Is Studying for the Bar Exam like Training for a Marathon?
By: NICOLE NGUYEN
Right around this time in 2012, as a 3L nearing the end of my law school career, I began to think a lot about two things: (1) the bar exam, and (2) running a marathon. This association is in large part due to the old adage, “Studying for the bar exam is like training for a marathon.” But is that really true? I set off to find out. I’ll be the first to admit that this was not my smartest idea ever, but — spoiler alert — I passed the Illinois bar exam and completed the marathon within my time goal and with the desire to run another, so it all worked out in the end. My findings on whether this analogy is apt: yes, and at the same time, a huge, resounding, no.
Of course, I didn’t actually decide to train for a marathon merely to determine whether this analogy has any relation to real life. Rather, these two big things in my life happened to coincide, making for a natural experiment. Here’s the scene: I registered for the 2012 Chicago Marathon (my first marathon) in February, with formal training beginning at the end of May and the actual marathon in October. I did the law student bar application 1L year (yep, I’m one of those people). BarBri started in late May for the July bar exam.
The basis of the analogy between studying for the bar exam and training for a marathon essentially lies in the practice-makes-perfect arena. That, and all the repetition. The slow build up from easy to difficult. The time and dedication involved. The incredibly, life-changingly, challenging final performance. And point for point, there are a lot of similarities.
But the differences are essential. For one, the running a marathon can be (and in my opinion, should be) fun. Runners can and should set different goals: a time goal and a non-time-related goal, like not stopping to walk or finishing with smiles on their faces. The process of training for and running a marathon can be a life-enriching experience, one that makes you healthier and happier and continues to do so as long as you keep up with it. By and large, studying for the bar exam does not have any of these benefits, and perhaps the association of these two events is misleading, bringing down the joys of training and running marathons to something that is met with a negative reaction.
I. The Similarities
A. Time and dedication
If you follow the traditional plans for bar exam studying and for marathon training, then this is probably the biggest similarity between the two. The BarBri courses provide you with a calendar of the entire study period with daily assignments, and I had a similar calendar for marathon training — so I just combined the calendars, putting in multiple choice practice questions and training runs in time-slots for each day. The strategy is typical: start small, and increase slowly, working your way up to the full event.
Dedication, like the calendars, goes hand-in-hand for both the bar exam and the marathon. For most people, if you don’t put in the work, you likely won’t get the results you want.
A small handful of talented folks can probably get away with not following the schedule — with doing a couple of practice tests two weeks before, or running a single 20-miler before the full marathon — and still successfully come out on the other side.
I found that skipping elements of the studying and training process had the greatest impact on my confidence, rather than my actual ability to succeed. Last summer in Chicago was much hotter than I was prepared for, and some days, running 7 miles in 90-degree-weather just wasn’t going to happen. But skipping that run just made me fearful of the next, longer run. What if that 9-miler was somehow the key to making it through the full marathon? What if I missed out on some important mental or physical breakthrough? So, too, with skipping some of my assigned essays or multiple choice questions. The key to success in either event is the cumulative preparation effort, and not a single exercise.
B. Repetition
Running is inherently repetitive — that much is obvious. But besides the physical repetition of your feet hitting the ground, there is value in running at certain paces repeatedly. At a certain point, you determine your marathon pace (akin to that ridiculous number of seconds that you are allotted for each multiple choice question), and repeating it essentially commits it to your muscle memory, allowing you to more efficiently dial in to that pace on race day. Repeat your test-taking pacing as well.
C. The Possibility of Burn Out
There is such a thing as studying too much as well as such a thing as running too much.
The majority of marathon training plans have a maximum long run of 20 miles — a full 6.2 miles short of the full marathon distance. There are a number of theories behind this distance, and most of them are fairly arbitrary, though one makes a great deal of sense: you don’t want to burn out, get injured, or waste your optimum performance on a training run. Twenty miles gets you most of the way there, allows you to get a fairly good idea of how your body feels at different points along the way, but isn’t so long that you need an extended recovery. (There are other theories that put you at a max of 16 miles, and the underlying logic is the same: don’t get burned out before the race.)
