The Meaning of the Marathon

Hi, Fellow Runners:

A while back, in Running Times magazine, a college coach named Adrienne Wald wrote that it was a ‘joke” to run a marathon by walking every other mile or by finishing in six, seven or eight hours. “It used to be that running a marathon was worth something – there used to be a pride in saying that you ran a marathon, but not anymore,” she added.  “Now it’s, ‘How low is the bar?”

That comment raised a firestorm of protest from the magazine’s readers.  Here a sampling of responses:  “Ms. Wald wants to know how low the bar is.  The ‘bar’ will be trampled under the feet of the marathon walkers and joggers, and Adrienne Wald can suck it!”...  “Let’s get rid of the exclusionary lingo and invite more into the sport” ...  “The quote by A. Wald was rude and stuck up.”  And, finally, there came this disclaimer from the editor:  “...we were surprised by the number of readers who took offense at the quote, and agreed with many of the points made.  In hindsight, we should not have run the quote without a larger context.”

The conflicting viewpoints became a subject of discussion at a marathon clinic I was coaching at the time, and the consensus opinion of the 40 members in attendance was decidedly opposed to Ms. Wald’s comment.   This, as it happened, scared the hell out of me.  You see, I had agreed wholeheartedly with Ms. Wald and had intended to track her down and tell her so.  But the reasoned observations of the clinic members gave me pause.   Could it be that, after 35 years of competition, I was falling out of touch with the running world in which I grew up?   Should I even be teaching young people whose thinking on marathons seemed so different from mine?

It took a while and some lost sleep, but  I finally figured out that any disagreement between Ms. Wald and her critics, and therefore any difference between my clinic members and me, was more apparent than real.  That’s because the discussion in the magazine and in the clinic had focused on the numbers – the six, seven or eight hours it took some people to finish a marathon.  But the issue is not time; it’s motivation.   It’s not the what; it’s the why.

Consider the following individuals, all of whom took more than six hours to finish their last marathon, but who had decidedly different reasons for doing so:

A young man in the early stages of Lou Gehrig ’s disease, who ran to show his body that he’s still the boss....., An ex-athlete who made a barroom bet that he could finish the distance and ran slower than he could have because he didn’t want to look too beat up when he collected his winnings later that night ..... A cancer survivor who ran to celebrate her second chance at life..... A twenty-something whose only running goal this season is to collect more finishing medals than her sister.....  A husband and father who told his doctor and promised his family that he’d get off the couch, stop smoking and work himself back into shape. ..... A tourist who stopped a dozen or more times on her marathon route to photograph the host city’s famous landmarks...... Another tourist, this one at Disney World, who ran his marathon on the same week-end he also ran a 5K and a Half-Marathon.     

The list could go on, but I think you get the point.  The right to consider yourself a marathoner is defined by why and how you ran the 42.2 kilometres, not by the number of hours it took you to cross the finish line.  Only your willingness to push through pain, your commitment to be the best you could be on that particular day, allows you to become part of a stream of history that dates back 2,400 years.

The lineage of today's marathoners began, of course, with Philippides and his three-hour run from the Plains of Marathon to the city of Athens in 390 B.C.  It’s a lineage based not on blood but on a shared experience that gives them insight into how Alberto Salazar must have felt when he collapsed and was hospitalized after beating Dick Beardsley by two seconds in the 1982 Boston Marathon that famously became known thereafter as the “Duel in the Sun.”  And they are uniquely able to share the anger and frustration of a Katherine Switzer as she resisted the physical assault of an irate race director dead-set on throwing her off the course simply because she was trying to complete a Boston Marathon that until then (1967) had been closed to women.  And, finally, they can understand the drive of a Jerome Drayton, Canada’s greatest marathon runner, who had a serious leg discrepancy (one leg shorter than the other) and so ran every race in chronic pain.

That’s the heritage of marathoners like myself.  So come and run our race in six, seven, eight hours or more, but do it with respect – always with respect.

Coach Stephen