I Love Annie wrote:
There is nothing impressive about jogging 26.2 miles every day.
There is if you raise just shy of £300k in the process. I, like so many others, ran my first marathon distance with Ben on a 401. No, it's not "a marathon" as we all stopped for lunch, the pace was really gentle, there was no winner. But I met people for whom running with Ben had really inspired them: the lady with Lupus whose 4.5km was amazing but broken, the guy with bursitis in both ankles who was running his 11th 401 marathon (against medical advice!), the woman who had travelled from Greece...
People dropped in and out all day - you walked or ran what you wanted to do, from 1km to 42km. The message was just 'get out there, chat, run, be sociable, raise money for two big charities in the process, then get a selfie with Ben afterwards'. He frequently stopped to give talks to schools, but also ran official chip timed marathons as part of the 401.
I'm really proud of my 42.3km, which was 21km longer than I had ever run before (I signed up only a week before so had no training, and was returning from injury with no more than 8km as my longest run in the weeks preceding it). As a tail-runner I did a lot of walking and talking as well as jogging, so my moving time was an hour slower than I'd like to aim for in my first marathon (in other words, 30 minutes slower than I'll actually achieve), but I proved to myself I could do it - and felt good about having been part of it too.
So, yes and no. For a competitive athlete, jogging 42km a day isn't a big deal. For underfit undertrained hobby-joggers it's a bloody miracle.