LIKE MANY AMBITIOUS 30-somethings before him, former NFL player Isaac Rochell signed up for his first marathon to take on a new type of challenge. But he didn’t just stop at one marathon. He signed up to do three in the span of three months—Ventura, Chicago, and New York—with only three weeks recovery time between the last two..
Completing the races was both empowering and humbling for Rochell, who retired from football earlier this year after a seven-season pro career as a defensive lineman, most notably for the Los Angeles Chargers. “I keep telling myself you’re not doing it right if you’re not having a midlife crisis mid-race,” the 30-year-old says, just a week after running the New York City marathon.
His running journey—which he began as he launched a new career chapter in media, as a sports broadcaster for NFL Network and CBS LA, podcast host, and content creator—has come with its share of physical peaks and valleys, all shared with his social media community of over two million followers. Rochell has also recorded his experience via a Garmin Forerunner 265 smartwatch—and, he shared a peek of said marathon metrics with Men’s Health.
How Isaac Rochell Got Into Running
To really appreciate the data, you have to understand how Rochell got to this point in his brief (but eventful) running journey. Almost immediately after retiring from the NFL in February, he turned his training regimen upside down. “Throughout my NFL career, I felt like there was a certain body type and weight that I had to maintain,” says Rochell, who hovered between 280 and 290 pounds as a pro player.
“I always told myself, when I finished, I would try to improve my body composition.” For him, that meant pivoting away from the type of training he prioritized for football—primarily short bursts of strength and speed—and replacing it with longer bouts of aerobic training.
He started by adding 30 minutes of cardio to his daily routine—at first, it was incline walking, and then he slowly integrated more running. Next, Rochell thought: What if I could just run for 30 minutes? Then, let me try for an hour. And he just kept moving the goal post, so to speak. “That kickstarted my journey, this extreme idea of: Let me just see how much further I can push my body.”
Eventually, he worked his way up to marathon mileage. There was no official race, no training plan—he just cranked out a casual 26.2 on his own on June 3. “Push the mind and the body will follow — previous PR was 13.1 and I wanted to push myself. Planned on doing 20 and I did a marathon…the body is as wild as the mind will let it be,” he wrote on Instagram, documenting his run. Knowing he was physically capable of covering the distance, Rochell decided to make things official and sign up for a proper race.
He ran the Shoreline marathon on July 13 in four hours and one minute without any formal coaching. After completing the race, he set his sights on a 42 minute PR for the next one. But with just 10 weeks to train, “I had to really push it,“ Rochell says.
Making Training More Focused
Rochell worked with runner and fellow content creator Hunter Leppard to formalize his training plan, which involved running 35 to 45 miles a week. For half of his weekly runs, he focused on speed. “I knew I needed to push my body and feel what it felt like to be running faster,” he says. With more focused prep, he was able to reduce his average mile time by a minute and a half in that timeframe.
“What I learned is that the beauty of a marathon is the training. That's what creates the camaraderie that comes with the running community,” says Rochell, who trained (and raced) with a group of four men. “There's something about it that’s so inclusive, because the barrier to entry is so low. I can go to a grocery store right now, run into somebody wearing a Garmin watch, and then we start bro-ing it out about running. You don't have that in football—your community is really just within the locker room.”
Rochell admits that his football background was both a blessing and a curse when it came to marathon training itself. “I think what makes football players great is every time that you put on your helmet, you have to feel like nothing bad can happen,” he says. “You assume that you're going to have the best day you've ever had—you have to feel invincible.” Running, on the other hand, is a bit different. “I can't put my shoes on every single day and go, this is going to be the best running day I've ever had. So that's where it was difficult, because I would love to go out and push myself every single day with my runs.”
And that’s where Rochell’s wearable really started to come into play. He relied heavily on the watch’s Training Readiness function—a metric that assesses factors like sleep, HRV status, training load, and stress—which is designed to help wearers make decisions to maximize training efficiency. “That was huge for me,” says Rochell. On the days he didn’t feel like running, a strong readiness score was the push he needed mentally to hit the road. And, vice versa, on days he felt eager to push himself on a run, a low readiness score might be a reminder to go for an easy pace that day. “I have this mantra of: If my body feels good, I'm gonna let it feel good,” says Rochell.
