Marathon Me

I get hassled at work for being crazy and for obviously destroying my knees. Just last night our company President told me that I was probably inviting disaster down the road by running so many marathons so often. The Boston Marathon on Monday marked my 70th marathon or longer distance race (65 marathons, 3 50ks, 1 40-miler and 1 50-miler). And while I will acknowledge that it is a lot of marathon to have run, it all depends on who you compare yourself to.

Checking the Marathon Maniac’s website which puts me at number #143 in total marathons. Which in all honesty is probably higher than it really is, since I just updated my totals this morning. I’m sure there are quite a few people who go months without updating the total as I often do, and of course there are lots of people who aren’t members of the Marathon Maniacs.

Looking at this list, just to crack the top 100, you’d need to have run 89 marathons or more, then the top 50 is 145 marathons, top 10 requires 282 marathons, and the top place, you might as well forget about it as it is 531. And that list doesn’t include people like Norm Frank who is currently at 955 marathons or the current world record holder: Horst Preisler who has well north of 1,000 marathons!

So when you look at it like that, I’ve barely done 7% as many marathons as Horst, veritable chump change.

The 100 marathon club has 170 members so obviously there are lots of people on that list not on the Maniac list.

It is interesting to see what the human body is capable, and it gives me great hope to see that guys can run hundreds and hundreds of marathons with seemingly little effect.

So I raise a glass to everyone going down their personal path to collect marathons.

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