STYLE REPORT: The Salt Lake City (Half) Marathon

About six months ago I wrote an essay about how I tried Strava and it freaked me out, I but I felt like a poser for doing so. I’m no elite athlete; maybe I’m just not the intended audience for it. If I actually trained for a race, would my feelings change? I was secretly curious, and I’d just watched the Chicago Marathon from the comfort of the sidelines and was feeling a bit inspired. It was these circumstances that caused my cousin Jane to spot my weakness from a mile away and pounce, convincing me to sign up for a half marathon with her.

So in November of last year I found myself Googling “best marathons in every state,” figuring we might as well make a trip out of it, filtered out all the states I’ve been to and all those without spring marathons, and landed on Salt Lake City, Utah. No way she would agree to a girls’ trip to Salt Lake City. But she did, and we were registered the next week.

I had six months to prepare, and though I tried to be humble about it, couldn’t stop talking about training for my half-marathon. Everyone was confused why in the world we were flying to Utah to run our race when I had never been to the state and had previously never run more than a mile without stopping. I obviously didn’t have a good answer, besides the fact that the arbitrariness was the point and throwing an absolute grenade into your comfort zone can be fun and necessary once in a while.

It got funnier and funnier as my training went on. I really liked referring to the Salt Lake City Half as if it were Boston. “Oh, no thank you, I have to train for Salt Lake City,” I’d say when offered a cigarette, cracking myself up.

And then, wouldn’t you know, as I was tapering off and preparing for my personal Boston, the Salt Lake City Half, the race was outshone by…. the actual Boston Marathon, the Monday before.

I didn’t know they were the same week! I’m not a real runner!

After I found out Boston was on Monday, I texted my friend that I was running the second-biggest marathon of the week. Still a good joke. I was then humbled:

And then, the day after my race, I was humbled AGAIN by the London Marathon, which I also did not know was happening:

It seems nobody really cares about little old me at the Salt Lake City Marathon. But that’s okay. When all the eyes are on Boston and London (and Jersey City to a lesser extent?), I’ll be here, in the mountains, with not just my running shoes on, but my reporter hat.

As always, I get my best style inspiration when I’m somewhere for a long time, bored out of my mind, staring at the only other people suffering along with me. That’s what birthed STYLE REPORT: THE VERIZON STORE and STYLE REPORT: UNITED ECONOMYPLUS. And what’s more fucking boring, more in need of distraction, than running for two hours?

Here’s what everyone who’s anyone was wearing at the Salt Lake City Marathon:

Two men

There are a lot of girls in matching outfits, as this is a thing girls do. Jane and I are lowkey in our matching; we’ve got matching new blue Adidas shorts, purchased for the occasion, but our own black tops. We follow behind two girls in cute matching yellow sets. Girls all over the course rock face glitter and star hair clips. It’s cute— if it weren’t such a trend already, if it weren’t so #RunTok, I’d actually have something else to say about it here.

Men don’t do this, for whatever reason. Maybe coincidentally two guy friends would hypothetically both show up wearing the same shirt, if it happened to be the official race t-shirt. But men typically don’t match with their boys.

However, all the matching girls’ outfits in the entire race couldn’t stack up to the one pair of matching men I saw, who nonchalantly ran the race in wife beaters and knee-length jorts. Not the trendy wide-cut jorts, either; these were tight to their thighs, potentially cut straight from skinny jeans. It was as if they’d rolled out of a weird TikTok fuckboy lookalike contest and pivoted to marathon running.

God, it hurt to watch them, and it hurt even more to watch them disappear into the horizon; these men were so fast I didn’t even see them for the rest of the race. What was in those jorts?

GET THEIR LOOK: Wife beater, jorts, potentially some kind of performance enhancer; I don’t know why I bother telling you how to get their look when nobody in their right mind would do this, but alas that is part of the grueling job of fashion reporter.

Idiots

Whereas the jorts guys are looking thigh chafe in the eyes and running towards it anyway, there are a lot of people running shirtless with running vests on who seem to be ignoring chafe altogether.

The issue, the danger, even, with ignoring the possibility of chafe, is that it’s going to happen either way. At least the jorts guys were doing it for a bit, a social experiment even! Chafing for them would be just as painful, but maybe in service of humor or some scientific conclusion. But if you’re wearing no shirt and a running vest, I have no excuse for you.

