Nowhere near that long. There's actually a great book ("The Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer") which takes you, quite conservatively, from "I can run a few miles" to your first marathon day in 16 weeks.
With runs on only 4 days a week -- only one of them a long run -- it hardly "takes over your life", either.
My training consisted of maybe a dozen 2 mile runs, and a couple of 6 mile runs, in the space of about a month.
I didn't do any exercise other than that. I wouldn't say I'm naturally athletic either. Sure, I was pretty slow at 2:30, but I managed to run the whole thing without resting or walking.
I reckon that I could smash out a marathon with less than 6 months of training, running 3 days a week. It certainly wouldn't take over my life, and it wouldn't take a year of training.
A similar endurance event I did once was riding a century (100 miles). Sure, riding a bike is a bit easier than running, but my total training for that was about 6 months, riding 25 miles 4 times a week, plus a single 60 mile ride. I managed to complete the ride in about 5:30.
Humans are well adapted to long distance endurance activities. A person of average fitness can walk 12 hours a day for a week with a 15-20 kg pack.
[1] I couldn't have imagined working out either but at 36 years old I found myself getting tired out walking upstairs, and having a torrid time with any kind of reasonably intense physical activity, and realised I needed to do something about it to avoid serious health problems later in life - and possibly not that much later.
Well, so could any human being. I've run a bunch of Marathons, and I've personally seen people with no legs complete them. The only significant difference between those who have completed a Marathon and those who haven't is who could be arsed to do it. But I don't think that extrapolates to any human endeavour. Highly motivated people can work their entire lives and something, and still fail.
It depends on the genre and if it's fiction or non-fiction. Non fiction, yes. But fiction is harder because of stylistic attributes and the fact it all has to connect. It's not like writing 300 300-word blog posts.
Too general a statement. Sure, an engaging consistent story is much harder than, say, the average cookbook or travel guide.
But many textbooks in science and math seem like absolutely Herculean effort. Gravitation[1] by Misner, Thorne, & Wheeler (a work of non-fiction) in my opinion would be the equivalent in intellectual effort to several thousand average works of fiction.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/06911...
Ever read Dan Brown?
Is there? The general public can be sold any kind of crap that takes minimal effort -- and in the same way, don't buy masterpieces that take tremendous effort and skill to create.
>It might be tawdry, silly, and factually inaccurate, but those qualities are orthogonal to whether or not you can write a story that people want to buy.
This isn't an argument on actual writing skill though.
It's like you measure a new category like "skill of writing best-selling stuff" that's not necessarily connected to the skill of writing itself -- just to the degree of sales.
But one can sell bad stuff or skilless stuff too. Sales don't show anything more than a skill in sales themselves.
With that being said Eddie Izzard, with little training, ran 43 marathons in 51 days. He didn't break any records or win any medals, which I suppose is roughly analogous to getting a book published, but he did do it, over and over again, which is arguably writing the damn book.
All of this suggests that I could probably run a marathon right now if I really felt like it. Fortunately (I'll say it again) I can't be arsed. Same goes for writing the book, because nothing inspires me enough to write an entire book. But I could do it, because I've absolutely written a book's worth of words over the past few years.