I doubt there is any logical connection between the growth of “noncompetitive” runners and the fact we’re not beating the Kenyans. Sorry your formerly elite and eccentric sport is now popular. Go try ultramarathons or RAAM. In any race you will still see plenty of competition near the front. I doubt the people at the back are slowing the front down any more than they ever have. The popularity is good for the sport and for sport in general. What’s bad for sport is people sitting on the couch watching millionaires play on TV. And those millionaires doing steroids. What’s sillier than duffers arguing over baseball stats? Certainly not duffers doing marathons. What’s good for sport is people actually doing it. Here are my credentials: All-American swimmer 7 times, state champion matched-sprinter, various runs, triathlons, biathlons, and cross-country bicycle epics, Portland Marathon in 1988 (3:15), 7 Hood-to-Coasts, rock climbing, mountaineering, mountain biking. I don’t mind seeing competitive sport less important to people now. I care less who wins the Tour since so many top riders seem to be dopers. Same for elite runners, weight lifters, football and baseball players, etc., etc., etc. All Olympic and world speed, endurance and strength sports are suspect; the elites are polluted, but guess what? People still like to do the sport. So what if they’re not sub-3 hours in the marathon? In an era when our country’s average level of fitness is more abysmal than ever, why object to people slogging out the miles, however slow? Crooked “elite” athletes have ruined the search for who is fastest, but they failed to destroy their sports because it never really was just about that one guy who broke the tape, it was about the community of dedicated athletes and it was about the inner journey of each participant. Good job, Shorter, and good job, Oprah, and good job, Kenyans, who are probably even clean. At 48 now I still might run, swim or ride another race, which someone else will win, or maybe I’ll do 25 miles of single track to get my exertion and exhilaration. I won’t be doing it to see if I’m the fastest in the world, and either way I won’t be needing to despise anyone doing it slower than me.

Oh please!

Lets have a bit of sanity here. A sport grows from being almost cult-like in it's exclusivity, to being a major national and international pastime. At the elite level, Americans happen to have disappointing results.

So... blame Oprah!

Now don't get me wrong - I hate the fat narcissistic heifer as much as anyone, not least for her insane insistence that luck and good fortune do not play any part in any exceptional success.

But... much as though I'd like to blame her for everything, making her responsible for a lack of fast American marathon runners is ridiculous!

What a sorry article!

I started running marathons in 1955 when I was 16 and was damn good at it. Everyone who ran them in those days was damn good at it and most of us knew each other. A massive, scarring lung disease contracted in 1963 kept me from every being a top flight runner again, but I still could break an hour for ten miles at 44 years old.

Back in the '50s, the average time for U.S. runners completing a marathon was possibly far faster than at any time in history. In 1955, Oprah was one year old.

In 1971 or so, the NY Road Runners Club really popularized the race beyond the less competitive devotees that ran Boston each year. Bigger fields meant slower times. But U.S. road racing and cross country had been popular since the beginning of the 20th Century. Tough, competitive races such as S.F.'s Cross City/Bay to Breakers, Marin County's Dipsea, Cambridge's Hyde Shoe and many others were local traditions and barely slowed even for World Wars. The NYRR allowed women to compete even though they had previously been discouraged from running as as far as 800 meters for decades.

What really slowed average times, beyond the growing popularity of the sport, more was the magical notion that the marathon was a special distance. People who simply did not have nor could they ever develop the necessary physiology to ever be seriously competitive decided, however inappropriately, that it was a desired challenge. But 26.2 miles/42 kilometers is an extremely arbitrary distance. In competitive athletics, few runners show much "range." Not many 100 meter specialists can last for 400. Not many 5,000 meter stars are impressive at a half mile. Exceptions such as Julie Brown, Joan Benoit Samuelson, or even less well known runners such as Ivan Huff were quite rare. So most marathoners were running the "wrong" for them, distance.

The reason that native born Americans are less competitive than they were during the flowering of road running in the '70s, is that I believe they simply do not have the genes, that is, the physiology for it. A raising in the U.S. standard of living has also taken its toll. Thanks to better nutrituion, we have bigger kids, they don't walk to school every day and don't run much at all. Except for the rare "sport," just like racehorses, we're pushing the limits of our inherited ability to compete at the level to which distance running has risen. European-Americans could compete against West Africans and do quite well, but not only Kenyans could clean both groups' clocks, but so could their closer tribal cousins, the Tanzanians, Ugandans, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Somalinese, and even an occasional South African. If you look at their gracile frames, their tiny calves, you will get a better understanding of why this is the case. Another very different physiological group, the Algerians, the Moroccans, also seem better equipped for the rigors of running rapidly for 15 minutes to a couple of hours. Orientals have competed at a world class level for many years, including the Koreans who startled the world at the 1932 Olympics and their genetic cousins in China and Japan.

Lastly, I'm obliged to mention that this country has been blessed with a long history of athletic prowess, including in distance running, for instance with one of the greatest marathoners of all time, Clarence DeMar. We've raised up and nurtured a wide ethnic variety of champion distance runners, from John A. Kelley, to Tarzan Brown, to Ted Corbitt, to Maria Trujillo. And while the tunnel-visioned Salon writer McClelland drops names, I hope he won't forget Dick Beardall, who gave as good as he got whether running against native born Americans like Ron Tabb or "imported" champions such as Alberto Salazar, and he did it more often than almost anyone.