I think I'm not on my own by being torn about this stuff. I have absolutely no problem with either her being slow or having her slow self chronicled in an article on MSNBC. However, I think its just yet another reminder of where this sport is.
The average person has a completely inflated view of how fast they are. Add a lack of common knowledge about track, etc and you get people thinking that they've run 4 minutes for a mile because they ran 4 laps on a 1/8 mile indoor track and other ignorant, but not malicious bs. I remember when Geb set a 5k wr a while back, I thought it would be an excellent thing to bring up in a class I was teaching. I relayed that that was like doing almost 4 minute miles for a 3 miles. There was a huge passive silence. One of my students then said "Don't people run 4 minute miles all the time?" I was stunned.
Conversely, in our increasingly sedentary society doing any sort of physical exertion for over an hour is met with some sort of awe as if you tempted death itself. Talk about running a marathon and the average individual is impressed simply with the distance of it and the amount of time that you'd have to run to cover that distance. Speed doesn't compute.
I think the main problem with where road racing is right now is that there is a huge gulf between those who view it as their sport of choice (talent aside) and those who are doing it because it's an event. Unfortunately, the latter is prevailing and gaining even more ground every day. As a result, your average road race today is either a 5k run/WALK that's 'fun' to participate in or a marathon that serves as some sort of rite of passage regardless of whether you trained, did well, etc. The point in both is to finish. Again, speed has nothing to do with anything.
So, while I don't have a problem w/ her "doing" a marathon, or even writing about it, I don't really embrace anything that makes running less a sport and more an event.
I played some baseball in high school, but I sucked. Those are the objective facts. I wasn't a winner for showing up. What I was doing was in fact quite different from what Wade Boggs, Roger Clemens, etc were doing. I was, in fact, a poor baseball player. This woman currently sucks as a distance "athlete". Not railing on her, she just does. However, maybe with some real work (15 miles a freakin' week?), she could write about what it's like to actually run and compete.