Shall post on arrival. PM me with some visual clues as to how I can recongnize you.

Room service is a trick rarely a treat
So you go for a bite that can't be beat
but how many patty melts can one man eat
when he's eating out on the road

A cat eats a fish
a dog eats a bone
out on the road a man eats alone
time to reflect and to atone
for his sins out on the road

I has arrived.

I am home safe and sound missing one chair. BK is the guy you can barely hear speaking but should put in the effort. He's full of good material.

Current status - being smashed over the head by the deck.

Read his blog.

First world poker problem of the day: wanting to go home, but candidates for worst player ever continually funneling into the game.

I like it.

Miserable day here, ice covering everything. 4 wheel drive is useless.

Sounds like a great day to build a fire and sit next to it with some wine. To me anyway.

Saturday I went golfing then drove up to big bear. After driving to the resort on Sunday to see how terrible the snow was, I drove back to la to stare off into the ocean.

CA winters are mysterious bitch.

"winters" you mean.

so i ran my mouth off this morning over coffee and gchat and accidentally claimed I could run a 4 hour marathon "for sure if a large wager was involved". The woman offered to bet me $500, which made me laugh when I told her she was off by about 2 orders of magnitude. so we settled on a charity endeavor like my swimming of a marathon.

does anybody with any running experience have anything to say? I am short and very heavy, but capable of getting down to about 5'7" 160 no problem. I have never run seriously, hate it with a passion, have horrible conformation (toes point out, bad knees bad hips), but incredibl endurance and slow twitch muscles.

Apparently 75% of females who run marathons cannot crack 4 hours. This strikes me as absurd (it's like 9:33 miles). Can I do this? Should I do this? I get 13 months to train and bet I can raise close to 10k for charity.

You'll be fine if you train. Halhigdon.com

I ran a half in 2 hours and one minute. It's very doable to do a full under 4.

I didn't do any interval training and all I did to train was pack on the miles.

Im a towering 5'3". Your strides are probably longer than mine. 13 months is MORE than enough.

I'd be concerned about injury. Runners tend to always be injured, and starting with great cardio + poor mechanics seems like a wonderful way to wind up visiting surf doc. My advice would be to build miles/hours slowly and do so with the help of someone experienced with older athletes. Gutting your way through injuries in endurance sports leads to months of breaks -- think about how much knowledge/experience Jesse had swimming and yet he still ran into over-use injuries ramping up training. Running is much worse.

My guess is that someone with a huge cardio base who is stubborn as a mule does fine at this, as long as his body holds up. Thus, not breaking it is probably the thing that defines success/failure.

A full marathon is 26.2 miles. Running 26 consecutive 10-minute miles would take 4 hours 20 minutes.

Back when I ran, a 10 minute/mile pace was my normal long distance slow jog. I did a couple of half marathons, neither in under 2 hours, and when I was done I couldn't imagine starting over and running another 13 miles.

Getting under 4 hours would be very difficult. My friend is in great shape and plays a lot of sports etc. He has done 2 full marathons and gotten around 4:30 on both after training. 2 years ago we both did a half marathon and he finished in 1:52. (I finished in 2:40 fwiw but am 100 lbs overweight.)

My mother did a full about 10 years ago. Her first half split was 2:30 but the 2nd half took her 4 hours despite a 6 month training program she did.

The point is it seems like a full is substantially tougher than 2 halves. I think it would be possible but I think you'd have to start working on it now, stick to a good training schedule and run good with the injuries.

Define "bad" please. I've had my share of knee and hip problems due to playing lots of innings as a catcher, a freak drunken wrestling accident which dislocated and tore up my left knee something awful, moguls, years of sciatica no thanks to golf, a totally siezed left glute medius no thanks to golf and wearing a tool belt, and other extracurricular activities. The number one thing that I ever did to strengthen my muscles in those areas, stabilize my joints, and improve the mobility of those joints, was squatting on a program called "Starting Strength," which I highly recommend to anyone with bad knees and or hips. The exception to this is if you have arthritis and or cartilage problems, but since you're considering such a thing I'm guessing you don't.

"but I heard squatting is bad for your knees."

Only if you do it wrong. Get "Starting Strength" the book, which is the "Small Stakes Holdem." of weight lifting, by Mark Rippetoe.

"but I don't wanna get huge."

Then don't eat at a caloric surplus. Novice gains are easy to come by because of the response by the central nervous system. Basically, your muscles are dumb. They learn how to lift more weight by lifting weight. You don't have to gain muscle mass to get strong.

"listen to my muscle memory"

I'm not a runner, never liked the high impact nature of the sport, but if I were you, I'd put off the running for a month while I strengthened, stabilized, and mobilized my joints. That way, when you hit the pavement, you'll be less likely to injure yourself due to bad knees and hips because the muscles that hold those joints together will be strong.

my 2c

A guy named Tyler Pennel won the 2014 Twin Cities Marathon. It was his first try at running that distance. This article might be of interest to Jesse.

Jesse if you want more motivation I'll bet the dont with a reasonable time limit for you to train

I think injury will fail me by itself like 30% especially if I start running much before losing 20 pounds.

I'm looking for some sort of combo action and charity donations. The stated time frame so far is 13 months (LA marathon is in March) with unlimited attempts. I'll keep you posted.

Nothing in stone yet obviously

Nowhere near as bad as you. Just soreness from time to time and pain in the knees when hiking downhill

I mean. That's all super basic from first principles stuff. I was a competitive swimmer who has likely botched more tapers than most humans have attempted.