Ever have time to run a marathon?
I like the absurd.
Perhaps like isn’t the best word. More like “enjoy” or “appreciate” or “bathe in the warm, incandescent glow of the silly stuff, regaling in”… you know, let’s stick with “like.”
One of my favorite memories of the absurd is a specific episode of CHiPs. In this feat of modern television writing, the highway patrol is stumped by some joker who commits crimes in plain view, only to turn up later with an alibi. Now, let me preface this by saying the concept of using an identical twin isn’t a new topic to television- it’s a staple. Every great show has had some variation of identical twin syndrome – Charlie’s Angels, Buck Rogers, any soap opera, every soap opera. At some point virtually all adventure or action series feature a twin, usually an evil twin, but a twin, nonetheless.
In this no-doubt Emmy-winning episode of CHiPs, the cops are fooled by twins who commit crimes, one being naughty while the other is across town saving a drowning puppy or directing traffic, somehow providing the alibi. The cops can’t figure any of it out until the big kahuna of the show, played by Robert Pine, realizes that it must be triplets and not just twins. Holstering this Holmesian deduction, the good guys triumph in the end.
That’s just absurd.
We all accept that twins will interfere with our television viewing, usually spliced together with some bad special effect where both sides of the same room don’t even exhibit the same lighting. But triplets? That’s absurd. And not even a little bit. That crosses the line.
How does this relate to sports? It’s absurd, that’s how. So many, in fact too many, sporting events result in a bizarre outcomes. Individual plays or games or even entire seasons that just shouldn’t be. Mathematically, karmically, rationally, they just can’t be. The Patriots comeback over the Dolphins, Maradona’s Hand of God non-goal, the 1969 Mets. Such strange results from such seemingly sensible games.
To me, the absurd of the 2004 Athens Olympics is the marathon. Not just in the Olympic Games, but any time. I point out the Athens Games because I watched, in some sort of temporal wormhole glitch, live, the women’s marathon. An American woman came down the track to clinch the Bronze medal. As she finished the look on her face was a mix of joy and tears and agony and … well let’s just stop at agony. The agony she experienced, no doubt, for having just run 26 miles for no real reason.
I can’t imagine running a marathon. Ever. I mean Ever. Capital ‘E’ ever. And neither should you. No human alive has any reason to run 26 miles unless they’ve been chased for roughly 26 miles and 20 feet by a large hungry animal or runaway truck.
That said, as I watched this woman grunt and grimace her way to the Bronze I had to wonder just how long it would take me to run a marathon and, more importantly, just how long it takes the best runners to do the same. For example, could I run half a marathon in the same amount of time as a Kenyan runs the full 26?
My point is, if you still believe I have one, is how fast could a marathon be run, ever? That’s Ever, with a capital E, that rhymes with G and that stands for Guinness. Please, no, not the beverage to be consumed by frat boys and anyone named Liam, the Guinness Book of World Records. The Guinness website states the fastest marathon ever run was 2 hours, 5 minutes and 38 seconds. That’s roughly a 5-minute mile. Not just a 5-minute mile, mind you, but a 5 minute mile, followed by 25 more just like it. I don’t think most humans could run that 5 minute mile and if they did, it’d be followed by 25 minutes of crying or illness or intravenous fluids, not 25 more miles.
The fastest marathon ever? Applying mathematics, one could say that at some point we shall simply reach the limits of human strength. For example, while many have run the famed 4-minute-mile, could they run 26 4-minute-miles back to back? Doubtful. Impossible? Perhaps not, but really really really unlikely. That would be 104 minutes (1 hour and 44 minutes for those without a Twist-o-Flex). Thus, at some point between 105 minutes and the current record of 125 minutes and 38 seconds there’s a minimum to be found – a limit to what a human could reasonably accomplish, after which the record simply could not be broken any further.
Considering the Guinness Record for the marathon over the decades, we can calculate a mathematical trend. By how much is the record broken, and how often? As training and medicine and nutrition improve, the athletes improve as well, but only to a point, only to the limits of human strength. At some future date the runners simply can’t get any thinner, eat any better, train any harder or be born any more Kenyan than they already are.
The Olympic marathon record was 2 hours, 58 minutes and 50 seconds in 1896. You gotta give credit to that Spiridon Loues of Greece– he could really tear it up. The marathon record drops by leaps and strides for a while, but after 1960, the Olympic and World record pretty much flatlines.
In 1960, the record was 2 h, 15m, 16 s.
In 1992 the winning Olympic time was 2h, 13m 23s. That’s only a 1.5% improvement.
The World record is now 2h, 5m and 38 s.
The change from Spiridon’s time is dramatic, but in the last 50 years we’ve only seen an 8% improvement. The World record was set in 1999 at 2h 5m 42s, meaning that in the last 5 years we’ve only improved by 4 seconds.
With the proper resources, not to be seen here, one could plot the year vs. world record and see how the times progress. Based on a mathematical limit formula, the times simply can’t get any better after a certain point. If the records are broken, they shall be in such infinitesimal ways that for all intents they are stationary. After that, marathon runners will just stomp along with no records to break except their own personal times. And, truth be told, that’s the only record those people should be going for in the first place anyway.
When we reach the magical year when the marathon record can no longer be broken, I shall tip my hat and raise a glass of my favorite sports beverage and share their pain.
The pain of someone who has run 26 miles. For no good reason.
