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McClelland uses Ryan Hall, "the swiftest American-born marathoner ever," to show how Americans are suffering when it comes to competition in the marathon. He points out, rightly, that Hall's fastest time is not even in the top 250 (it's number 255). What he omits, though, is that Hall's fastest time is actually his only time, as Hall has only run one marathon. Thus, Hall, who came of age in the past 10 years, those years that Oprah had supposedly crushed all American runners' competitive spirit, finished less than 4 minutes behind the fastest marathon time ever in his first 26.2 mile race. For some reason, I'm just not buying the logic here. Quite often, it's not the statistics a writer includes that are the important ones.
