I could have begun training and then completed a marathon

In general it says the bare minimum of time it takes someone to train for a marathon is something around 6 months. This is of course assuming you aren't someone who just has run 15 miles a day since they were 5 in an effort to calm down their ADD. But 6 months of heavy training is what the books (read: Wikipedia) says.

Alright, so that knocks off 6 months from the 11 months I get to play with. That leaves me 5 months of free time. I'm going to say that for me I'd like to ideally train for 8 months, that way I can take my sweet ol' time weaning my way off chipotle. That still leaves me 3 months of fuckarounderry.

So, in conclusion, I could have bumfucked around doing nothing for three months, marginally ran for 2 months whilst eating ice cream and carnitas, and then trained decently for 6 months and then ran that beast.

I didn't do that.

But that's what I could have done.