Stop me if you've heard this one. Oh, wait, we've all heard the story about the guy who takes a bar bet the night before a major city marathon and manages to run it in three hours. As with all urban legends, the story is told with lots of details that no disinterested person would keep straight. The runner's name, the easiest part of the story to recall (and to verify), has somehow been lost.
Surely, there are people out there who have run a marathon on a whim. This most likely occurs in smaller races since the big marathons don't take race day entries. But that detail doesn't necessarily invalidate the story. The person could always run as a bandit. I expect that the vast majority of such attempts are unsuccessful, but a few manage to finish. Some might even arrive before the finish is closed down at five or six hours.
A finish time is a completely meaningless number to a non-runner. Most people don't even know how far a marathon is. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone outside the running community that could tell you that a 3-hour marathon requires stringing together 6:52 miles. Even running a single mile in 6:52 is an experience few people can relate to. The storyteller is just picking a number out of the air and 1 hour behind the winner seems both impressive and believable.
Of course, no such number exists. The rigors of professional competition have made it impossible in any sport for an untrained athlete to do something "impressive" by objective standards. If someone told me they knew someone who ran a marathon with no training and "did OK," I'd believe them. But when they throw out a time that would be a PR for 90% of the running population, it sounds a bit fishy.
By including the finish time, the storyteller is asking that the story be judged as an athletic achievement rather than one of personal triumph. And that's too bad, because as athletic achievement, a 3-hour marathon is not worth reporting. As personal triumph, merely finishing a first marathon certainly qualifies.
The original marathon legend is quite different. We hear all the details a normal person would remember - the victory over the Persians, the run back to Athens, the subsequent collapse and death, and the name Pheidippides. Nobody ever quotes a finish time despite it being a de facto world record.
The Pheidippides story does have some problems. The ending fits too conveniently with what the Greeks considered good theater. Perhaps if the Persians had won and Athens needed to organize a hasty defense such urgency would be called for. But why would a messenger see the need to run himself to death to tell people they had nothing to worry about? Perhaps he was concerned the Athens Gazette would run a picture of him walking through a feed zone.
Unlike our hero from the bar, Pheidippides was a trained professional runner. The honor of carrying the message of victory would be given to the best foot messenger on hand. My guess is that, aside from a few blisters and a sore set of quads, he came through it just fine. Later, when his running buddies questioned him about his newfound celebrity, he played it cool and described the run as an OK effort, but he was dying at the end. When the quote got into the media, the metaphor was lost. Fact checking wasn't a priority among Ancient historians.
Why do people embrace both of these obviously contradictory stories? How could an event that killed a professional be so easily conquered by a novice? I believe it is due to a fundamental misunderstanding about athletics in general and the marathon in particular. Most people believe that athletic prowess is as pre-ordained by genetics as hair color or a recessed chin. They reason that a marathon is impossible for most people and easy for a select few.
Both conclusions are wrong. Any reasonably healthy person can walk 26.2 miles in a day with no training at all. It won't be much fun, but it's possible. In less than a year, that same person can train themselves to actually run a marathon. This time, it might be fun, it might even take less than three hours, but it still won't be easy. Running a marathon at or near one's potential is brutally hard regardless of genetic gifts. That's why the world's top marathoners only do it a few times a year. If they could race more, they certainly would, since that's how they get paid.
Genetics does matter. No amount of training will make me a 2:10 marathoner. But training had everything to do with the difference between my first marathon (4:35) and my PR (2:57) twenty years later. And that's really the point. While it's nice to pick up a trophy here or there, most of us run not to be seen by others, but to get a better look at ourselves. As we run into perceived limits, we find those limits have much less to do with genetics, gender, or age and much more to do with how determined we are to move them.
Even if it was possible for an untrained runner to knock out a 3-hour marathon, the feat would merely indicate that with proper training, the person would probably be a decent runner. That's true of many people who don't run. We are not defined by the things we could do - it is the things we actually do that matter. We choose to run.
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