- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Do pro football players whine about how America needs to start discouraging kids from playing touch football after school? Do chess champions get angry when old folks like to sit out in the park for a casual game? Do Nobel laureates feel like middle-school science fairs devalue their work?
Look, here's the deal. Let's tighten up the standards on Boston, let's start a few new elite marathons. And then the people who want to protect the marathon's purity can have their intense, exclusive races, and the rest of us can have a challenge that calls to any ordinary person who wants to put in two years of dedicated effort.
Alternately, I could write my own column about how road marathoners are watering down the sport, and we should have contempt for any runner who hasn't joined me on a 30-mile off-road ultra.
