[ HERO VIDEO — LOS ANGELES MARATHON ]
KI’S ARCHIVE · STORY
I Ran a Marathon Even Though I Hated Running
An old story from Ki’s Archive about how a challenge from a friend somehow turned into running 26.2 miles through Los Angeles.
Los Angeles
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[YEAR]
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8
min read
This one’s older than everything else in here.
I wrote a version of it about five years ago, back when I still had a Wix website and a lot less idea of what I was doing. The story hasn’t changed. I’ve just cleaned it up.
Running has always been part of my life. A marathon never was.
Three miles around my neighborhood used to be plenty. That was the workout. That was the whole plan.
Then a friend asked me a question I wasn’t really prepared for.
What If?
I’d just gotten back from a big trip through Europe, and landed — for a month — back at my parents’ house.
That’s when it hit me.
I’d spent months living in total chaos. New cities, new plans, moving fast. And now I wasn’t.
I felt like I was just going through the motions. A little bit like a zombie with a pulse.
So one day I laced up for what was supposed to be a normal 3-mile run.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I changed my mind and decided I was going for 10 instead.
I didn’t make it. I got to 9 and walked the rest of the way home.
But something about that run stuck with me.
It planted the question: what if I could run more than that. What if I could run a lot more than that.
What if I ran an actual marathon.
So I said, fine. I’m doing it.
The Training
The plan I gave myself was simple. Drive somewhere. Run two more miles than I ran the week before.
That was it. That was the whole training program.
I didn’t know, at the time, that most people spend six to eight months training for something like this.
I gave myself a fraction of that.
In hindsight, that was a little naive of me.
To be fair to myself, I wasn’t doing nothing. I had a rough weekly rhythm — a couple of days running, with the longer ones saved for Mondays, a couple of days in the pool, some lifting, a lot of stretching.
Still, my longest run before race day topped out at 18 miles. That was the most I’d ever done, unofficially, in one go.
If I’m being honest, the training was pretty unsuccessful.
But the race was already booked. So.
[ MARATHON PHOTO 01 — ACTUAL RACE ]
[Caption — describe the moment from the actual race]
The Run
Race morning, standing in the crowd at the start line, I felt genuinely excited.
Might have had something to do with imagining the attention that comes after finishing something like this. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
Once the gun went off, I dropped straight into a flow state. Time felt like it was moving at double speed.
I hit mile 15 in 7 minutes and 53 seconds — the fastest split of the whole race.
Breaking three and a half hours suddenly felt well within reach.
It felt, for a while, too good to be true.
It was.
Mile 18
Funny enough, everything went to hell around mile 20.
The pain was unlike anything I’d felt before. My quads and hamstrings gave me the middle finger. My knees were on fire. Every muscle I had was fatigued.
To top it off, my AirPods died.
With six miles still standing between me and the finish, every single step became about one thing: not cramping.
At one point I actually had to punch my own legs a few times just to get them moving again — like smacking an old TV to get the picture back.
I was checked out. Mentally, I was already at the finish line, working through the complimentary Clif bars.
Every water stop was a small crisis. I couldn’t say no to the electrolyte drinks.
What had started as a what if had somehow become an if only.
I crossed the finish line in 4 hours and 4 minutes.
[ MARATHON PHOTO 02 — ACTUAL RACE ]
[Caption — describe the moment from the actual race]
THE LOOK
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The Marathon Continues
That’s a good time. I know that. I was happy. Genuinely, insanely happy.
But the competitive part of me still refuses to accept that’s how it ended.
Looking back, I’ve landed on two things.
The first is that my race was basically the tortoise and the hare, and I was very obviously the hare.
I went out too fast. Too cocky. I can’t count how many times I told myself, mid-race, don’t get carried away — pace yourself — and then didn’t listen.
Lately, I’ve noticed my life running the same pattern. Too many projects, not enough pacing, eventually burning out and getting nowhere.
Ironically, running is usually the thing that slows me back down. Every finished run resets something.
It’s less of a roller coaster and more like a bow and arrow. Sometimes you have to pull all the way back before you can actually move forward.
The second thing: identity beats outcome.
I read Atomic Habits that summer, and one line from it stuck with me — if you can’t identify with who you want to become, it’s hard to reach the outcome you’re chasing.
It’s why so many people can’t quit smoking. They focus on not taking the next puff, instead of believing they’re already someone who doesn’t smoke.
Looking back at my training, I was completely outcome-focused. I wanted to finish a marathon. I wasn’t especially focused on becoming a runner.
That gap is exactly where all my shortcuts and excuses lived.
In the end, the actual number of miles mattered less than what training for them did to my discipline.
I finished four minutes outside a sub-four-hour marathon. That’s obnoxiously close.
So I’m running it again.
Not to break four this time. Just because, apparently, this is something I do now.
The marathon continues.
PRESENT DAY
Five Years Later
I wrote the first version of this almost five years ago, and reading it back now feels a little strange.
A lot has happened since then. I’ve traveled more than I expected to. Built an actual career around a camera. Started a company I probably wasn’t fully ready to start.
The part that stands out to me now isn’t the marathon itself.
It’s that I said yes to something before I had any real idea whether I could pull it off, and then just figured it out while it was happening.
I think I’ve been running some version of that same move ever since.
I don’t think a marathon changed my life. But looking back, I can see the pattern pretty clearly.
Say yes. Realize I’m probably a little in over my head. Figure it out along the way.
Apparently that’s just what I do.
Would I run another one?
Ask me again in five years.
— Ki
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