soccer players are the best! i want to see frankie haydek run a marathon.
Decent little story there.
Any healthy and active male should be able to qualify for Boston. It took this guy three tries, you gotta have proper pacing and some lungs and it shouldn't be too difficult for anyone.
Yeah right. No one should believe this story.
Sydney Maree says in "Running with the Champions" that he ran sub four (mile) in high school off of playing soccer and running a little on the weekends. Of course he also says that in college he regularly ran 10 miles in 45 minutes for his morning runs.
This story is entirely believable. I ran a 2:59 marathon in high school with zero run training. I just wanted to see if I could run a marathon and registered the day before the event. I didn't run track or cross country in high school but was a competitive swimmer until grade 9. In high school I was probably walking on average around 15 km a day (to and from school, walking the dog, etc) and playing soccer or football every day at lunch and sometimes after school. I was also on my feet at work around 20 hrs a week. Like the guy in the article, I had no idea how to pace and went out with the leaders in 36 flat through 10k, 1:19 through the half, and really ran out of gas over the last 15k, resorting to multiple walking breaks and taking 1:40 to finish the second half.
Haven't run a marathon since, as it was a very lousy experience, but I walked on to my university team in my second year there and had success collegiately and post-collegiately in the mile to half marathon distances. Moral of the story: you don't need great running mechanics to run a sub-3hr marathon. I had a decent VO2 max from the residual benefits of swim training and a lot of time spent on my feet and that proved to be enough.
His Napa Valley marathon (which obviously has the wrong age) is listed as a 3:35. That doesn't qualify for Boston. I believe that someone can run a 3:35 with no training. No questions asked.
So obviously after this 3:35 experience, he began to train.