Boston Marathon: The First Century of the World's Premier Running Event (Centennial Race Edition) [Paperback]

Tom Derderian has it all here: hundred years of petty evil, as of 1996. There are marathons and ultras all over the world, but the Boston Marathon is supposed to be the granddaddy of them all. This suggests that Mort Sahl was right, and that Darwin was wrong. Endurance travelers have declined in quality since the days of Paul Revere.

The subject matter of this book doesnï¿t even merit one star, but I guess that the completeness with which the subject is covered might be a minor saving grace.

ï¿Completeï¿ doesnï¿t mean even-handed, of course. The map of the route through Boston taken by the runners is featured in this book. But there is no mention of all of the honest people, over 100 years, in Boston and elsewhere, minding their own business, whose business was deterred because their normal routes were closed to them in order to accommodate gaggles of smug, self-righteous, human spare parts with numbers on their waists and noses in the air (ï¿How fit we are, and how pathetic you are - God has given us the RIGHT to delay and inconvenience youï¿).

Still, there isnï¿t anything so vile about a marathon runner with pretensions of fitness that an early death by natural causes canï¿t Fixx. And, by the way, guess which famous marathon runner is never even mentioned in this book as an example of the possible connection between marathoning and heart failure.

Yes, this book propagates the myth that the ability to run a marathon is some sort of indicia of physical fitness. Bill Rodgers has the chutzpah to suggest, in the text, that ï¿the marathon is the king of sportsï¿. Oh, you dog!

The studies vary, but there are enough case histories of marathon runners dying of brain cancer and heart failure (of course, these are not alluded to in this book) to cause one to suspect that the ability to complete a marathon is NOT an ultimate test of physical fitness - or even a sport at all - so much as it is a ï¿knackï¿. The ability to open a beer bottle with oneï¿s teeth is also a ï¿knackï¿, but at least its practitioners tend to mind their own business and donï¿t promote themselves as athletes.

They donï¿t promote themselves as idols either, but Derderian gives us stories from the two World Wars in a vain attempt to convince the discerning reader that an endurance athlete can be a war hero - this is presumably also in furtherance of the fitness myth (but surprisingly enough, he disparages the legend of Pheidippides). Yet when was the last time that any military recruiter set up shop at a marathon finish line?

Maybe it was faintly possible for a marathoner to become a military hero in the days of Bill Kennedy and Sidney Hatch, but itï¿s scarcely conceivable now as the ï¿sportï¿ becomes the province of the yuppies.

The photos in this book, especially the more recent ones, probably tell us more than the author would have us know about the de-evolution of the marathon runner. And the picture on the front cover is fairly typical of them: thereï¿s the sexless Joan Benoit crossing the finish line with her right fist pumped high in a fit of masculine ardor. Due to the peculiar physical requirements that make the ï¿idealï¿ endurance runner and the attitudes that such individuals conventionally assume, endurance races themselves are a race of the androgynous - featuring skinny, un-muscular, passive leisure-class males, motivated by a peculiar form of vanity, and flat-chested masculinized sneering leisure-class females, motivated by penis envy and hate-male.

Shoot, look at the guy whose picture is on the last page. All that I see are teeth on a skeletal frame in clothing. Thatï¿s the author, folks - a marathoner himself.

Interestingly enough, this book ends at the cusp of a new era in the marathon freak-show - the passing of the torch from arrogant yuppies to emaciated Nigerians who seem even leaner and hungrier than those they are surpassing. This development was just starting to unfold when the author wrote the chapter called ï¿The Jinx and the Mad Africansï¿, and weï¿re still awaiting reports from the field on how our own home-grown plutocratic pasta-chompers respond to being outperformed by Third-Worlders.

Needless to say, the moral uplift that Derderian attempts to invoke in his Afterword is completely inappropriate, given the banal immorality of endurance races and the athletes who run them. The postscript to every endurance race and the epitaph of every runner was best expressed by Ray Garraty, Walker No. 47, from Stephen Kingï¿s ï¿The Long Walkï¿: ï¿I was one in a million. I wasnï¿t bright enough to realize the circus fat lady is, tooï¿.