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Outside wrote an article about me!
Magnus finished in Eight Hours, though he ran it in the worst conditions imaginable while I ran mine in perfect conditions in a pleasant area, he is also a much more specialized and better climber than I was at the time. I do think it is funny that the video mostly shows him jogging, but if he took 8 hours he was mostly walking, that's only a little over 3 miles an hour.
It's a fun article, but I think for quite obvious reasons the running editor for Outside ignores the most obvious explanation for this practice: Running a marathon is kind of stupid as an activity.
Don't get me wrong here, I think being able to go 26.2 miles in some reasonable period of time is a really cool and valid measure of fitness. And running a marathon in 2.5 hours or less is an amazing achievement in itself, literally faster than I could run half that distance.
But running a marathon in good amateur times is kind of uninteresting.
A lot of sports are like this, interest varies with level. Outside of the playoffs, College basketball is more entertaining than the NBA regular season. MMA amateur slugfest smokers are always pretty fun, but the top-level pro game has gone through periods of boredom like the Lay'N'Pray lightweight title reign of Gray Maynard. Being objectively better does not always make something more interesting or entertaining. Marathon running might be kinda bimodal in terms of interest: it is interesting to watch pros try to break 2hrs, and interesting to watch complete rank amateurs try to gut it out, but it's not that interesting to watch a bunch of junior product engineers try to break 4hrs.
The balance expressed by a pro rock climber who can also run a marathon is much more interesting than the specialization expressed by a 5'6" skeleton ambling to a 2hr45m marathon time.
Personally, I've always wanted to organize an Athenian Race. The really interesting 26.2 mile race wasn't Pheidipides racing back to Athens, it was the Athenian Hoplites who crushed the invading Persians at Marathon and then marched all the way back to Athens prepared to fight the Persians again. So an Athenian race would be a big strength workout, then complete a marathon in less than 8 hours, then get wine drunk to celebrate defeating Persia.
Strong disagree. The only reason the former seems "balanced" is that pretty much all fit humans are at least somewhat decent at running, so they're capable of doing a crappy job of running a marathon. This is pretty much the equivalent of the fact that most runners can do at least some pushups - they're still mostly bad at it and it doesn't demonstrate that they're complete athletes because they can do a little bit of another sport.
I also reject the false dichotomy. One of the guys I run with is 5'6" and roughly 170 pounds and is a 2:35 marathoner. Running pretty fast for amateurs doesn't require a skeletal frame.
I have no idea what's interesting about watching amateurs try to gut it out. They're basically just not even trying to do the activity. If you already know going in that you're going to spend a bunch of time walking, then you're simply not running a marathon.
Marathoning is boring to watch no matter what the level is and I won't try to convince anyone otherwise, but gimmick versions of running that skirt around someone just having shitty conditioning doesn't make it more interesting.
I mean, you might not get it, but the video linked above got 600k views out of the gimmick. So clearly, as per the article, a bunch of people do find it interesting.
Primarily because the Marathon or distance running in general is interesting as a gut check, as a test of will. This is why once Marathon running became common, people became more interested in the recent trend of Ultras.
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Have you heard of the marathon du medoc? It has compulsory wine tastings throughout the course as well as oyster tastings.
No but that sounds amazing
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That seems kind of like a series of fencing or MMA bouts, or maybe a rugby game, followed by a 26.2-mile ruck march. With plenty of booze at the finish line.
I think Rugby or American football would be the closest approximation to hoplite warfare, fencing is more agility and MMA is too personal.
But "400m Sprint, 20 back squats at bodyweight, 30 pull ups..." Seems a lot easier to organize.
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