The Relentlessness of Marathon Training

I know you’re sick of hearing about it, I’m sorry.

The primary thing you learn about training for a marathon is that training for a marathon makes you even more of an insufferable bore than you were in the first place.

Rudy Giuliani, before he morphed into the dripping-hair-dye lunatic monstrosity that he has become, was famously mocked by then-about-to-fail-Presidential-candidate Joe Biden, who said, “there’s only three things he needs to make a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.” That is what it is like training for a marathon. Every conversation you have, with anyone, is basically a noun, a verb and your marathon training. It is the first thing on your mind at any given moment. Everything else in the world is just a background subplot. It’s all I can talk about.

I apologize: It is now your turn to have all this spoken into the side of your head.

I had never planned on running a marathon. I started running 13 years ago, when my wife became pregnant with the person who will become a teenager next month. I was still a smoker back then, and I thought I’d try to replace a terrible habit with a healthy one. According to my Runkeeper app, I’ve run 16,314 miles since — I’m 8,600 away from running a lap around the earth — and when I moved to Georgia in 2013, I tried my…