6 Things I Did Last Weekend That Took Longer Than Someone Running 26.2 Miles

1. Stayed in bed after my alarm went off.
Hey, come on. I work hard all week. And I don’t have 41 teammates waiting for me and the whole world watching. I can turn the alarm off and snooze for an extra 1 hour, 59 minutes and 40 seconds if I need to. Actually, two and a half hours.

2. Procrastinated emptying the dishwasher.
What do I look like, some sort of super athlete who has spent their entire life training for this moment to make history? Seriously, it can wait. There are plenty of clean coffee mugs to use while I get up the motivation to put the dishes away 1 hour, 59 minutes and 40 seconds from now. Or so.

3. Made dinner from a recipe that was only supposed to take 45 minutes.
I don’t know who writes these recipes, and who they think they’re bullshitting with this “Prep time: 20 minutes/Cook time: 25 minutes” stuff. Do they have a sous chef at home to help them chop all these vegetables? It takes me 10 minutes just to peel the garlic. I was led to believe that this was going to be a pretty quick and easy weeknight meal, but it turns out that in the time it takes me to double the recipe, prep, cook everything, forget to cook the rice until way late, and tell everyone “it’ll just be a few more minutes, have some more chips and salsa” four to six times, a superhuman can apparently run a marathon.

4. Cleaned part of my garage.
OK, so I’ve been saying I’m going to get around to this all summer, and I finally got it cleaned up, partially. Look, it’s a big job. Not exactly something that can be accomplished in a single Saturday morning. I mean, give me 41 guys and a pace truck and yeah, this place would be spotless, but all by myself? One hour, 59 minutes and 40 seconds is barely enough to figure out where all these tools go. At least I swept the floor, where it’s visible.

5. Watched the new Brad Pitt space movie.
Ad Astra is two hours and four minutes. Add in the previews, and it takes longer for me to get through that than it took Brigid Kosgei to run the Chicago Marathon. Pretty good movie, though.

6. Read through Twitter and wondered if I should formulate an opinion about Eliud Kipchoge’s marathon besides “HOLY SHIT, THAT’S AMAZING.”
I mean, there were a lot of tweets.

—Brendan