I hate to admit this, but one of my immediate thoughts after signing up for my first marathon was, I wonder how much weight I’m going to lose. It’s not like I signed up for my hometown race in Columbus, Ohio, to lose weight, but my internalized diet-culture brain did hold onto it as a nice little potential side benefit. Which is why I was so disheartened when, a few months into training, the opposite started happening.
It feels gross typing that out and even worse knowing that others are going to read this, but I soon learned I wasn’t the only one thrown. When I took to Google, I saw headline after headline that, in sum, read “yes, weight gain can sometimes be a byproduct of marathon training” and made me feel like utter shit about it. There were stories that advised how to train without “sabotaging your waistline” and others questioning why anyone would take up long-distance running if it didn’t lead to shedding weight (to be exact, “You can run as many marathons as you like, but you’ll still be fat,” per the ever-subtle Daily Mail). The prevailing narrative was that gaining weight during my training cycle was a betrayal of its entire purpose. A mistake I should immediately work to fix.
Increasingly, however, young women are outright rejecting this toxic framing. When I closed my broswer tabs and turned to TikTok and Instagram, I discovered a community of runners who not only accept their weight gain but also embrace and applaud it, knowing that it’s an essential part of preparing their bodies for the enormous endurance challenge of running 26.2 miles.
