I know I rant a little too much about the Biggest Loser. It is a TV show for goodness sake! But I often feel as if the show is irresponsible — and having these obese (they still are) people train for a marathon in just 60 days, a little over 8 weeks, seems irresponsible to me.

Confession here — though I do occasionally watch Biggest Loser, I did not last night. Last night I just flipped it on for a few minutes and did not see the actual marathon or the training, but I did read synopses.

For my first full marathon, I trained for about nine months — I trained for a half marathon the year before and decided at the finish line to do a full marathon the next year. Most marathon training schedules I’ve seen start at about 12 weeks. Many schedules are even longer, depending on the marathoner’s starting fitness level.

Though I entered only two full marathons, I never hit the wall in either race. In fact, if you train appropriately I don’t think hitting the wall is a requirement. From the highlights of this show, these people were struggling and looked as if they should not have been out there. It seems as if more than one person hit the wall.

Everyone finished and the first of the four had a great time at around 5:30!

But as I said at the beginning of this post — this is a TV show. The point is to put people in challenging situations and see how they respond. It really is no different from Survivor, Amazing Race or Real World. If they didn’t make it really hard for these people to be successful, there would be no show.
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If you are interested in training for your first marathon, send me an e-mail and I will help you find a training program that will work for you!

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