Living History Farms Off-Road Race 11/22/08

The Marathon

The Marathon has to be one of the oldest and most revered athletic events of not just endurance sports, but all athletic endeavors. The super-human like people that run marathons are some of the most fit and athletic people in the world. These people are capable of doing things that an average person couldn’t do, such as run a sub five minute mile, something that a large majority of people cant even do for one mile, but that they can do for all twenty six point two miles of a modern day marathon. The marathon is not just something for those skinny, but extremely fit Kenyans and Ethiopians that you see on TV however and on newspapers maybe once a year. Today hundreds of thousands of people have run in marathons all across the world and on every continent, including myself. People who run marathons are some of the most fit athletes in all of sports, and the marathon is one of the most revered endurance events in all of sports that such a small elite number of people on the earth can even push themselves to do.
Most people might know where the marathon originated, but they may not know the amazing story to its finest detail of how “The Marathon” started. This is something that I found and was interested in after I had run my first marathon, not just why I had actually chosen to actually pay to do that, but why and what makes people want to put themselves through such indescribable pain and suffering. The origination of the marathon was in Greece, as most people know. But what some people do not know is how the marathon commemorates the run of the soldier Pheideppides from a battlefield near Marathon, Greece, to Athens, which took place in 490 B.C. (Graetzer). Pheideppides did this to bring the new news that the Greek forces had prevailed over the Persians. Although he was the first one to make it back with this good news, he later collapsed and died at the end of this historic run (Graetzer). This day in history would forever be known as the day that the marathon started as an endurance event although the first real Olympic marathon did not take place until 1896 when the Olympics were held in Greece. The first marathon took place in this year but it was only twenty-four point two miles, as opposed to the twenty-six point two mile standard of today’s marathons (Graetzer). In the Olympics of 1896 however an athlete from Greece had yet to win a gold Medal, until the day that the first Olympic marathon was run and in the end Spiridon Louis, a Greek postal worker, turned out to be the one to win the first Marathon in a time of just under three hours (Graetzer).
The next year the first Boston Marathon took place on April 19th, 1897, which was chosen as the date as to commemorate the infamous ride of Paul Revere in 1775. This marathon was very different however from the marathons today, as there were only fifteen runners who started, and out of the fifteen runners only eight finished (Graetzer).
A few years later the 1908 Olympic games took place in London, England where the race distance was changed to twenty-six miles and an extra three hundred and sixty five yards was added on, as to ensure that the race ended in front of the king’s royal box (Graetzer). During the next sixteen years there were many debates as whether or not to change the official marathon distance to twenty-six point two miles or not but in the end it was established that the official distance for marathons for many decades to come. The distance was set twenty-six point two miles as the official distance was finally put into place in the 1924 Olympics in Paris (Graetzer).
This is part of the reason that for so many people this event is one of the most revered and looked up upon sporting events as very few people today even think about running even a few miles but the idea of running an entire marathon is just and way too farfetched for people to even begin to comprehend.
Since the first marathons of the early twentieth century there has been much advancement, as the world record times have dropped to an almost incomprehensible pace and intensity set by many of the most elite athletes in the world.
These extreme athletes may be some of the most talented people in the world but they didn’t just become this super-human. It is a combination of natural ability, in most cases, and running an average of nearly one hundred miles every week at high altitudes, such as in mountains, as well as a will to be one of the best (Indiana University). This combination makes these people some of the most fit athletes in the world and makes this event one of the most amazing feats of human endurance and strength ever witnessed to so many people.
This doesn’t mean that all of the nearly three hundred thousand people each year that have run marathons have to run nearly one hundred miles every week. Going out and running nearly nine times a week for men and seven for women to actually be able to run a marathon (Indiana University). This does mean that to run at a truly elite level you have to put in a lot of miles every week and dedicate a large part of your life to training to be a professional marathoner. This also does not mean that marathon runners are only professional athletes. To the contrary, as a recent study conducted by Indiana University has shown, nearly sixty-two percent of the men and fifty-seven percent of the women who qualified for the Olympic trials for the to represent the United States in the Olympic marathon had worked full time jobs as they trained to become one of the strongest most elite athletes in the world (Indiana University).
