Marathon for the masses

Next Sunday, 6,000 runners will line up along Congress Avenue, tightening their shoelaces and tucking away Gu packets before the start of the LiveStrong Austin Marathon.

They'll spend an average of four hours and 20 minutes chugging 26.2 miles around the city, taking part in an event that's as much social hour as it is sport.

At the end, whether they tore through the course in 21/2 hours or walked every other mile, they'll get a medal and the right to call themselves marathoners.

The LiveStrong marathon is just one of more than 600 marathons nationwide. That's double the number of marathons in 1980 available to running junkies looking for their fix. Last year alone, 35 new marathons made their debut.

During the same period, the number of marathon finishers swelled from 143,000 to more than 500,000. All those new runners, though, moved a lot more slowly.

In 1980, the median completion time for a U.S. marathon was 3 hours 32 minutes for men and 4 hours 3 minutes for women, according to Running USA. By 2010, the median time had slowed to 4 hours 16 minutes for men and 4 hours 43 minutes for women.

It's not that elite runners are running slower, it's that more slow runners are tackling the distance. And most of them are running just to finish, without much thought to how long it takes.

Marathons have evolved from serious sporting events for top-notch athletes to rolling road parties with people in costume, bands every few miles, and people walking — instead of running — stretches of the race.

Depending who you talk to, that evolution has been either good or bad.

"The wonderful thing about the marathon is it's for the elite and the common man — it's the great equalizer," says John Conley, director of the LiveStrong Austin Marathon, which marks its 20th anniversary this year. (A half marathon with 12,000 runners and a 5K with 2,000 are part of the lineup.) "The marathon is a different kind of event. It doesn't require speed, it requires fortitude."

Some hard-core runners, though, say slowpokes are zapping the marathon of its prestige. Once, only the best runners finished marathons; now scores of mediocre athletes (and non-athletes) are pounding out 26.2 miles.

They argue that a six-hour finisher isn't really "running a marathon," he's just participating.

An article in The New York Times in 2009 quoted Adrienne Wald, the women's cross-country coach at the College of New Rochelle, who said that slow runners have lowered the bar so much that it no longer means anything to finish one.

That article unleashed a flurry of debate (which continued in the Fit City blog later that year).

The slowpokes, on the other hand, say fast runners should just get over it. At a time when about two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight and third are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, isn't encouraging regular folks to exercise a good thing? The slow runners don't interfere with fast runners, who are long gone before they cross the finish line. Besides, without the masses signing up and paying race registration fees, they note, some marathons couldn't stay in business.

Today's runner is running for health and completion, not competition, says Ryan Lamppa, a researcher for Running USA. Today's runner is also older and doesn't necessarily have the stereotypical thin, wiry body of yesteryear.

That's because group training programs have made the sport less intimidating and more welcoming to regular people, Lamppa says. The Internet has made it easy to share enthusiasm about running, too.

"People now know where to start," Lamppa says. "They can talk to friends, go online — it's made access to being able to finish a marathon open to everyone."

There's nothing wrong with that, says John Bingham, a running columnist and author of "No Need for Speed." Bingham, who counts himself as a slowpoke, says his best marathon time ever was 4 hours 35 minutes — and that was too fast.

"It was like rushing through a good meal," he says. "I looked around and said, ‘Why are we in a hurry?' "

These days he savors each marathon, making it last about six hours. "If I find great people to talk to, it could be longer than that," he says.