Happy Friday Slatsters. This is the time when we go off the record just for you, our Slate Plus friends and neighbors.

And this week was a ride. A defense secretary Pete Higsef went to Capitol Hill to demand an enhanced budget for the war in Iran.

We watched the world's richest man have a meltdown about a movie.

Elon Musk, freaking out about Christopher Nolan's latest epic, The Odyssey. And we are also seeing

oil prices jump dramatically once again after the Houthis took credit for attacks on tankers in the

Red Sea. But we're going to set all that aside today, because today is day when we go off the record kind of inside the demented minds of the people who make this show and how we think about the news and our world. And today I have Rob Gunther. We're here to talk about running. Hello, Rob.

Hello, Lizzie. Tell me, tell me about your running background and why we're

going to talk about running today. Yes, so we're going to talk about running because there's a couple of

different running inspired stories that have been in the news. We, you and I were both chatting on Slack as we

normally do, and we sort of came to these articles together and it sort of just clicked. Like, why don't we talk about this? I've been a runner since about 2007. You have a running background as well. Okay, how many marathons have you run? I've run, I believe, 16 or 17. That's psychotic. Yeah, yeah, it is. Like, what do you have left to do? Like, a marathon that is in your mind like, I want to go run the original marathon? Yeah, you know, I got into running because my dad and my aunt signed up to run a marathon. I was in zero running shape. I never ran. This is like the year after I graduated college. And I kind of said, yeah, I could do that too.

And everybody laughed at me.

And I did it sort of like, you know, out of spite. And it just propelled me into the next stage of my like life. I sort of have never stopped. Oh, my God. There was a guy. So I ran track in college. Not well, small division three school. but there was a guy on my track team who ran the Boston Marathon out of spite.

Hmm. Not well, small division three school, but there was a guy on my track team who ran the Boston

marathon out of spite with no preparation.

Boston's like a hard one.

I mean, he was on my track team, but have you done Boston?

I've done Boston.

I beat the bombs that year that the bombs went off by like 20 minutes.

It was a crazy, a crazy experience.

I finished running the race. And, you know, when you finish running, they corral you, this long, slow march. You're trying to, like, jostle past everybody to meet. My parents were with me. My wife, Joanna was there. And we were probably about like two or three blocks away from the finish line at that point when the bomb went off. And my mom immediately was like, that's a bomb. We got to get out of here.

And I'm just like, you know, probably being an annoying son, but I'm like, mom, that's not a bomb. You're embarrassing me. To me, it sounded like when you're in New York City and a giant truck flies down a side street and like goes over a bump and crashes down very hard. Yep. But as soon as like, you know, like wildfire it spread.

Obviously it was a bomb.

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