Out of the elite American athletes who responded to this survey conducted by the University of Indiana only forty six percent of men and twenty nine percent of women trained with a coach (Indiana University). This is very interesting seeing how these people who didn’t have a coach could stay loyal to their strict training schedules of running countless miles every week for months at a time. Interestingly, the women who were surveyed in this study who were training to vie for a spot on an American Olympic squad were at a similar height and weight for an average American woman, and on the other side, the men were in general shorter and weighed less than the average American (Indiana University).
However, this also does not mean that just anyone can go out and train to be an Olympic athlete and to compete at this level but there is a certain level of natural talent that goes along with this ability to run at such high paces for such a long time and distance. Only by training for an average of ten years of their life just to be able to reach this point and to compete at this elite level (Indiana University). Even all of this intense training, however, has not lead a very high amount of these elite marathon athletes to actually be able to win an Olympic marathon, as most people have seen if they have ever heard, read, or watched an elite marathon race. Instead, most people would talk about how they see those skinny as a rail Ethiopian or Kenyan seemingly just floating across the surface of a road on their way to yet another victory.
An example of one of these most elite athletes in the world is the current marathon world record holder, Haile Gebrselassie who at the age of thirty-four years old broke the marathon world record time as he won the Berlin marathon in a time of two hours, four minutes, and twenty six seconds. Running at an average pace of under four minutes and fifty seconds per mile (Associated Press); something a very large majority of people could not do for one mile let alone twenty-six point two miles. Gebrselassie however had the strength to “throw up his arms in triumph as he broke the tape” and afterwards he commented on his twenty-fifth world record, accompanying two Olympic ten thousand meter race gold medals, when he said “Don’t ask me how I feel” and continued on by saying “It’s very special, spectacular” (Associated Press). Many people would see this as an understatement after not only having won an elite marathon race but having also broken a world record in the same race. Some people might call Haile Gebrselassie a freak of nature or non-human, although he is just another “normal” human.
There is a man by the name of Dean Karnazes however who is not satisfied by running just a marathon but who is part of a small amount of people who runs ultra marathons. Dean Karnazes however does not think that just a marathon is long enough for one run, even a hundred miles is not enough for him. Dean Karnazes is one of the world’s elite ultra marathon runners. From the outside Karnazes might be a pretty normal looking guy who runs a natural food business, and has two children and a wife. The only thing that’s different about him and the next guy is the fact that he gets up at two in the morning to go out and run fifty miles, and then working a full day at his business (Saporito). This is only a small part of the training routine that he does weekly in order to be able to actually run these extreme distances. Some of his major accomplishments that he has accomplished are endeavors such as running for two hundred and sixty two miles non stop, mountain biking for twenty four hours straight, swimming across the San Francisco Bay, and recently completing a three hundred mile run nonstop, just to name a few of his extraordinary accomplishments (Saporito).
Dean Karnazes has also competed in numerous ultra marathons where surprisingly he hasn’t won and was beat by a woman. Part of the reason for this is because of the actually physiology of marathon or ultra marathon running because of the fact that when these ultra marathoners are running eventually they run out of glucose and have to turn to using up their fat stores in their body. This is beneficial to women, who, on average, have a higher body fat percentage. They can last longer and have more “energy” by using their higher percentage of fat that they have in their bodies (Saporito). Another advantage that women have is that they, unlike men, have a larger supply of estrogen, which acts as if it were an antioxidant, which protects their muscles from breaking down as much as they could otherwise (Saporito).
Many of the things that these ultra marathoners are completely unimaginable for most people to even think about running two hundred miles. However, these ultra marathoners are willing to make them selves run these extreme distances is completely out of the ordinary and are also not what the human body is meant to do. I know this from personal experience because I have run a marathon, and at the end I could barely walk, but to run a marathon another three or four times I could not even begin to think about what it would be like to put your body through so much pain and suffering. There was an extreme amount of pain that I went through when I ran my first marathon, but not nearly to the same extent as these super athletes who go above and beyond the expectation of human functionality and physiology of what a person’s body goes through as it progresses towards the finish line of a marathon as a marathon runner’s body is going through a wide variety of biophysical stressors.
