A Year of Marathons – The Weird Side of the Internet

A Year of Marathons – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

I’d love to run a marathon. See now, me writing this is like people coming up to me saying they want to write a book. Could they sit at a laptop every day for months trying to figure out how to tell a story in 70-80,000 words? Sure. I could run a marathon if I rand like three yards at a time, stopped for coffee and beef jerky, slept on the side of the road or at least caught a few naps – by that definition, I could run a marathon. And I’d live to. Soon as I’ve got a month with nothing better to do. And a good pillow that travels well.

But I cannot, under any stretch of imagination or exercise of hubris, imagine that I could do what 55-year-old Belgian runner Hilde Dosogne did. She ran a marathon. Then she woke up the next morning and ran another one. Then the next day, another one. At one hundred-and-fifty consecutive marathons, she beat the women’s record for that feat. But she kept on, until she was tied with the men’s record, resting after 366 consecutive marathons.

She paid the price, putting her body under tremendous strain, but aside from the swelling of the joints known as bursitis, the main toll was on her mental health, having to get up every morning knowing you were going to get up and run a marathon.

I really gotta give it up to Hilde Dosogne. Every day knowing you’re going to get up and do something that people spend months training to do once. I mean, does she have three-hundred and sixty-six oval “26.2” stickers for her bumper? Can she even see out of her back window? It would be funny as shit if she doesn’t have a single oval sticker. She may not even have a car. She may even have just been running to a good coffee shop and back every day.

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