around mile three, I spotted someone on the sidelines holding a sign that said, “Some day, you won’t be able to run a marathon. Today is not that day.” What a privilege to get to do this.
Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Teo Paoletti and Amanda Jansen for spearheading the nomination for this award and to Melissa Boston, Amber Candela, Zandra de Araujo, Eva Thanheiser, and Temple Walkowiak for supporting the nomination. Thank you to the early career scholars who have “run” alongside me on this journey, especially Cathery Yeh for being a thought partner as I conceptualized this article and always asking if I’m drinking water and Jonee Wilson, whose collaboration has been a major source of fuel. Thank you to Jen McEntee for being a forever coach and to Students Run Philly Style for the gift of running.
References
Arbaugh, F. (2024). Commentary: Personal transformations and the possibilities of incremental progress in mathematics teacher professional development. Education Sciences, 15(1), 30.
Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (2024). AMTE Long Term Goals for 2024–2028. https://amte.net/news/2019/02/amte-long-term-goals-2024-28
Hallman-Thrasher, A., Brown, R. E., & Candela, A. G. (2026). What Does It Mean to Be in a Community of Mathematics Teacher Educators? Mathematics Teacher Educator, 14(2), 68–71.
Hiebert, J., Stigler, J. W., Jacobs, J. K., Givvin, K. B., Garnier, H., Smith, M., Hollingsworth, H., Manaster, A., Wearne, D., & Gallimore, R. (2005). Mathematics teaching in the United States today (and tomorrow): Results from the TIMSS 1999 video study. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 27(2), 111–132.
Litke, E. (2020a). Instructional practice in algebra: Building from existing practices to inform an incremental improvement approach. Teaching and Teacher Education, 91, 103030.
Litke, E. (2020b). The nature and quality of algebra instruction: Using a content-focused observation tool as a lens for understanding and improving instructional practice. Cognition and Instruction, 38(1), 57–86.
Litke, E., Wilson, J., & Hill, H. C. (2025). Equity-focused, rubric-based coaching: An incremental improvement approach to supporting teachers to shift toward more equitable mathematics instruction. Education Sciences, 15(4), 444.
Otten, S., de Araujo, Z., & Candela, A. G. (2025). The Benefits of Modesty: Considering Incremental Professional Development for Mathematics Teachers. Education Sciences, 15(4), 473.
Star, J. R. (2016). Improve math teaching with incremental improvements. Phi Delta Kappan, 97(7), 58–62.