Single-day practice bar exam tests serve the same goal. The bar exam in most states is 2 days, which is significantly longer than most of us have ever tested. These days give you an opportunity to test your knowledge and acclimate your body to testing for that long, and hopefully leave you with enough energy and resolve to continue studying the next day. Test-day logistics were a big deal for me (likely carrying over from my concerns with race-day logistics), including fueling strategies (what breakfast would provide enough energy to last through the first half of the day, without snacking? lunch?) and timing strategies.
D. Waiting (Or, the Taper)
At this point, after the big practice test and the 20-mile run, the analogy begins to fall apart. The last two or so weeks of marathon training consist of tapering — reducing mileage to allow the body to rest and recover so that you are fresh on race day. Tapering strategies differ, some with reductions in both mileage and days of running and others with only reductions in overall mileage, but either way, this leaves runners deliberately finding things to distract themselves. At this point, running has become such an important and time-consuming part of your life that to suddenly find yourself with only 3 miles on a schedule just seems counterproductive and can cause all sorts of anxiety and restlessness. In reality, no amount of added miles during this time will help you get through the marathon. Rather, adding miles could leave you burned out and increase the risk of injury.
The last two weeks of bar studying certainly causes anxiety and stress, but the impulse is often to do more, rather than less — more multiple choice, more essays, more of everything. And if years of cramming for exams has taught us anything, it’s that it is certainly possible for additional study time to help. Not always, but sometimes.
I would liken the marathon taper to the waiting that comes after you finish the bar exam. There is nothing that you can do after the exam is over, so you just find ways to distract yourself from the anxiety of not knowing your results.
E. The Event Itself
Panic. Exhaustion. Forgetting essential things (ID badge or race bib; lunch or Gu; tissues or Body Glide). Things will undoubtedly go wrong: you’ll get an essay question on something that seems familiar, but that you don’t actually remember studying; race day weather will be in the 90s with no shade. The overwhelming sense that you’ll never get to the other side in one piece.
But in the marathon, you get to the finish line and there’s a sense of happiness and hope, as opposed to the sense of relief that you feel after the bar exam is over. That relief comes from the knowledge that if you were successful, you might not have to do it again.
II. The Differences
The bar exam-marathon analogy only extends so far, and the biggest differences lie in the attitude of those embarking on these endeavors. Bar examinees may be carried forth by a sense of duty, and at some points, a sense of dread. After three years of law school and tens of thousands of dollars in debt, it only seems right to study for and complete the bar exam. And if you fail, there are consequences, namely in the ability to be admitted to the bar and practice law — which is presumably the reason you went to law school in the first place. This is, no doubt, an immense weight on the shoulders of every bar examinee.
Prospective marathoners come at it from a different angle: by and large, they arrive at week 1 of training because they want to be there. Running a marathon may be bucket list item, to be completed and not necessarily repeated; a way to raise money for charity; a way to lose weight; or it may be part of a long-term running program. It is not an obstacle, the completion of which allows you to move on to the end goal — rather, it is the goal. Reaching the finish line accomplishes the task at hand and for most marathoners, there is nothing after the race depends upon whether you cross that line.
Training for the marathon and studying for the bar exam more or less worked out for me. Preparing for them both at the same time probably added all kinds of additional stress overall, and I can’t say that I’d do both at the same time again. Personally, I approached Day 1 of the bar exam a ball of nerves…just like every one else in the building. I was forced to trust that my studying had paid off; I didn’t want to talk to anyone, lest they shake my own (fragile) confidence. But stepping up to the starting line of the Chicago Marathon, I was elated. Energized. Smiling. As with the bar exam, I stood in my corral, and had to trust that my training was sufficient. However, at the same time, I knew that whether or not I crossed the finish line, I had already done something of which I could be proud.
