Benny Blanco Says He Ran a Marathon With No Training After a 2:30 a.m. Bet

Most people who announce at 2:30 in the morning that they could run a marathon tomorrow wake up a few hours later and quietly let it go. Benny Blanco set an alarm for 5:30 a.m. and turned up at a start line. He has spent the last few days telling three million Instagram followers that he ran the thing on no training at all, to settle a bet his friends made with him in the bar, and most of that is accurate. The distance is not, and he gives it away himself: the medal at the end of the video reads Venice Beach 2026 Half Marathon, a race of 13.1 miles.

The 81-second clip opens in the bar, where the producer and songwriter makes his case to the camera under the on-screen line “POV: u decide to run a marathon at 2:30AM with no training.” He grumbles about how early road races start, and looks worse in every clip through the back half of the race. By the finish he has a medal in his hand and the words “bet won” over the shot. “i ran a marathon with zero training just to see if i could do it,” the caption reads, and by Tuesday the post had picked up more than 61,000 likes and 2,000 comments.

Blanco captions his own splits as he goes, which is how the distance gets away from him well before the medal turns up. One title card, early on, reads “12 miles left.” A few seconds later it is “11 miles left,” then “6 miles left,” then “3 miles left.” Nobody counts down from 12 in the opening miles of a 26.2-mile race.

The Venice Beach Half Marathon and 5K was started by Brennan and Michelle Lindner, a couple who live in Venice and run the events company behind it, and 2026 was only its second year. Organizers told the Santa Monica Daily Press they were expecting a field of more than 5,000 across all the distances, which is a healthy turnout for a race that age. It finishes under the Venice Sign on Windward Avenue, having taken in the boardwalk at Ocean Front Walk, Muscle Beach, the canals, and a stretch inland along Venice Boulevard and Abbot Kinney Boulevard. The first edition raised upwards of $10,000 for school booster clubs in Venice, Mar Vista and Marina del Rey.

That race went off at 7:10 a.m. on Sunday, May 17, with bib pickup from 6 a.m. Blanco posted the footage on Sept. 12, roughly four months after he collected the medal, which the video never mentions.

Covering 13.1 miles on no training is still a miserable way to spend a morning, which is most of why these videos get made in the first place. Beginner plans are long for a reason, and Marathon Handbook’s own start at 15 and 16 weeks. We have written before about what the body actually does to someone who skips all of that and starts anyway, and about getting through the distance underprepared when it is already too late to fix. Blanco is not the first to try it with a camera running, either. One man’s wife entered him on 24 hours’ notice after he told her he could handle 26.2 miles cold.

Mid-race he does go looking for a benchmark, asks what a quick marathon is, and gets Harry Styles, who ran 2:59:13 in Berlin in September 2025, one of the faster marks on our list of celebrity marathon times.

Registration for the 2027 Venice Beach Half Marathon opened on Sept. 1, and the race is set for May 16.