Mother of God. What a specimen. For those that might not know: I just completed my first ever half marathon in Madison over the weekend. And I’ve been walking around like this all week like I walked on the moon or something:
Well this story brought me back down to earth REAL quick. This grandpa completed a sub 3:30 marathon while sucking down Newports the entire race. One dart after another, one mile after another. An 8 minute mile with the lung capacity of a 6-year old. Unreal. Here I am stopping for water and shoving energy gels in my gob every two miles and this dude is running laps around me smelling like a Wisconsin tavern in 1992. All you can do is tip your cap.
Side note: I’m going to give the full marathon a go in 2023. I was pleasantly surprised at how much energy I still had at the end of the half marathon on Sunday. Maybe it was the cold weather numbing my entire body, maybe I was in fight-or-flight mode, maybe it was the street level Percocet I bought from the guy sleeping outside of a bank downtown. But I probably had about 2-3 more miles left in me if I would have pushed it. So that gets me to 16-ish miles. What’s 10 more on top of that! No way that will end poorly for me, right?
Future Narrator: It did.
PS: Clip relevancy rating to the chain smoking grandpa: 7.1/10:
Mandelbaum! Mandelbaum! Mandelbaum!
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