Easy to Be Hard Attending any sort of running conference is a virtual ride in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Cups at Disney World: lots of whirling and spinning in all sorts of expected and unexpected directions and a touch of nausea as you wobble your way back onto solid ground. Les Smith at the Portland Marathon hosts a race directors’ gathering in the days leading up to the early-October marathon. The panels are usually composed of much the same roster of long-running experts in the field—folks who were around when cavemen ran from saber-toothed tigers and when running in America was confined to either punishment laps for having goofed up on a sports field or a way of escaping the long arm of the law. These folks are the people who have shaped the sport over the decades into what it has become and, in most cases, learned running from the black toenails and chafing thighs up by competing in the sport probably more often than was good for them. Most of them have, by dint of time and experience, reached the level of the guru who sits outside his cave on the mountainside waiting for the young acolytes and searchers for truth to seek him out. But sometimes not.

Some of the young who arrive come not to seek advice and truth but to lecture the guru on How It Should Be. Some of us codgers at first find this approach disrespectful and arrogant until, escaped from the withering assault on age and experience, we sip a glass of Oregon wine later that evening and reflect on what arrogant idiots we were at that age. We chuckle at the underinformed who demands that there be one aid station for every mile in a marathon or she will not sign up for our race. She has likely never heard of hyponatremia and probably doesn’t know that the revered Boston Marathon didn’t put water on its course until 1978 yet lost very few people to dehydration in the previous 81 years the race was contested. Or the young computer tech who wants nothing to do with a race that does not fall neatly into one of four categories—5K, 10K, half-marathon, or marathon—and in the process ignores most of the largest and oldest races in the world. Did you know that the three largest road races in the world do not fall into any of those four camps1 and that many of the oldest races in North American don’t, either? The Bay Area’s Bay-to-Breakers and Dipsea

(both roughly 7.5 miles or thereabouts; people don’t rightly care all that much) are both about 100 years old, as is the Berwick (Pennsylvania) Run for the Diamonds (9.1 miles). Over the years, the Boston Marathon has been anything but consistent in distance: 24.5 miles (1897–1923); 26 miles, 188 yards (1924–26); 26 miles, 385 yards (1927–1952); 25 miles, 962 yards (1953–1956); and finally 26 miles, 385 yards (from 1957 to today). In any case, the whole 26 miles, 385 yards is completely arbitrary and is not by any means the distance Pheidippides (or whatever hemerodromos it was) ran from the plains of Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C. But the one that rankles most (beyond the person who castigated a hardworking Oregon race director for not spending excessive time creating a suitable T-shirt in both men’s and women’s cuts and the one who threw accusations around relative to how put upon women in running were while some of the same men who had moved women’s running forward rapidly in the 1970s and ’80s were sitting in the room holding their tongues) was the one who bristled at the suggestion that it would be beneficial to the running world if some races were made more—rather than less—difficult. The discussion centered on how too much emphasis was being put on making marathon courses too easy and that it was not necessarily good for the runner because (1) a completely flat course is extremely wearing on the leg muscles and (2) why take potentially

good scenery out of a course just to make it flat? These suggestions were apparently an outrage. Marathons should be made easier, the old fogies were informed. Marathons were already too hard. Well, duh!—that’s why they’re called marathons2. Over yet another glass of fine Oregon wine that night, the old farts talked about some of the most memorable marathons they had ever run, and none of them involved pancake-flat courses. There was mention of Pikes Peak—alas, not exactly 26.2 miles! There was mention of the difficulty of the Boston course and how it took a real student of the sport to learn how to save or mete out energy on various segments of the course. The New York City Marathon’s specific challenges came up. A discussion followed of how it is more advantageous to a marathoner to have some hills in the first few miles to get blood pumping big-time into the big leg muscles and how variations in terrain help massage the leg muscles and run them through varied ranges of motion, thereby saving them from the monotony of the same exact range of motion for 50,000 strides, which, one race director laughed, “can cause carpel-tunnel disease of the legs.” Then the conversation really became esoteric because there were, as usual and increasingly more so at these affairs, several ultramarathon race directors. You can imagine where the discussion then went: ultramarathoners wallow in relating how difficult a course was . . . or is. The hallowed names Leadville and Hardrock were uttered,

and then someone had the audacity to bring forth the double-dog dare ultra’s Name That Should Never Be Spoken: Barkley. For the uninitiated, the Barkley Marathons—a 100-mile ultra or a 60-mile “fun run”—were founded in 1986 by madman Gary Cantrell. The Ultra is run in Frozen Head State Park in Wartburg, Tennessee, and consists of five 20-mile loops, with a 60-hour cutoff and 54,200 feet of elevation gain and loss. Since its inception, only nine runners have completed the 100-mile race. That, of course, put a real damper on the whole discussion, as it always does, because how are you going to top Barkley? The discussion of the benefits of difficult races petered out, and the hoary old race directors devolved into talking about high-tech T-shirt fabrics, and one of them revealed that cotton was com-

ing back because some manufacturers had evolved cotton T-shirts to the point that they were potentially better than high-tech shirts, and then we all had a final glass of wine and went to our hotel rooms to go to bed, which is what over-the-hill race directors do when there is no longer anything difficult to talk about. According to RunningUSA, the largest road races in 2009 were these: 1. Rome’s Stracittadina Fun Run, 4K, 64,000 finishers. 2. Sydney’s Sun-Herald City2Surf, 14K, 62,754 finishers. 3. Frankfurt’s JPMorgan Corporate Challenge, 3.5M, 61,000 finishers. 1

“Marathon: a long-lasting or difficult task or operation of a specific kind. Source: The New Oxford American Dictionary. —Rich Benyo

2

Note from the publisher—Digital M&B has arrived! That’s right—starting with the March/April issue, Marathon & Beyond will be available in both print and digital formats. We’ve inched toward this juncture slowly because we wanted to make sure we found the best industry partner to work with. We have, in a company called Advanced Publishing. Our digital edition will be viewable on Macs, PCs, and iPads.

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The digital edition will look exactly like our print edition, and you’ll have lots of cool tools for navigating through every issue. Plus, every issue is archived, so you can go back to reread any digital edition any time. One neat feature of digital is that advertisements are “live.” When you come to an ad, if you click on the URL in the ad, you go right to the Web site.

Starting now on our Web site and with our next renewal effort this month, the digital edition will be an option for new and renewing subscribers. If you don’t need to renew soon, you can still have a digital subscription—just give us a call or send us a letter and payment. The cost to add digital to a print subscription is just $13 per year (regardless of where you live). Our phone number is 217/359-9345 (toll-free in the United States: 877/972-4230). The M&B address is 206 N. Randolph St. Suite 400, Champaign IL 61820.—Jan Seeley