AEW star Darby Allin thinks he can ‘just wing’ a marathon: No, he can’t

Skateboader/mountain climber/occasional AEW wrestler Darby Allin thinks he can “just wing” running the 2026 New York City Marathon, which he plans to attempt “fully blind.”

“I don’t even have running shoes yet,” Allin said, in an interview with “The Takedown on SI” podcast.

“I kind of want to just go into it fully blind,” Allin said. “Everyone’s like, You gotta know what you’re getting yourself into. I was like, I kinda wanna just wing it, and it sounds so fun.”

Not advised.

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I’ve completed three marathons, including the 2016 New York City Marathon, and I’ll be the first to tell you here – he won’t get past the 5K mark if he doesn’t do any training.

Allin said on the podcast that he thinks has a solid cardio foundation from wrestling, which, yes, he has the cardio to wrestle for 15, 20, 30 minutes, which ain’t nothin’ – but, reality check here: a marathon ain’t 15, 20 or 30 minutes.

Without training, he’s going to be lucky to run the first 5K, which starts with a mile-long, 4.5 percent climb over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, in 10 minutes per mile.

Pro tip: even experienced runners struggle with that opening segment, because the bridge incline can slow your pace close to a minute per mile from what you’d expect to run.

Come out too hot, and you’re killing yourself for the later stages – if you make it that far.

Ten minutes per mile for 26.2 miles gets you to about four and a half hours – no rest holds, rope breaks, walking through the crowd or up the ramp to dive on a waiting, arms-out-to-catch-you opponent.

Factor in that, again, even experienced runners lose seconds per mile as they make their way through a marathon, Allin isn’t going to average 10 minutes per for 26.2 miles.

He’s trained to being able to do 30 minutes of wrestling; his marathon experience is going to be five hours or more.

And that’s if doesn’t end up walking long stretches of the course, which, I mean, more power to him there, but that’s probably not the look that he wants.

I’ll suggest that he goes out sometime soon to try even a 5K run – that’s 3.1 miles – and see how he fares.

The buildup for a marathon, from my experience, doesn’t really start until you can do 10 miles.

Then you add two miles to your long run every other week until you can complete a 20-mile run.

Once you can survive a 20, the expectation is, 26.2 is only another 10K – a 10K is 6.2 miles.

The NYC Marathon is Nov. 1; I’m writing this on June 26.

Marathon training plans typically run 15 weeks, with a three-week taper.

That pretty much means starting … today.

Or just winging it, and utterly embarrassing yourself, and in the case of a guy representing something bigger – as a pro wrestler, there will be media attention on him, and the New York media can be brutal – embarrassing AEW.

Not like this guy hasn’t embarrassed himself and AEW repeatedly over the years.