I Impulsively signed up to run a Marathon

What have I done?

Earlier this week, I was on a phone call with one of my sisters who casually mentioned that she signed up for the Disneyrun Marathon. She is a solid runner, and she has completed half marathons before. In fact, she had meant to sign up for the Princess run (another half marathon), but since that registration was all booked up, she decided to do the full marathon instead – no big difference right? RIGHT???

For those of you who do not know her, my sister has a lot of talents. She is book smart, street smart, artistic and put-together. However, one of her most underrated and underestimated talents is her salesmanship. Throughout my life, she has convinced me to do things I wouldn’t have thought to do on my own such as:

• Become a vegetarian at age of 7 (good call)

• Tell my parents I have an imaginary friend named Chlamydia (very funny)

• Explore a law career to the point of taking the LSATS (very wrong)

• Buy electric bikes and rely on them as my primary mode of transportation (she had the electric part right, but it turns out it needed to be car, not bike)

And now

• Sign up for the Disney Marathon

To be fair, she didn’t tell me about it to get me to sign up. She just went on about how fun it would be, and she made it sound so do-able, I couldn’t help but get caught up in the hype. There were too many appealing factors including:

• Getting to travel somewhere warm during the winter

• Going to Disney

• Having a goal

• Working towards completing the goal (especially if there is a gamified app involved!)

• Being punishingly disciplined

• Being able to eat more without losing my figure (gotta stay fueled!)

• Doing all this with my sister and with Seth (oh yeah, I roped him into it too)

I am still happy about all of these things. But now that I have paid the fee and started training, all the difficult realities of the situation have hit me like:

• I hate running

• I have bad knees

• I really hate running

• I need to set aside long periods of time to train safely

• I need to find a time where the high school is not making use of their track (e.g. 5:30am)

• I loathe running

• I need to invest in some expensive gear to be able to train during the rainy/snowy/cold months

• I need to figure out running nutrition (apparently there is a whole world of energy gels and beans you should eat proactively while running so you don’t hit the wall with exhaustion)

• I despise running

• My smartwatch and my training app can’t agree on the distance I’ve run, so I’m not sure if I’m making good time or just jiggling around too much.

• I need run really long distances multiple times between now and January 9th instead of it being a one-off challenge

• I hate running

But it’s okay. I’ve accepted that I chose to sign up and seal my fate. Now it’s time to lean in and see what happens!

Have you ever impulsively signed up for something super hard and seen it through or courageously quit? Comment below or drop me a line to let me know!