Most runners spend months training and obsessing over fitness so they can successfully complete an endurance race. I’ve got a completely different system these days: I run endurance races to get back into shape.

I realize this is fucked up, especially for a near 60-year-old. Most people train first and race second. They follow plans, monitor nutrition, sleep, prioritize recovery, and arrive at the start line lean, rested, and prepared. I’m not most people as you know, although I vaguely remember being that guy once upon a time. Now, I spend my days convincing myself I’m still an endurance athlete, happily carrying around fifteen extra pounds, working long hours, traveling, making questionable social decisions, and only running and training when I can. I then register for something sufficiently painful to force a lifestyle correction. The endurance race isn’t the reward for training. The endurance race is the training.

Enter the Toronto Marathon.

The week leading up to the marathon was a masterclass in how not to prepare for a run. I was at a conference in Yellowknife where I consumed enough restaurant meals, hotel breakfasts, and pints of beer to make my Garmin wonder if it was attached to someone else’s wrist. By the time I got home exhausted on my redeye flight three days before the run, I was carrying an extra layer of conference insulation and feeling increasingly hostile toward everything and everyone in my life. My training had been non-existent for a month, my confidence was shot, and rather than accept responsibility and suck it up like a mature adult, I decided the logical solution was to quit. So I cancelled my flight to Toronto less than an hour before leaving for the airport, as if teaching myself some kind of valuable life lesson.

The lesson, as it turned out, was that I’d spend the rest of that same day wandering around the house feeling sorry for myself and making everyone within a fifty-foot radius miserable. I even got tired of listening to me. At some point during my pity parade, I texted my buddy Jeff in Toronto, who was planning to meet me for beers after the race. After enduring several minutes of my text-whining, he offered to pick up my race kit and leave it at my hotel. Whether this was the ultimate act of friendship or a desperate attempt to save me from my self-loathing, I’ll never know. I rebooked my flight and headed to Toronto and when I arrived at the hotel that evening, my bib was waiting at the front desk. The universe had spoken. No more excuses, fat boy.

The next morning after a few hours of sleep, I stood at the start line carrying extra weight and but a ton of experience. This wasn’t my first marathon. Or my tenth. Or even my thirtieth. I knew the routine. The nervous energy. The endless bathroom visits. The last-minute gear adjustments. The quiet panic hidden behind the forced smiles and selfies. As I looked around, I could see the apprehension on the faces of many runners. The internal negotiations about whether they were truly ready. Oddly, I felt none of it. It felt strangely normal, familiar, manageable even. And sometimes, when you’re a badger, manageable is all you’ve got.

The race itself wasn’t pretty. There were no breakthrough moments. No personal bests, no inspirational soundtrack playing in the background. Just an aging badger grinding away the kilometres, slowly converting an eternity of toxic shit into forward progress. I just kept moving one step at a time, one kilometre after the next. Eventually I crossed the finish line after 4 hours and 15 minutes, collected a medal roughly the size of a hubcap, and limped away with a few less toenails and a good story. This was not a marathon after all, but rather a very long, expensive, and poorly conceived training run.

I now realize and accept that the older I get, the less I can rely on fitness and the more I have to lean on experience and determination to carry me through. Fortunately, after decades of making questionable decisions and enduring the consequences, I’ve accumulated plenty of both, which is good because I have an ultramarathon in two weeks that I’m equally unprepared for. Good grief.