Most of us show up to a marathon already quietly terrified. The training’s done, the carbs are loaded, and somewhere around mile 18 we’ll probably have a small existential crisis. That’s just how it goes.
Jake Bale looked at that whole setup and thought: what if we made it harder?
Bale, who goes by @thelungespecialist on Instagram — a username that raises questions even before you know what he did — showed up to the Surf City Marathon with a plan to lunge the entire 26.2 miles.
Not run it. Not jog it. Lunge it — drop one knee toward the ground, stand back up, repeat immediately on the other leg, and keep doing that until either the finish line appeared or his body staged a full revolt.
His body staged a full revolt.
Two Miles of Lunges Is Already an Absurd Amount of Lunges
Around the two-mile mark, Bale’s quadriceps gave out. He had to stop. “This is one of the toughest things I’ve ever tried,” he said afterward.
Coming from someone whose entire identity is built around lunging, that carries some weight.
Here’s what two miles of walking lunges actually looks like in numbers: somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 individual reps, depending on stride length. Each one requires the quads, glutes, and hamstrings to fire under load, lower the body toward the pavement, then drive it back up before the other leg drops again. There is no coasting, no float phase, no sneaky moment of recovery tucked between steps. Just thousands of reps of relentless, grinding muscular work.
For context: most gym-goers start bargaining with themselves around rep 50. Bale performed hundreds before stopping. That he made it two miles is remarkable. That he thought he’d make 26.2 is a fascinating study in human optimism.
What Actually Happens to the Body
Running a marathon is hard. Lunging one belongs to a different category of suffering entirely, and the physiology isn’t subtle about why.
When you run, momentum helps carry you forward between footstrikes. Muscles fire, recover briefly, fire again — there’s a rhythm to it that the body can, with enough training, sustain for hours. Lunges don’t work that way.
The lowering phase of each rep — what exercise scientists call the eccentric phase — causes consistent muscle damage.
It’s the same mechanism behind DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness) that makes your legs feel like concrete the day after a heavy squat session. Multiply that across a few thousand reps with no recovery, and the damage accumulates faster than the body can handle.
Lunging also burns far more energy than running the same distance. Bale’s muscles were demanding enormous amounts of oxygen and fuel while simultaneously accumulating lactate — essentially, his cardiovascular system was being asked to do the work of a sprint effort sustained across miles. Even for a trained athlete, that’s a losing equation eventually.
Then there are the joints. Knees, hips, and ankles absorbing deep, repeated loading with every single rep. Two miles of that is already significant stress. Twenty-six would be… a lot to ask.
The Setting, For What It’s Worth
The Surf City Marathon runs along the coast of Huntington Beach, California each year. Flat course, ocean views, tens of thousands of runners. It’s the kind of race where people chase PRs and quietly dread hitting the wall somewhere in the back half.
Into this scene stepped one man, lunging.
While other participants ran past him, Bale moved forward one rep at a time through the early miles. One can only imagine the looks he was getting — the double-takes, the confused spectators, the fellow runners doing mental math on what exactly they were witnessing.
He never made it out of the early stretch. But honestly, very few people ever would.
What Runners Should Actually Take From This
Bale’s attempt wasn’t a preparation problem or a mental weakness. He ran into a genuine physiological wall — the kind that exists regardless of how fit you are or how badly you want to push through it.
For marathon runners, there’s something worth paying attention to here. The muscles lunges hammer — the quads and glutes — are exactly the muscles that fall apart in the final miles of a marathon. That burning in your thighs at mile 22, the one that makes the downhills feel worse than the uphills? That’s a tame version of what Bale felt at mile two. It’s also a big part of why running on sore legs in training isn’t always a bad thing — the body adapts to what it’s exposed to.
Which is actually an argument for incorporating lunge work into your marathon strength training, sensibly and progressively. Not thousands of reps at a time. But building strength in those muscles pays off when the race gets long and heavy. If you’re not sure where to start, a proper strength training routine for runners covers exactly what you need.
Bale’s attempt is also a useful reminder that the marathon distance is its own kind of honest. It doesn’t care about your intentions. It finds the weakness, whatever it is, and makes you confront it — whether you’re running, walking, or, as it turns out, lunging.