I have to hope and pray that you tested the anti-chafe technology of that vest before you got here. If not, you’re making a really big bet, and I hope to God it pays off in your favor. Otherwise you’re in for hours and hours of pain that the one free Michelob from the post-race party won’t quite soothe.

GET THEIR LOOK: Ram your head into the wall a few times until you’ve got some minor CTE. Then go through life making decisions as normal. You will probably at some point be the type of person who wears a running vest with no shirt.

Uncreative spectators

You know how every year there’s a seemingly random Halloween costume that half the people you know do? There was a year that everyone on Earth was Mia from “Princess Diaries” but specifically this one outfit with the sunglasses and those headphones on.

I’ll never care deeply about Halloween costumes— or believe this is an issue— enough to expand this into a full screed, but I’m fairly sure this is because of algorithms/TikTok/Pinterest; when you look up “halloween costumes” the same three top videos show up, and so everyone that waited until the last minute shows up dressed like some niche Parker Posey role because they looked up “brunette Halloween costumes.”

Please don’t hate me but I think this marathon sign is the equivalent of these Halloween costumes. It’s cute, it’s interactive, it’s positive, but it is deeply, deeply random.

GET THE LOOK: Make the 63,382th version of this sign. Or, if you really want to be cutting edge, go on Pinterest, search “fashion inspo,” save the literal first image you see, go to Amazon, buy cheap dupes of all parts of the outfit, and wear that. It’s the same principle.

Me

I take off my (well, Jane’s) jacket around the 1.5 mile mark. I’m good and warm, enjoying the rush of a long downhill stretch. The sun has just started peeking over the horizon, lighting up the mountains in the far distance and the fancy neighborhood closer by. My nerves are gone. The spectators are jazzed. I’m having more fun than I ever anticipated.

“You can just donate that if you want,” she tells me, pointing to a trash bin full of jackets around the two-mile mark.

“No, it’s yours, I’ll hold onto it.” It’s no sweat off my back; lest we forget I trained in Chicago winter. Lest we forget I’ve been layering up, holding jackets for extended periods of time, for months. This was expected. My last PR was holding a jacket, and I’m on track to smash it, also holding a jacket.

“No, seriously, just toss it. I don’t want it.”

“I might want it later, though. I’ll hold onto it, seriously, no big deal.”

“Oooookay.” This is the Midwestern equivalent of spitting in someone’s face.

The jacket continues to be a source of tension throughout the race. For the first nine-ish miles, I genuinely have no problem holding the jacket, while Jane constantly makes me aware I can get rid of it whenever; “we could even find some girls that look that size and give them a free jacket!” she told me. I laugh and insist I’m fine holding the jacket.

(In retrospect, how would that work in practice? Would it really be better to go around profiling strange women’s sizes than just hold onto a jacket?)

Around mile 10, the worst happens: my body gets heavy, the sun is fully overhead, there’s no more downhill, I’m bored as hell, and I feel a creeping urge to get rid of the jacket. But I’m in too deep. There are no donation bins this late in the game. More importantly, that would mean saying “you told me so,” and I’m in a very vulnerable state after running for ten miles so I would rather saw off an arm than do such a thing. (Not having arms is a great excuse not to carry the jacket.)

We finish the race. And yeah, I notice, my arm is a little sore from carrying it— but I hardly notice it because every other part of my body is approximately five thousand times more sore. And I do end up wanting the jacket later, and putting it back on, because I’m cold again! It turns out we’re both right, and it turns out that this never comes up again because we’re both just so happy to be done.

GET THE LOOK: Black jacket on your arm and big scowl. Then big medal and black jacket on your body and big smile :)

The guys

In my Strava essay I posited that all the hot guys have been absent from the bars for months because they’ve been marathon training; in this case, I’m pleased to report that I was right. It seems like every tastefully tatted, muscled, mustached twentysomething man in America has been training for the Salt Lake City half-marathon and has pulled up in short shorts and a rain jacket. It’s the Paul Mescal convention. I blame my nerves on the race.

