I don’t think I need to explain the various ways in which events both globally and personally historic conspired to fuck up my plans to hike the Continental Divide Trail in 2020. I’ll say only that although I had been preparing and looking forward to this hike for quite a while, by the time my planned start date had rolled around, I was into my second month of receiving emails from the CDT Conference actively discouraging people from thru-hiking until the whole pandemic thing had blown over. That left a rather large gap in how I was going to spend the months between then and when I would need to prepare to return to my seasonal job in Antarctica. I didn’t actually spend that long thinking about what I was going to do with all the time and energy I would otherwise have funnelled into hiking—after a solid ten minutes spent on my parents’ front stoop, pondering my options and watching the smoke from my cigarette curl in the sharp sunshine of late spring in the Deep South, I decided to train for a marathon. Maybe I ought to have considered it just a little bit longer.
I had run a couple of halfsies a few years back, and I figured that training for a full marathon would be similar enough that I wouldn’t really have to think that hard about how I was going to go about it. That was, well, dumb, and I can’t say it’s a process I would recommend to anyone, as it didn’t even earn me the pride of completing 26.2 miles of continuous running, but only an embarrassing mixture of pain, blood, and humiliation. But if what you’re looking for in this life is suffering rather than a sense of accomplishment, I can and will show you the way. What follows, then, is my guide on how to gain 15 pounds while training to run a marathon on your own, in 10 simple steps.
1) Completely half-ass any research you do into the training program you’re going to follow. The only criterion that truly matters is that you want to pay exactly nothing for it, but anything that will require you to do an extensive amount of reading or even watch a video longer than forty-or-so seconds is completely off the table. Basically, you’re going to want to find a 12-week program described as “popular” by the website that exists explicitly to sell it, then screen-grab an outline of the schedule. This document is now your bible, and it is a low-resolution jpeg of a spreadsheet half a page long, completely devoid of any explanations or details.
2) Despite being a long-time smoker who is already several pounds overweight, know that you are too advanced to start this program for marathon-beginners from the actual beginning. That is a thing a weenie might do, and you are not a weenie. While it is true that you spent several of the last few years completely out of practice, you have been running regularly for, like, almost a month now. You will start this program at week three or four, never mind the fact that your first long run will be double the longest distance you’ve managed in the past forty months. The pain that will scream violently through your legs and viscera during this workout is the pain of progress.
3) Abruptly quit smoking. While this will, in theory, make running easier in the long term, it will, in the short term, make your day to day life excruciating—which running excessively long distances apparently doesn’t do enough for you, already. And as you will experience an overwhelming need to find something to do with your hands and mouth now that they aren’t busy putting smoke into your body and actively killing you, it will also make you extremely prone to snacking—something else which running excessively long distances apparently doesn’t do enough for you, already.
4) Start a long-distance relationship over facetime, give it a week, and then move from your parents’ flat suburban neighborhood in the Deep South to your girlfriend’s picturesque home in the forest on top of a literal fucking mountain in the mid-Atlantic area. This will ensure that you will now have to plod down and then climb back up this literal fucking mountain every single time you go for a run, while sacrificing almost none of the heat or humidity you enjoyed in the South. Living at the summit is crucial, because at all costs, you need to avoid doing the hard part before you’ve already worn yourself out running downhill. Make sure the process of getting back to the place with the shower, couch, water, refrigerator, air conditioner and bed is as difficult and demoralizing as possible.
5) If you can, avoid running during the pleasant and calm coolness of the early morning. This time is best spent daydreaming about buying cigarettes, daydreaming about bumming cigarettes, daydreaming about holding cigarettes, daydreaming about lighting cigarettes, and daydreaming about smoking cigarettes. While drinking your heavily-creamed coffee and eating your breakfast oreos, you should occasionally look out of the window at the scenic surrounding mountains and think to yourself, “I should probably start my run before it gets too hot or it starts storming,” because those are the only two kinds of weather that happen on summer afternoons on the East Coast. Either it will be swelteringly, blisteringly, painfully hot, or you will find yourself in the middle of the kind of storm that is usually accompanied by pairs of animals housed inside a handmade boat. And if you can strategically dick around while the weather is actually bearable, you will be guaranteed to end up running in one of them.