These types of measures, which are available on just about every fitness wearable these days, can be helpful—but expert coaches caution putting too much focus on the numbers. “Runners should pay attention to readiness scores, but not treat them as the final word,” says Jes Woods, a Nike Running Coach in New York City. “I think of them more as a quick gut check than a rule. It can give you a sense of how prepared your body is to handle stress that day and also helps you separate ‘I’m just not motivated’ from ‘my body might actually be a little beat up.’”
Woods recommends digging into your data in specific moments and pairing those insights with the signals you’re getting from your body.
“Instead of relying on one score, runners should pay attention to the basics that show up across multiple metrics,” she says. “You can learn even more by watching how your easy pace heart rate trends, whether your resting heart rate stays stable, and how your legs feel getting out the door. If your easy runs suddenly feel harder or your resting heart rate jumps, it is usually a sign to scale back before fatigue becomes a problem.”
How the Marathon Runs Actually Went
Rochell’s confidence carried him right to the starting line of the Chicago Marathon, where he went on to achieve a 41-minute PR by completing the race in 3 hours and 19 minutes. Then, just three weeks later, he ran the New York City Marathon, finishing in 3 hours and 34 minutes.
“Chicago for me was a much easier race, and my readiness score was better—everything was better for that race,” he says. Looking at the data from his watch that day, however, in theory it should have felt more strenuous than New York. In Chicago, his average heart rate was much higher (161 versus 148 bpm) and his pace was much swifter (7:30 versus 8:08).
“I finished the New York marathon running a nine and a half minute mile [by the end], which for me is kind of slow, and my heart rate dropped. On paper, it was easier,” says Rochell. “It was just really interesting to see that, because I was dying running a nine and a half minute mile.”
“He probably felt better in Chicago for a simple reason: Fresh legs plus a flat course usually feels a whole lot smoother than long climbs and bridges on tired legs,” Woods says. “Chicago lets you settle into one steady rhythm. New York constantly changes the demands on your body, and that adds up, especially for someone still adapting to long distance training.”
Another noteworthy observation: his Garmin data says that Rochell burned fewer calories during New York, even though he was running more slowly. “That shows me, like my legs were not as prepared as they should have been—I just had heavy legs, which doesn't translate to a super high heart rate or burning a ton of calories,” Rochell says.
It’s also worth noting that calorie calculators from fitness wearables aren’t 100 percent accurate. “Calories and other metrics help us understand effort, but they do not tell you everything about how a race will feel,” Woods says. “Honestly, you can burn nearly the same calories in two marathons and feel like you ran two completely different races. Recovery, terrain, weather, pacing… all of that changes the experience. The numbers help, but the context is what makes them meaningful.”
Rochell admits to me that he didn’t recover well in between the two races. His readiness score was “just awful” every day. “This is where the football mindset hurts me. In my mind, I was like, nobody can tell me that I can’t get better in three weeks,” he says. “So I was working against the data, which was telling me I literally needed four days to recover—but I was back to running intensely in a couple of days. Obviously it ended up hurting me.”
How He'll Take on Running Moving Forward
Following the tough race, Rochell has come to re-evaluate what success means in sport—after all, compared to football, running wins are less cut and dry. “Objectively, I lost, right? I ran a 3:19 and then a 3:34, so we're talking about an almost 20 minute swing. In my football mind, I'm like, okay I got worse,” he says.
But at the end of the race, after putting it all out there, he thought: “It’s a huge win that I'm here finishing this. I'm able-bodied. I have people that I love that are here to support me. There's millions of people here to support all the runners, and that's such a massive win.”
So does that mean there’s another marathon in Rochell’s future? If you’d asked him right after the New York marathon, he’d have firmly said no. But after just a couple of days, he started to get the itch to sign up for another race. It’s official: He’s hooked.
“Sure, I played seven years in the NFL, tore up my body. I'm 250 pounds. There's a million reasons for me not to be running marathons or to care about it, but why not do it? I just hope that people feel inspired to go out and try it—not just marathon running, but any type of physical feat that they want.”
Kristine Thomason is a writer and editor with over a decade of experience creating content for print and digital publications. Previously, she was the health and fitness director at mindbodygreen, and the fitness and wellness editor at Women’s Health. Kristine's work has appeared in Men's Health, Travel + Leisure, Health, and Refinery29, among others. She holds a journalism degree from New York University, and is certified in personal training by the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM).
