I consider myself a person who enjoys giving out new challenges and seeking out new adventures for myself as time goes along.

While I have set my sights on traveling as the newest adventures I want to accomplish in the coming years, there is something else much more rigorous that I want to challenge myself to accomplish one day. That is, I want to go the whole 26.2 miles, and run a marathon someday.

Obviously, this seems like such a difficult thing to accomplish on paper because I do not have any prior experience running races outside of a few 5k races a year. One of the main reasons behind why I want to run a marathon one day is for the big challenge I would give to myself.

Additonally, I would love to run a marathon as a way to support the kids that I dance for in The University of Iowa's annual Dance Marathon. There are a few students involved with the organization who travel out to Chicago every October and run the Chicago Marathon for all of the young kids battling cancer at the UI Stead Family Children's Hospital. But if you look at the circumstances of my life, you would realize that it seems very impossible for me to put up for such a grueling task.

First off, while I look skim, the facts are that I am not at a healthy BMI level, which puts me far out of shape to run a marathon. I stand at 6 feet, and weigh around 240 pounds. A lot of my extra weight largely contributes to my football playing days as an offensive lineman in high school, along with a bunch of stress eating that has occurred since my college career started in fall of 2016.

Even though I do try to work out whenever I can, I just cannot seem to lose weight even though I have looked much thinner than I have 18 months ago. And my heavyweight does reflect on my overall performance in conditioning. I was one of the slowest players on my football team, but I had the endurance to keep going throughout practice because I had trained my body multiple times a week to get into shape to play football.

There is a motivational factor that also comes into play in my beliefs that I will never be able to run a marathon. While playing high school football, I wanted my team to have success on the field, and became committed on improving as a player. And I worked to improve my eating habits so my body would not negate all of the big gains I had made in the weight room. Back then, I had all of the motivation in the world to train my body to become more physically active because I wanted to chase after wins and championships.

Nowadays, I do not feel motivated to go to the gym because I don't feel there are any rewards to be chased after because I no longer play competitive sports outside of intramurals. My performance on treadmills is subpar all due to my lack of motivation to take my conditioning seriously. Just doing a simple 5k or 2 miles on the treadmill is something of great difficulty for me due to my heavy body weight.

One may think that maybe once I am out of college, I will have more time to go to the gym to get my body in shape. Well, that might not be true either. What I really want to do most in life is to travel, but I just have never had the money to make ends meet with that. If this trend continues where I don't get the vacations I have been dying to take the most in life, I will need to make a complete overhaul with my life, and do whatever I would need to in order to make my travel dreams possible. This would happen by cutting down personal spending on so many things.

One of those things I would not spend any of my money on when I am out of college would be memberships to a gym. My biggest goals in life are to find a way to travel, not to get physically healthier. And I am determined to do whatever in order for my biggest ambitions to happen. Add on my plan of spending absolutely nothing on gym memberships, personal trainers or anything related to improving my health and wellness in my mid-20's, this will make it only more difficult to get into shape to run a marathon.

Additionally, if I were to have any motivation to train and condition for a marathon, I would not know how to train properly for such a thing. I have no idea what foods I would need to eat in order to physically survive for a marathon. On top of that, I would have no idea how often I would need to train and how long I should run to get into marathon shape. Even if I were to figure out how to train properly for a marathon, it would be such a tough mental block for me as well.

Adjusting to the mental challenges associated with training for, and running a marathon, such as the physical pains and fatigue that comes with it all. Yes, I did get banged up a little bit in football, and definitely felt those sores after games and practices. But the physical pains of running a marathon have to be much different then what I experienced in football.

Plus, you get breaks between possessions in football, and if you are in a marathon, there is no such thing as the other side of the ball goes out onto the field and you get to chill for a few minutes. You have to keep going all the way to do this! And the overall mentality of running a marathon is something I'm not sure if I could handle or not.

I do not feel optimistic that I will run a marathon one day because the challenges seem too extreme. But if somehow, all of this can come together, I would be ready to run the full 26.2 miles.

Don't even know how to get started. There is a motivational factor as to why I I had all of the motivation for such rigorous physical activity back in