6) By the time you are consistently running twenty or more miles per week, you will have become something less like a person and more like a ravenous, insatiable pit of hunger covered in sweat and hair. Especially the day following your weekly long run, you will not be able to stop yourself from eating pretty much any time you are awake. No matter how sensible it might seem, this is not the time to cook all of those healthy, low calorie, well-balanced, protein and nutrient rich meals you already know how to make. No, this is the time to learn new recipes for making double-battered chicken tenders and double-pepperoni pan pizza from scratch. In the unlikely event you do not eat everything in one sitting, don’t worry: the cold leftovers will go great with your heavily-creamed coffee and breakfast oreos.
7) If possible, select your birthday to be the special day you will run your solo marathon—but only if it falls in the middle of the most unendurable month the East Coast has to offer. This will help ensure that the weather will be maximally unsuited toward running, or any activity that involves being outside or alive. It will also mean that you will need to jump three and a half weeks ahead on your training schedule, since if you have been following all the steps in this guide faithfully, you won’t have thought any of this through ahead of time.
8) On the big day, pick a route you are completely unfamiliar with. The phone call you’ll get from your girlfriend about 10 minutes after she has dropped you off at the trailhead telling you that you’ve headed off in the wrong direction will help set the tone for the rest of the run. If you’re very lucky, the first 15 miles will be scenic and shaded, with well-packed trail underfoot. This is important, because fatigue will make the last stretch of any marathon difficult even under ideal circumstances, and you really want to time what will turn out to be 11.2 sand-covered miles of exposed, sun-baked, industrial hellscape so that you have to run through it during the hottest part of a day so humid it feels like you are trying to draw breath through clarified butter. When you notice that the body glide you applied earlier that day has actually melted off of your skin and pooled around your socks, you will somehow not immediately also notice that you are now so badly chafed that your leg is coated in blood. That realization will come later.
9) If you have a moment in which you find yourself standing next to a reeking railway line in the cruel unblinking sun with sweat pouring in little streamers from your completely-soaked-through clothes, the boiled gym-sock smell rolling off your body in waves so thick they’re almost visible, staring in horror at your bloody hand, because you only became aware of the bleeding leg situation while you were trying to apply more fucking body glide and now sweet moses, you’ve gotten blood all over yourself, and you think to yourself “holy shit, I think this might actually be the single most disgusting moment of my entire life,” then congratulations! You did it! This moment is what all those weeks of training were for! You’ll still have something over four miles left to go, but don’t worry: your muscles are by now so worn out by heat and dehydration that you’ll find yourself physically unable to run any further, and you will end up simply limping the rest of the way. It’ll still take you over an hour to drag your wrecked and wretched body across your arbitrarily designated finish-line, but at this point the “running” part of your marathon is effectively over.
10) It’s helpful, but not necessary, to time the realization that it’s going to take you significantly longer to finish than you’d planned in such a way that it occurs somewhere where it turns out you have no cell service, and you will thus be unable to call your girlfriend to let her know that despite the fact that your ETA has come and gone she will not need to start looking up the trail for your broken corpse, laying in the open in a pool of sweat, blood, and failure but still untouched by the local wildlife because it is too nasty even for the turkey vultures you’re pretty sure have been circling you for the past two miles.
If you can get ahold of her when you have a mile left to go, however, you should do so. She will come to meet you with a still-chilly gatorade and walk with you all the way to her car, over which she’ll have draped a banner wishing you a happy birthday. There’s a river there, which you can walk directly into. The water will be clean and clear and cold, and the current will be gentle; it will wash the salt from your clothes as it cools your fevered and raw skin and gently lifts your body away from the painful twin influences of gravity and your own bad decisions. You may only be in the river for ten minutes, but they will be ten of the most blissful minutes of your life.
There will be frosty cold sodas in the car, and a change of clothes; there will be doritos, and the air conditioner will be on full. You will stop for ice cream on the way home. You will order a large blackberry milkshake, and you will almost have finished it by the time you clear the parking lot. You will be 15 pounds heavier than when you began this process, but for a little while, you’ll still be able to tell yourself that this this weight is the result of your now grotesquely muscled legs, and for a few more weeks you can continue to ignore the fact that your pants have gotten noticeably more snug at the waistline.
You will sleep deeply this night, and for maybe the first time since your life and the world around it all went to shit, when you wake up the morning and start your day with a giant mug of heavily-creamed coffee and a fresh stack of oreos, your body will be so sore you will barely be able to walk as you look out over the scenic surrounding mountains, but you will nevertheless feel refreshed, reinvigorated, and grateful to be alive.
