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I am writing this between physiotherapy sessions, nursing a lingering tendon injury from running the Toronto Marathon — my first full marathon — and wondering how exactly I got roped into a hobby best summarized as being bad at something that also makes you miserable. I won’t reveal my finishing time, but I can assure you nobody crossing the finish line near me looked like they were born in Kenya.
It was Mick Jagger who got me into running. This sounds comical, not least because of all the hobbies one might plausibly inherit from the Rolling Stones frontman — from the music to his signature struts, to cocaine addiction — the one I picked up was much worse: long-distance running. But there he was, in an interview, explaining how he manages to stay in such preposterous shape well into his 70s while continuing to prance across stadium stages like a possessed aerobics instructor. His secret, apparently, is running.
What began several years ago as a few three-mile jogs gradually snowballed and most recently culminated in the full 26.2 miles. But before I rush to LinkedIn to humblebrag about how the marathon taught me everything I know about sales, I will share my experiences here.
Last year I ran a half-marathon and vividly recall thinking upon crossing the finish line: That is enough. I had tested the limits of the human body, or at least my human body — which, ideally, I would still like to retain some mileage on. It came as some surprise then, that when my fiancée suggested we register for the full Toronto Marathon, I agreed. On second thought, why only do something halfway?
This, I have discovered, is the essence of running: making yourself miserable in pursuit of an arbitrary goal, suffering through it, feeling briefly proud, and then wondering whether you can do something even stupider next time. The often-cited “runner’s high” is a real phenomenon both during and after runs. Even if you are miserable during the run, you cannot quite escape the intoxicating feeling afterward that you might do it better next time.
When we signed up, we had months ahead of us. This should have been comforting, except that we live in Toronto, where the weather is often worse than shin splints. Summer runs are plagued by suffocating humidity, and winter runs bring ice, snow, and sub-zero temperatures. There is, mercifully, an indoor track at the nearby YMCA, where 15 laps are equivalent to one mile. So a modest 10-mile run requires circling the same track 150 times, an experience somewhere between exercise and psychological warfare.
The prevailing professional wisdom — or at least the wisdom of the sort of people who treat muscle pain by covering themselves in KT tape so they can keep running — is that marathon training should focus on total weekly mileage rather than attempting to run a full marathon before race day. You gradually build up to roughly 37 miles per week, with one “long run” serving as the weekly centerpiece of your training.
Beleaguered by uncooperative weather and lacking the willpower of a Navy SEAL to wake up at 5 AM to run before work, we topped out at around 20 miles as our longest training run. Come race day, this meant there were only another six miles or so our bodies needed to figure out how to cover. What could possibly go wrong?
The answer is — after the first 12 miles, which all felt great — my left knee. Then my right hip. Then my left foot. Then the right knee. The curious thing about marathon pain is that it does not arrive as a single predicament but as a sort of throbbing Lazy Susan, rotating through your body.
Much of distance running is, as they say, mental. You can run a lot farther than you think, even when you begin to feel the debilitating pangs of exhaustion weighing you down. Eventually, these pains begin to cancel each other out. After two hours, you need to go to the bathroom so badly that the musculoskeletal system becomes a secondary concern.
One of the consolations of running a marathon is people-watching. There are runners of every conceivable stripe and temperament. We saw one man running in a brown corduroy suit, presumably because dark gray wool would have been too formal for a 26.2-mile run. Another woman ran in a literal corset, which was not actually part of Alo’s latest collection. There was also someone dressed as Spider-Man, other couples like us in matching outfits, and, adding insult to injury, someone breezing by in flip-flops.
The spectators provide their own entertainment. Some hold encouraging signs; others shout the name printed on your bib, creating the fleeting delusion that you are some celebrated athlete rather than an amateur runner panting through mile 14. One of the better signs read, “ChatGPT can’t help you here.” Another offered, “Pain is French for bread.” A more cynical placard suggested, “Therapy was also an option.” Seeing friends or family along the course, there to support you, is also a welcome jolt of energy.
But the marathon photographers are the most diabolical. They possess the annoying and faintly evil instinct to position themselves at the midpoint of upward hills, the perfect vantage point from which to capture you at your most demoralized and downtrodden.
Then there is the food.
Your body needs fuel to run, and to run a marathon it needs a great deal of fuel. During the race itself, you fuel yourself with little packets of goo — sugary syrup you slurp down every three or four miles while running and trying not to vomit. The packaging has the sterile, futuristic look of astronaut food. And just like astronauts, we marathon runners will waste no opportunity to tell you we have run a marathon. I can write that now.
Training for a marathon is like taking on a part-time job, except instead of being paid a wage, you get blisters, sore legs, heaps of laundry, and piles of worn-out, expensive running shoes you need to replace. You can say goodbye to your indulgent social life as entire Sundays disappear into five-hour runs because the training plan says you need to cover 20 miles, and unless you’re a top-tier runner, this is no brisk feat. On one occasion, we left for a run in the morning, and a woman stopped us later that afternoon to ask if we had been running all day because she recognized us from hours earlier. Sadly, yes.
But completing the distance is, annoyingly enough, an incredibly rewarding feeling. It is the reason we undertake difficult things in the first place; they become meaningful precisely by being difficult. In his famous moonshot address, President John F. Kennedy said that “we choose to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Running marathons falls under “the other things.”
As we neared the final few miles, mustering what little energy we had left to run through the finish line, I began to understand why people keep doing this ridiculous thing — and why the marathon persists as the metaphor of choice for long and laborious undertakings like life itself. And now that it is finished, the only thing I can think about (aside from drafting that cringey LinkedIn post) is getting over this tendon injury so I can get back out there for another run.
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Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.