There is nothing inconsequential about running a marathon. It’s long and grueling and makes you chafe in horrible places and often ends in people vowing to never do it again. It’s a well-known symbol of athletic accomplishment, which is why people love wearing finisher’s shirts to work. It’s 26.2 miles of heart, sweat, and tears. Except when it’s not.
Last weekend, the small pack of lead runners of the Venice Marathon – that’s Italy, not California – ran a bit over the standard distance when the lead motorcycle took them off course about 16 miles into the race and cost them about two minutes, which feels like a month to elite runners. This allowed an upstart local to win the race, if steal is a bit too strong a term. And for all the comments about how athletes should know the course, it defies every ounce of human psychology to not follow a race official on a motorcycle. It would be like telling a surgeon he’s using the wrong scalpel. This only affected a small number of runners, but it completely altered the outcome of the race. And, unlike most of us weekend warriors, those runners who took a wrong turn aren’t simply running for pride, but more for a paycheck. So that wayward motorcycle may have cost someone a rent check.
Perhaps oddly the only thing worse than running too long for a marathon is, ironically, running to little. That's what happened to the entire field of the recent Milwaukee Marathon, where participants covered only 25.4 miles, a full eight tenth of a mile less than the requisite 26.2. Granted, for the average human the difference between 25.4 and 26.2 is a rounding error, both distances better traveled by car than foot. But to an obsessive distance runner, 26.2 is the only distance that matters. Anything less is simply a long run, leaving participants sore yet emotionally unfulfilled. From a pragmatic perspective, Milwaukee’s faster runners could not use their finish time to qualify for the Boston Marathon, a race that only accepts those who’ve posted competitive times. An event widely recognized as the most elite in the sport. To run the Boston Marathon is you tell the world, or at least those who care about such an esoteric pursuits, that you are not simply a distance runner, you are an accomplished one. And not surprisingly, most Milwaukee finishers are not pleased, Boston qualifier or not. Comments have ranged from conciliatory to downright anguished, as if they’d been cheated of life’s rich reward.
Marathoning used to be a mysterious and relatively unpracticed art form. Races that now limit their fields to tens of thousands used to simply be a gathering of eccentrics in a park. But over the course of the past decades, finishing a marathon has become a seeming right of passage, not only a form of self fulfillment but also a form of communication – a way of telling the world, or at least your coworkers and neighbors, that you have done something remarkable. What was once a subculture has now become a vanity play. Not for nothing, but this has also buoyed the exponential growth of Iron Man and Half Iron Man races, events that used to literally be perceived as a form of either torture or insanity.
So what is the takeaway from this - the fact that 26.2 has taken on meaning far beyond the distance itself. That runners aren’t particularly interested in running 27 or 25 miles, but rather 26.2 on the nose. At the very least, it reminds us the psychology and sociology of sporting accomplishment, where the representational value and emotional rise is perhaps more important than the sporting act itself. As a longtime triathlete and distance runner, it’s taken me my entire athletic life to this point, over 30 years of racing, to understand that we should all take pride in the journey, not the result. And I say this knowing full well I defy that ethos every time I check the race report to see how my time compared to some guy I’ve never met before and will likely never see again. And every time I measure my time to some time the year before, when, coincidentally, I was one year younger and one year less removed from my long ago peak of virility. So it’s not even a fair comparison.
Perhaps that is why we care about 26.2. And why race directors in Milwaukee and Venice will suffer the critique. They aren’t simply running races. They are stewards of self-concept, people entrusted with participants physical, as well as emotional well being. Which makes the difference between 26.2 and 25.4 or 27 much more than few footsteps, and anything but inconsequential.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him on twitter at @KeithStrudler
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