All of these men are wearing beanies and outerwear in a similar way to how they dressed Robert Pattinson in The Drama; it’s almost comically on-theme, as if they’re playing the character of “outdoorsy guy,” but it still works because they’re handsome. Maybe outdoor wear looks more attractive here because we’re… in the outdoors? A Patagonia rainjacket in Chicago doesn’t look bad, it just looks unremarkable. But here, with the mountains on the horizon line, it looks divine.

I apologize, SLC. I’ve only really seen the chopped husbands on Mormon Wives. I had no idea you were hiding these BADDIES! It’s too bad I was going too fast to talk to any of them.

Evil spectators

The first couple miles of the race, for me, go incredibly. The course is all downhill, and from miles 2.5 through 5 we’re running through this gorgeous, quiet smaller road that looks like a nature trail.

I’m doling out high-fives, pumping my fist; I yell “GO BLUE” at a spectator with a Michigan jacket, something I never, ever do otherwise. I genuinely giggle at a sign that says “why are you running?” with the guy from that Vine as if that is not a ten-year-old video at this point. Another sign reads “AT LEAST YOU’RE NOT AT WORK” and I cackle loudly “I DON’T HAVE A JOB!” as I jog away; it is officially, in fact, my first day of unemployment. Childlike joy. I start to understand why people love doing this.

After that initial euphoria— which allows the first half of the race to pass by as if nothing even happened— we hit a minor but seemingly infinite and punishing uphill. A barely-there grade that builds upon itself for blocks and blocks as we face directly into the rising sun. A shorter but even more grueling uphill around mile 8. I try to just turn up my earbuds and meditatively roll with it. It doesn’t work. Around mile 11 I start a fight with my cousin because she’s talking to me too much. The childlike joy has given way to a childlike temper.

Around mile 12.8 I scream “let’s get this shit over with!!!!” and sprint (as fast as I can, which is probably a limp) to the finish line. This is the corniest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It’s Marvel movie dialogue vibes. I silently hope that no sweet young Mormon children have heard me. I am in a dark place in the minutes before the finish.

All this being said, imagine being in that state of mind— exhausted, terrible, mean, driven to Marvel-esque snark— and seeing a sign that says “Why are you doing this?” or “Therapy didn’t work?” or “Try not to shit yourself.”

Hello? Where is the respect?

If you’re someone who needs to absolutely get off on making someone else’s achievement about you, please have the common decency to do it in the first few miles when things are still funny. Maybe have a sign that starts off funny but is wholesome on the other side, for those last few miles.

GET THEIR LOOK: None of you could even try to get this look, because my readers are kind and would never do something like this.

Me, the day of; more impressive people, the day after

The day after the race we run into a girl wearing her marathon medal as we wait in line at a bakery to get the biggest cinnamon rolls in the world. It’s notably not a half-marathon medal; a full marathon. I didn’t think anything of this.

Jane disagrees. “Did you see that girl wearing her medal in there?” she asks once we got back to my rented Jeep.

“I feel like that’s normal, right? People do it in Chicago. You get a bunch of congrats and I think you might get free stuff. And people give up their bus seats for you.”

“I guess. I don’t think I would do that. It’s a thing?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s a thing,” I respond, randomly defensive, and proud, of this marathoner I do not know.

Later, on the phone, my dad asks us if we wore our medals around town. “No, we just did a half, I feel like that’s too much,” I yawn, realizing I’ve just inadvertently decided my stance on medal-wearing; cool if you do it after a full marathon, but deeply embarrassing for anything shorter.

I don’t really know what the optics are of wearing your half-marathon medal around. If there are real marathoners around, it feels like stealing valor, even if the medals are different. This might be out of my pay grade as a style reporter; luckily, my series IDEAS GUY INVESTIGATES is due for a comeback, and this topic seems perfect for research.

GET THE LOOK: To steal my look, run a 2:05.05.05 half marathon (good luck ever hitting a time as lucky as that) and get a big medal. Wait, shit, oh my God, I’m so sorry, there are no more medals for the 2026 SLC Half because it’s over and never going to happen again. Maybe you can run Boston next year and you’ll almost look as good?

Thanks for reading… big shoutout to Salt Lake City… epic vibes I genuinely had a blast last weekend…

I am back from my desert hiatus and EXCITED for what the next few weeks have in store ideasguyically. You should be too. Ideas Guy Nation is almost 400 strong and I am kicking around a few ways to celebrate…

Please comment what your opinion on medal etiquette is I’m dying to know.