There are two basic principles of training for an endurance event, such as a marathon, which are overload, which is defined as “exercising at a level which causes the body to make specific adaptations to function more efficiently, and specificity which refers to adaptations of both metabolic and physiological systems based on the type of overload used”. (Finke) Specificity also depends on things such as frequency, intensity, duration, and in some cases terrain that all use different types of energy in order for the body to be able to get to the finish line of a marathon (Finke).
The basic energy source that is used from the human body for about the first twenty miles of a marathon, or ultra marathon, are carbohydrates mainly in the form of glycogen and fat stores (Finke). As these materials are broken down because of the presence of oxygen in the human system, the energy that is being used goes up and therefore causes an aerobic workout (Finke). Of course there are waste products of this burning up of glycogen in the human body, some of the byproducts formed such as water, carbon dioxide, glycogen broken down into pyruvate, and lacking necessary oxygen, breaks down into lactic acid, and therefore causing soreness or pain in a person’s body (Finke). As this lactic acid continues to form and accumulate fatigue begins to occur and the glycogen in a person’s body begins to diminish more rapidly (Finke). Eventually these glycogen stores run out, at about mile twenty when the body of a marathon runner has to turn to burning fat in order to keep on progressing to the finish. However there are so side effects to this use of fat as it causes an increase in the amount of oxygen needed to produce an equal amount of energy as burning glycogen would (Finke).
All of these things are true, however, if a person is not willing to train and put in the necessary workouts in order to actually get their muscles and body ready to run over twenty miles. If this is true that person will not physically be able to make themselves run these extreme distances to help optimize the amount of carbohydrates and the consumption and utilization of oxygen. Which both come to be more efficient throughout the training process for a marathon (Finke). In biological terms this basically means that throughout a training program a person’s body utilizes the mitochondria. These mitochondria adapt in a marathoner’s body throughout a long term training regimen so that these microorganisms can increase the amount of aerobic enzymes that are produced in the body. Another function of these mitochondria is to help mobilize and use the available carbohydrates and fats that are stored in the body so that a marathoner can function more efficiently to make sure that that person makes it to the finish line.
Although many people will never have to face these biological challenges or knows about them one things that most people do know that running is very beneficial to improve an individual’s overall health. Which may or may not be included in an individual’s set of goals of what they want to accomplish.
If a person’s goals are not orientated towards running extreme distances there are still many great side effects of running or jogging a few miles every day. Some of these positive side effects are things such as reducing the risk of a stroke, heart attack, breast cancer, and the prevalence of muscle and bone loss (Cummings). Another notable fact is that running can increase the amount of natural human growth hormone in a person’s body, which helps a person look younger, and in shape. Running also helps with the prevalence of a type of good cholesterol named HDL, and encourages the use of nearly fifty percent of your lungs that normally go unused (Cummings).
From these few benefits listed about the benefits of running there is really no reason that a person would not choose to go out for a run. These positive side effects of running are not just limited to marathon running as a person who consistently runs several times a week can help lead themselves to a happier, healthier, and longer life.
From this analysis of marathon running as a sport in the past when it was all started in 490 B.C. to today when marathons are such a widely acclaimed endurance event there has been huge amounts of progress. Not only from the first Olympic marathon that was run in just under three hours to today when modern day super-athletes are getting closer and closer to running under the two hour mark. There has also been a lot of change from when just twenty or thirty years a going out and running just a few miles was enough for anybody, and running a marathon was thought of as being completely out of the norm, to today when a man has run three hundred miles all at once. I believe there are imaginable possibilities in the future of this event, that I also have passion for as I know many of these ideas and concepts not just by looking from the outside in but actually being able to look from the inside out. Therefore I believe that I know much more from my person experience of what it really feels like to be in such an elite group of athletes who are some of the most fit and unique athletes ever known to walk the face of the earth in human history.