Marathon Week

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from August 2000.)

As a frequent flier to marathons, I inevitably bump into megamarathoners. They fly anywhere and everywhere to add another race to their total.

In Edmonton this summer my path again crossed that of Peter Butler. He has traveled from his home in St. Paul to run “something over 400” marathons. On my last trip to Canada I met Wally Herman, who has marathoned more than 500 times.

They take after Sy Mah and Norm Frank in this quest. Mah’s lifetime count of marathons, 524, was thought to be unbreakable until Frank broke it a few years ago.

At yet another Canadian marathon a few years ago I met Gordon Hartshorn. He had started his turn-of-the-century celebration early by trying to run marathons 200 weeks in a row by the year 2000 – all while dealing with prostate cancer. The illness ended his streak at 74 weeks and took his life in 1998.

This piece remembers him. He inspired the thoughts herein.

When we last talked at the Canadian Rockies Marathon in Canmore, Alberta, I mentioned in passing my own longtime marathon-a-week habit. His eyes widened – until I added, “... as a weekly total, that is.”

My weeks lined up much differently than Gordon’s. He did little else but rest up and travel between races. This is how most megamarathoners do it.

I like to run too much to do it only a few days a week. And I’m not tough enough to go the weekend distances that Gordon did.

Only twice have I even run two marathons in as many weeks. Now I’m lucky to put in two a year. But I’ve long taken weekly marathons the easy way – on the installment plan.

Miles don’t count with me. I never check them, choosing instead to keep score by time periods.

For much of my running life I’ve totaled 3½ to four hours a week. That’s marathon time, more or less.

(It was more in the long-gone days when I routinely averaged eight-minute training miles. Today, while taking at least a minute longer to complete each mile, my total probably falls slightly under a marathon. But who’s checking?)

My weekly running settled at marathon-like distance 20 years ago. Only the daily doses have changed since then, not the time-honored weekly total.

Marathon-a-week was what I ran in the gray days of nothing longer or shorter than a half-hour, never taking a day off and always totaling 3½ hours. Marathon-a-week was still the total during my brief flirtation with running every other day for an hour at a time. Marathon-a-week was my total while running by three-day cycles – long one day, faster the next and rest the third.

Marathon-a-week has been my practice since returning to more frequent running, usually six days a week with one longer day before the day off. This total even holds steady on the rare occasions when I attempt a true marathon and the race itself is my only run that week.

Few of us are superpeople who can run a marathon every weekend. We don’t have the legs or drive – or the travel budget – for it.

But the marathon spread across the full week is a nice substitute when the real thing is out of reach. Gordon Hartshorn would approve.

UPDATE FROM 2014

The length, in time, of my average day's activity has gone up as the pace has slowed since writing this piece. A marathon would take longer to finish now, but I still total marathon time in a good week – the easy way.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in  as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]