Winning your NFL fantasy football league is a marathon, not a sprint.
And so is losing — as Cole Bray, a sophomore at Wake Forest University, found out, after he walked 26.2 miles inside the school’s dining hall as punishment for finishing last in his friend group’s fantasy football.
“I thought this would be super funny, and then I ended up losing and had to do it,” Bray said.
In a now-viral video on TikTok, which has garnered over 1.3 million views, Cole’s friend, Chris Ellis, captures his feat from start to finish, clipping together videos of Cole power walking past students in the university’s cafeteria named “The Pit.”
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For 9.5 hours, he walked the same monotonous route, while listening to music and grabbing the occasional glass of water from his friends nearby.
“Basically, I did a figure eight,” Cole said. “And then every 20 minutes, I’d have a watch and I would switch the direction, but I kept to that basically the whole time.”
Originally, Cole, Chris, and the eight other guys in their fantasy league had planned to make the loser eat 83 hot dogs, a shout out to Joey Chestnut’s record number at Nathan’s Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest. But none of them were thrilled at the idea of stuffing themselves with dozens of glizzies, so Cole birthed a better idea.
Inspired by past events at school called “Pit Sits,” where students would stay inside The Pit, sit, eat, and hang out with their friends all day, Cold suggested a pit run or walk. They agreed the loser must do a full 26.2 miles of a marathon.
“I didn't think I was going to lose,” Cole noted.
But when he came last in the league by just one point, he knew wasn’t going to back away from the challenge.
Cole picked a slow Friday, one without classes or much work to complete, and walked from 9 a.m. until 6:30 p.m.
“I took about 45 minutes of breaks throughout. I walked a 10K, and then I took a break,” he explained. “ I walked another probably four or five miles, and took another break. And then, about every three and a half to four miles, I would take another break.”
Friends would drop by for support, at least for a bit. “Whenever Chris or one of my other buddies would be there,and they'd get up to leave, I'd walk with them to the door,” Cole said.
His playlist mainly consisted of 1990s grunge hits and rock classics. He considered listening to an audiobook but ultimately decided the soft-spoken words would make him sleepy.
“How you feeling?” one friend asked him 10 miles in, to which Cole responded in the video: “Legs hurt but mentally we’re feeling good. We might sign up for the marathon. Who knows?
“My legs hurt pretty bad. I’m probably going to stop here in like three minutes or so to take a little break,” he said. “But it’s going pretty good. We’re just moving ahead.”
While Cole inched closer to the total mileage, Chris and their friends got the entire campus involved. They took to the campus community app called Fizz to anonymously share photos of Cole walking inside the dining hall.
“ I feel like we moved on too fast from the fact that somone walked marathon in the pit,” one post read.
By the end of the day, the entire dining hall was cheering Cole on as he sprinted through a toilet paper finish line. His friends even presented him with a tiny trophy to honor the accomplishment.
Every year, at the start of the NFL season, sports fans will group together in leagues to participate in fantasy football. Each participant is responsible for a roster full of real-life players, which they’ve chosen, across all teams to compete against their friends’ picks in the coming weeks.
When a player performs well, the person who has them on their team will receive points. The goal is to have the most points by the end of the fantasy season, which always concludes before the playoffs.
Chris’ video was met with several stunned viewers online admitting they were shocked he actually completed the challenge.
“Shoutout bro for actually doing the punishment,” one person commented, while another wrote: “A marathon is actually crazy.”
What started as a fun bit to finish out fantasy season has since motivated the group of guys to try and host a charity “Pit Marathon” in the future.
“I think that'd be a really cool opportunity to potentially make it a campus tradition because we got the whole dining hall rallied around it,” Cole said.
Super Bowl LIX will take place on February 9 with the Kansas City Chiefs facing off against the Philadelphia Eagles for the second time in the last two years, although the Wake Forest boys aren’t happy about it.
“I hope both teams lose, honestly,” Chris said.
Cole described a meme that asked whether people would prefer an Eagles win, a Chiefs win or a meteroid strike. “I think I would take the meteoroid strike,” he declared.
