When Ryan Hall returned to the Boston Marathon in April to make appearances, all anybody could talk about was his size. Since he announced his retirement from professional running this winter, the fastest American-born marathoner has packed on almost 40 pounds.

“People were commenting that they couldn’t even recognize me,” Hall said. “And then some people were like, ‘You’re fat’ or ‘You look good, but you’re big.’ I needed to show people that that yes, I look different, but it’s not like I just got fat. I didn’t just start eating the house and stop working out.”

So Hall took a photo of himself with his shirt off and posted it to Twitter to set the record straight. In the picture it was clear that the lifelong distance runner had a new activity: weightlifting. Six days per week he takes to his makeshift gym in the garage to build a body he spent the past 20 years trying to whittle down to be as light and lean as possible.

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Me at the end of bulking about to start my first cut (165 lbs). Starting to feel a little soft. pic.twitter.com/5b5kuQ5m9I — Ryan Hall (@ryanhall3) April 21, 2016

As a result, he’s gone from 127 pounds last summer to 165 pounds today. And he couldn’t be happier about it.

“I’ve been small and weak my entire life—just, like, totally underdeveloped,” Hall said. “I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to be big and strong.”

Most days he spends up to two hours working out. He focuses two days each on arms, legs, and back and chest. When Hall started, he could only bench press about 100 pounds. Now he’s maxing out at more than 200 pounds, he said.

Hall, whose personal best in the marathon was 2:04:58, retired from running at age 33, because chronically low testosterone and extreme fatigue would no longer allow him to train at the level necessary to compete. Since then, he has been coaching his wife, Sara Hall, who ran a career best 2:30:06 at the London Marathon at the end of April, as well as focusing on parenthood with his four daughters adopted last fall from Ethiopia.

And Hall has taken up bodybuilding, writing his own workouts and changing up what he does every day so that his body keeps adapting. He said it’s been fun to do something he was not particularly good at in the beginning—after four years of chasing improvement in running and not seeing results, the rapid advances in weightlifting have been a morale-booster.

The new routine has also raised his energy level.

“I feel like it’s giving life to my body instead of taking it away,” he said. “Now I can go run and not feel fatigued and feel good. But I’m also doing so much less running-wise than I ever have—like, 12 miles a week compared to 12 miles a day.”

He hasn’t totally lost his speed, though, as he discovered when Sara had a pre-London workout to do and he was without a bike to ride beside her. Hall jumped in and surprised himself with three miles at 5:40 pace without having done a lick of speedwork in at least four months. He often structures his weight workouts to include short rest between sets—around 45 seconds—which end up providing cardio benefits, too.

His diet has also undergone a transformation from carb-focused to protein-heavy. Hall takes in about 50 grams of protein every three hours—six meals a day that add up to about 3,500 calories in the form of favorites like Muscle Milk pancakes and plenty of fish.

“I still weigh myself every morning, but I get bummed if I’m not putting on half a pound now, whereas in running it was the complete opposite,” Hall said. “I was always trying to knock off a pound here and there.”

Along the way, he has also gained some necessary fat. He's now at a point that he wants cut a couple of those kind of pounds to stay muscular, as he indicated in his tweet.

Since the end of his running career, Hall has now traveled to the Olympic Marathon Trials, Boston, and London—the sites of some of his history-making performances. While it is sometimes difficult to not be on those starting lines anymore, don’t look for Hall to return to the scene.

“It stirs up a little something in me,” he said. “But there’s never any doubt. There’s a sadness that I’m not ever going to get to experience that for myself again and that was such a fun time…but there’s never been a second of, ‘Maybe I can get back in shape and do this.’ I am so sure that my body had nothing left to give me in terms of running that there isn’t any question whether I made the right decision.”

Now the singular focus is on becoming as big and muscular as he possibly can. Gone are the days of sizes small and medium. Hall is buying size large—and extra large, just in case it ever comes to that.

“I’m definitely filling out my shirts,” he said. “But now the medium stuff doesn’t look quite right. I’ve had to order some new clothes, but it’s all good.”

Ryan Hall’s Workout

Below is Hall’s full workout, with some exercises linking to MensHealth.com articles that show proper form for the move. (Men’s Health, like Runner’s World, is owned by Rodale.) For each superset, Hall takes little to no rest between each exercise. He rests for 45 seconds after the second exercise.

“Rather than being very concerned about the number of reps I am doing I focus on contracting the intended muscle group very hard,” Hall said. “I tell myself I am not lifting weights; I am contracting muscles. So rather than stopping when I get to a given number of reps, I just go to failure on every exercise, every set. I know not everyone agrees with this approach of going to complete failure, but I like it and it works for me.”

Monday and Thursday: Chest and Back

Superset 1:

Superset 2:

Superset 3:

Dumbbell flys (5 sets of 4–10 reps)

Dumbbell pull-overs (5 sets of 4–10 reps)

Finish:

100 diamond pushups

10 minutes of ab exercises (1 minute on/1 minute off)

Tuesday and Friday: Arms

Superset 1:

Superset 2:

Superset 3:

Superset 4:

Superset 5:

Reverse curls (8 sets of 4–10 reps)

Dumbbell skull crushers (8 sets of 4–10 reps)



Superset 6:

Dumbbell concentration curls (5 sets of 4–10 reps)

Triceps dips (5 sets of 4–10 reps)

Superset 7:

Finish:

15 minutes of various ab exercises

Wednesday and Saturday: Legs

Machine exercises:

Toe raises (10 sets of 4–20 reps)

Quad extensions (5 sets of 4–10 reps)

Hamstring curls (5 sets of 4–10 reps)

Cable ab curls (5 sets of 10 reps)

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