21 Miles? Yeah, baby!

How long does it take me to run 21 miles at my “training” pace? That would be five hours. Yes, I ran yesterday for five hours straight. Am I sore today? Yes. Do I feel good anyway and glad that I did it? Absolutely. I'd feel better if some generous soul would donate a bunch of money or if thousands of people would [nevermind. This has been edited to comply with commercial restrictions], but well, I do understand I can't have everything and I feel pretty lucky just to be able to do this at all.

So here's the funny thing about this marathon business: I'm able to “run” 21 miles, albeit very slowly, yet I don't really feel like I'm in any better shape than I was before I started this little adventure. How can that be? Well, I think it's because I've worked pretty hard to remain in pretty poor shape (more cookies, please!). Sadly, the simple truth remains that even if you're running 15-25 miles/week (and that's actually pretty low mileage for most marathoners, I believe), you can still gain weight if you take in more calories than you burn. When you're burning so many calories, you might think it would be hard to consume more than you burn, but it's actually surprisingly easy. ;-)

Posted September 12, 2005 07:12 AM | marathon