I totally agree about the fixation with marathon (and longer distance) running. At the minimum, I don’t think it’s especially healthy. Dean Karnazes notwithstanding, it’s brutal on your joints to run 21+ miles, in honor of some Greek dude who died running.
This might belong in the athletic accomplishments thread, but my greatest running feat was completing a 5K at age 40 more quickly than my age 20 time. I finished a shade under 19 minutes, by pacing myself behind a woman.
As I neared the finish line, my plan was to put on the afterburners, to blow by her and reveal dominance of the Y chromosome. But she was up for the challenge, and had her own kick for the home stretch. While I like to blame it on Comfortably Numb inexplicably being included in my race day playlist, the truth is, she was faster. I couldn’t catch her, but I still took third place in my age group.
For me personally, my attachment to distance running stemmed from the fact that I'm not a very good runner. There was no amount of training I could do, ever, to run a sub-20 5K. My personal best was just under 22 minutes, which is an eternity from sub-20. I was not born with any natural athletic ability at all. But as the saying goes, speed is the gift your parents give you -- endurance is the gift you give yourself. Even a slow schlub like me can build up mileage, at which point the marathon becomes a fairly natural challenge to overcome. Like climbing Mt. Everest because it's there. Also, my willingness to put in a bunch of miles allowed me to out-compete men who are more athletically gifted than me, which was always kind of cool. Those guys would smoke me at shorter distances.
Eventually, though, people like me tend to encounter the same issue that
@MAC_32 's friend encountered. Okay, I completed a marathon, but I can I finish in under 4 hours? Okay, I finished in under 4 hours, but how much lower could I get that number with another training cycle under my belt? Okay, I set a new PR, but can I get myself to the point where I'm legitimately racing this event as opposed to simply covering the distance in a per-determined amount of time? Done, done, done, and done. I'm never going to BQ, so there are no more natural goals for me to chase. I could keep racing and keep getting slower and console myself with "AG PRs" or whatever, but honestly I'd rather just move on to some other challenge. I can't flip a switch and force myself to be all motivated about yet another mid-week long run just to come up with excuses about how losing 5 minutes isn't really that bad for a guy my age. I know that, and everybody else knows that, so what am I trying to prove, and who am I trying to prove it to?
I never liked 5Ks, and I never liked speedwork. I would do them because they were a necessary part of training, but what I was really out there for is the quiet time when I'm alone with my own thoughts. Speedwork won't give me that, but a boring 5-miler on a weekday morning scratches that itch, and I don't need to follow it up with a race.
Hats off to the older guys who are showing up on race day. I totally respect that, and I kind of wish my preferences were such that I could be one of those guys. But they aren't, and that's okay.