- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
[Y]ou'd think America would be turning out faster and faster marathoners. Instead, the opposite is happening. The more we run marathons, the slower we get....It makes me ask: Has this country's marathoning spirit been trampled by hordes of joggers whose only goal is to stagger across the finish line?
Why does it make you wonder that? Are you trying to reduce your undergraduate logic professor to tears? There have to be better goals for your life.
It's unclear to me why the author suggests slow winning times are due to an increased popularity of the sport, or even the mindset that finishing the marathon itself is a landmark achievement everyone wants in their lives. I get that he's angry that people without his excuse not to run a marathon at all -- and the average runner now beat him when he did run one -- aren't killing themselves trying to minimize their time, but I don't see the connection to the fastest runners.
I don't know why the-ryan-that-lived is running a slower time than other people. It's a suspect statistic, but I'm not researching it. I would suggest that there are a lot of non-Americans in the world, and running has a low barrier to entry. This might have something to do with why we don't always win international competitions.
