This issue marks the 100th issue of Marathon & Beyond. Begun in 1997, the magazine is the evolution of a short-lived quarterly periodical from 1978-79 called The Marathoner, published by Runner’s World to take on the massive increases in material being generated on marathoning and ultrarunning during the first running boom that was inundating the monthly magazine and making its annual marathon special issue unwieldy.

The Marathoner lasted a mere five issues before being killed off because it was linked on its profit/loss statement to a fortnightly tabloid called On the Run that hemorrhaged money at Runner’s World. Marathon & Beyond has, in a sense, run parallel to the second running boom, the one we are still in.

We considered doing all sorts of special sections to celebrate 100 issues, most of it involving the history and evolution of the magazine. We considered picking one representative article from each of the magazine’s years of publication. But for readers who have been with us since the magazine’s early years, that would have been rather tedious because they have already read those articles. And besides, picking one article to represent an entire year was awfully restrictive.

We also considered rating the top 100 in some category of marathoning or ultrarunning, but that sort of a listing quickly becomes . . . unwieldy. And it leaves a lot of space for arguments: how come such-and-such was ranked 67th when it obviously should have been 69th?

So we decided to break the 100 down into 10 Top 10 lists and turned to a team of writers who we felt were experts in the respective areas. Our only instructions were to keep the pieces at roughly 2,000 words, since we wanted to leave some space for features that we usually carry in our July/August issue. Since the magazine’s first year, that issue has been dedicated to “summer reading” and “adventure running.”

• 1 The 10 Most Important Marathons in History by Hal Higdon
• 2 The 10 Most Important Ultraraces in History by Theresa Daus-Weber
• 3 The 10 Most Important Male Marathoners in History by Roger Robinson
• 4 The 10 Most Important Female Marathoners in History by Kathrine Switzer
• 5 The 10 “Easiest” Marathons in North America by Paula and Steve Boone
• 6 My 10 Most Difficult Marathons by Lois Berkowitz
• 7 The 10 Most Important Ultrarunners in History by John Medinger
• 8 The 10 Most Important People in Marathon History by Toni Reavis
• 9 The 10 Most Important Innovations in Marathon History by Allan Steinfeld
• 10 The 10 Best Ultras for First-Timers by Meghan Hicks

We hope you have as much fun examining the Top 10 lists as we did. And if you happen to disagree with some of the picks, feel free to let us know how you would have fashioned the list. We will carry the responses in next issue’s Letters column.

Many thanks to our faithful readers and to our very supportive advertisers for pushing us into triple digits.