I enjoy watching sports on television like any sports minded person. There is one exception to most sports enthusiasts that I enjoy watching that they probably pass on. I watched the Tokyo Marathon last week. Two things make this difficult to watch for the majority of sports viewers. One is that watching a marathon has been likened to watching grass grow, or watching paint dry, as for over two hours all you see are legs moving back and forth. The second problem is that it was in Japan and the time difference made viewing between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. Not many people will watch a marathon race at those hours.
One other problem is that it is hard to describe just what running a marathon is like to the average person. Most have no concept of how far 26.21876 miles is in length. For most, that is like saying the moon is a long way off. When you tell them that it is like running from San Marcos to Austin they seem to get a better idea of what running a marathon is like. Trying to explain how fast the runners are moving is another sticking point. Instead of miles per hour the description of a runner’s pace is miles per minute – he is running a 9: minute mile. This is a difficult concept for many to understand if they are not in the running community.
For even those individuals that are runners it is often hard for them to imagine what it is like to run at a fast pace. Way back when Roger Bannister broke the first four-minute mile, it was considered an almost impossible task. Roger Landry broke that record a few weeks later. When the big showdown race between the two record breakers was held they both broke the four-minute mile with Roger Landry being the winner. Since then, there have been track races where as many as eight of the top finishers all broke four minutes. There have been several high school runners that have either broke that four-minute barrier, or at least have come very close to it. For the normal runner the four-minute mile is something only the elite runner can accomplish and trying to even comprehend what it is like to run that fast is hard to imagine. The best example is running around a track for a quarter mile. A four-minute mile has you running around the quarter-mile track in one minute (60 seconds). That can be done for good runners. The hard part is doing it four times in a row without stopping. I ran a five-minute mile (75 seconds per lap) one day and I had many doubts on that last lap about even surviving.
