let’s put aside the false us-versus-them dichotomy that the debate usually degenerates into. Instead, let’s look at how these well-meaning, usually inexperienced marathoners are ill-served by the equally well-meaning groups they raise money for.

Consider my odometrically challenged officemate. For starters, ignorance certainly isn’t bliss at the 23mile mark of a marathon. Even allowing for a momentary memory lapse, her answer speaks volumes about her indoctrination to running.

Look at any of the literature meant to lure charity marathoners, and one theme is a constant: completing a marathonis the ultimate achievement inrunning. (Never mind that the claim is belied precisely by the hundreds of thousands who do so every year.) Yes, completing a marathon, especially your first one, is a big deal. But that’s different than holding up the Platonic ideal of The Marathon to such an extent that your troops don’t know or care how long it is.

First things first. The marathon is no more the ultimate in running than was the first sub-4:00 mile. Some pessimists predicted that the first person to break 4:00 would die of a burst heart or some such deserved punishment for striving Icarus-like against the laws of nature. But the entirely arbitrary measures of a mile or a minute have no meaning to the human body; by now, the thought that a 3:59.9 mile is godlike is so archaic that we lament that no high schooler has run one in more than 30 years.

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Same thing goes for 26.2 miles. Perhaps fora Tegla Loroupe or Moses Tanui, who attempt to race the distance more than a minute a mile faster than their already-swift training pace, a successful marathon is nonpareil. For mostcharity runners, though, who give their main goal as completing, not competing, there’s nothing inherently “ultimate” about the marathon distance. Why not run 26.3 miles? That would be all the more ultimate.

FALL OF THE RUNNER

What’s wrong with a little hype? Like Richard Dawkins, I worry that misrepresentations at the outset can have long-term negative consequences.

Take your typical first-time charity runner who finishes a fall marathon. It’s not uncommon for such a runner to have been, at best, an intermittent jogger just the previous spring. Six months after signing on to the charity program, our ambling fundraiser accomplishes what is billed as the sport’s ultimate achievement. By now, it’s late October, early November. The days are short, the weather increasingly nasty. Long-time runners have a hard enough time maintaining motivation through the dark night of winter. How much more so must that be the case for someone who didn’t have the habit even a year ago, but who has been told that she has already mounted the sport’s summit? Where is there to go but down?

In other words, charity running programs are billed as a lever that

springs thousands of new runners into our community every year. But, because of the manner in which they present their fund-raising vehicle, they likely contribute to fewer of their enrollees becoming lifelong runners. Gail Waesche Kislevitz’s book First Marathons cites a figure of 250,000 first-time marathoners a year. Where are they the next? Dennis Ahlman, president of Team in Training, once told me that his organization doesn’t track such statistics about their participants. The best data he could offer was that 11 percent repeat the program. Great, but where are the remaining 89 percent?

Common sense would seem to dictate that, once immersed—however briefly—in the running lifestyle, most people will stick with it. By this reasoning, however, nearly everyone soaked in Shakespeare for a semester would become lifelong readers of high-quality literature. The best sellers’ lists suggest otherwise. Closer to home, have the AIDS rides created a nation of cyclists?

In this space, Roger Robinson has written that the walk/run training that most of the charity marathoners rely on is classic American moderation. I must respectfully disagree. New York Times writer John Tierney has coined the word “explornography” to describe the growing hunger in American society for extreme adventure as therapy (suggested motto: “I want my peak experience, and I want it now!”). Entire industries have been built around helping impatient thrill seekers to the

top of sundry pinnacles. Think of the would-be mountaineers and their escorts portrayed in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Certainly, aiming for a marathon finish line six months after one’s first run/walk around the block is running’s version of Tierney’s term. As Marine Corps Marathon race director Rick Nealis bipolarly told the Washington Post, “The main thing is for people to have a vision of crossing the finish line, getting off the couch.” The kinder, gentler approach to marathon training, with its curious mix of dumbing down and excess, is the only physiological way to accommodate such a goal. Again, though, once the goal is reached, then what? How many novice climbers who scale Everest then care to spend their lives walking up Little Round Top?

JUST DO IT OR JUST SAY NO?

The above lamentation, of course, assumes that our eager charity marathoner even makes it to the Himalayan foothills. The numbers of people who start such programs and aren’ trunning a year later fall through the statistical cracks even more than do first-time completers.

Last spring, another woman in my office got the charity marathon bug. After handing over my check for $52.40 (which she accepted with gratitude, not bewilderment), I probed a bit about her background and motivation. Turned out she had tried to

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get going on a walking program on her own a few times to no avail. She saw signing on for charity as a way of forcing herself into fitness while helping others. Obviously, any runner should encourage, not impugn, anyone trying simultaneously to better themselves and the world. With this in mind, I gave her a book I’d coauthored and, later, encouraged her when she hit snags in her training. I told her she’d do fine.

But I told her this with a decidedly forked tongue. Simply put, this woman had no business thinking about trying to run a marathon four months hence. She was—and I’m being generous here—at least 50 pounds overweight. She had no athletic history or basic fitness level to speak of. When, two months after a lifetime of being sedentary, it was time to do runs longer than 10 miles in brutal summer heat, she had nothing but her good intentions to see her through—and that wasn’t enough. She struggled on for several more weeks, each long run more frustrating than the last, until she was injured. A month and a half before her goal marathon, she dropped out of the program and hasn’t run since. (Incidentally, the other woman in my office finished her first marathon, dropped out of another one a few months later, and, similarly, has yet to lace up her trainers again.)

The dropout can be excused for not knowing what she got herself into. The supposed “expert coaches” supplied by her charity are not so blameJuly/August 1999

less. A few looks and a few questions should easily have told them to tell her to set a more moderate goal. I would love to hear their counterargument to Bill Rodgers’s suggestion that anyone contemplating a marathon should have a year’s worth of steady running in the bank. But what incentive did they have to tell this woman—and the thousands like her with similar backgrounds and backsides—that she would be in over her head as soon as she stuck a toe in the water? How then would money be raised? In my officemate’s case, her charity got the few thousand dollars she raised, while, in the end, she got a bitter introduction to our sport thanks to the all-too-common all-ornothing presentation of running.

A MODEST PROPOSAL

Fortunately, a simple solution can prevent the improper education so many charity runners receive: hook them up with local running clubs.

Do I even need to detail the benefits that would result? Could anything but good come out of ending the charity runners’ sanctioned separatism? The charities would still meet their noble fund-raising goals, the novice marathoners would get better training advice, and the clubs would gain a few new members.

Exposing charity marathoners to running’s strong infrastructure would keep more of them on the road for life. Get the fledgling runners off the

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