I settled on a loose interpretation of one of Higdon’s programs that emphasized a progressive mileage buildup, plenty of running at race pace, and track and hill workouts once a week. I had been running the trails around my home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, semi-regularly through the winter, but if I wanted to break three hours, I knew I had to step up my training. The race has a net loss of 700 feet over the 26.2 miles and-perhaps more importantly since I live at 7,000 feet-it’s at sea level. (By now it should be clear that the photo above is neither of me nor of the race I ran in.) Nearly a year after the Ryan interview, I finally settled on the Mountains to Beach Marathon in Ventura, California.
Now, the call of the clock was sucking me back in. I had run one marathon, in 2008, when I was 21-years-old, and came in at exactly 3:29:34. Not as much as the Kenyans have, but a smidgen.” “You also need at least a smidgen of talent. “You need to train with the same dedication as a Ryan Hall or a Shalane Flanagan,” says Hal Higdon, owner of a 2:21 marathon PR and author of 36 books, most of which are about running. Sub-three is a goal with no reward, a personal vendetta against the clock. A Boston qualifier for my age group (18-34) is 3:05 and runners who win local marathons run in the 2:30 range. You have to be fast and dedicated to a pretty all-encompassing training plan, but aside from the number two leading off your result time, there are zero practical reasons to aim for it. Three hours is an odd and somewhat arbitrary goal. “Doing it in less than 3 hours is really hard. Two percent! “Running a marathon is hard,” Remy writes. Writing at, Mark Remy pointed out that though thousands aim for it, only two percent of marathon finishers in 2011 ran under three hours. P90X had only run a 4:01:25.īut later, in the spate of editorials about what it meant for a politician to lie about a marathon time, one fact jumped out at me. Now, I’m okay with my politicians being better than me at balancing a budget or having more neckties, but I’ll be damned if they’re faster than me.
In August 2012, the Republican vice-presidential candidate told an interviewer that he had run a marathon in: “under three, high twos.
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