What Makes a Marathoner?

There’s an oft-cited statistic that claims that only 0.1 per cent of people have run a marathon. Or maybe it’s 0.01 per cent. Nobody really knows, but it’s very rare. We do know that an extremely small minority of people have run 42.2K in a race. For the recreational road runner, there are few things as rare – or challenging – as the marathon.

There’s also no other athletic achievement that draws as much defensive derision: “I don’t even like driving that far! Was someone chasing you?” etc. It’s good-natured, as long as you understand that it comes from a place of “I couldn’t possibly fathom the depth of your accomplishment, so I have no choice but to minimize it.”

But there’s one question that’s rarely examined: what makes a marathoner? For some, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime achievement. For others, marathons define their every day: they plan their evenings around the next morning’s run, which they run with their friends who do the same thing. When they’re not training, they’re reading books about running. Diet is dictated in large part by how food will fuel runs. But how do you get from one to the other? When does “marathoner” stop representing something you did and become something you are?