For Ukrainian Runners, a Brutal Race Made Sense When Little Else Did
Enlarge this image toggle caption Yuri Kadobnov/AP Yuri Kadobnov/AP
The world’s shortest marathon has been run in the Ukrainian city of Kirovohrad. For some, it’s the answer to an aging and shrinking community. But the distance is still a big deal.
It’s not so much the record that made it memorable, the world championships in 2014 or even the way it came out of nowhere, with the race start at 9:30 in the morning. (It’s now 5:30 a.m. for the 2015 race.)
It’s the fact that it was so much more than that. It was a brutal race.
“You could hear the guy next to you, who was wearing a headband, just about take it off,” said one runner, who is now running and talking about it publicly (at 25.1 miles: a 1,000-pace improvement since the first official run in 2004). “It was brutal. I can’t even imagine the pain, and the strain that comes out of it. You’re not just going for the marathon, you’re also training for this race, not just running three miles. You’re going for three or four hours at speed. It’s like running for your entire life. And you never get over it.”
That’s the mindset of all the winners: A life-long obsession with running, one that is fueled only by the desire to run every day.
For more than a decade, this has been the way the U.S. has built its world-class runners, from Olympians to half-marathoners to ultra-marathoners. The U.S. has created a class of so-called “distance runners” that, when you strip out the top level runners, are more like 5,000-pace sprinters who are as dedicated to their sport as they are to their families. Those U.S. distance runners have no problem running 5,000 miles in a single year, or more than twice that when factoring in more than two months of travel, with a new record number of entrants in the world’s most prestigious races in the last year, the 2013 Boston Marathon.
But in recent years, this model