The BBC News Magazine has an interesting article today titled ‘From marathons to mud running’ that delves into the emergence of more extreme events rather than the former holy grail of running a marathon. It is not exactly a new theme for those in the running community as the rise of triathlon and the ‘Tough Guy’ style events has been going on for quite a while now.
There is an interesting comment in the article from ‘Dean’:
“People spend a lot of time working so it is very difficult to commit to team games like football or rugby, exercise can become very solitary and boring.”
This is something that I can sympathise with a lot as my free time family time is dominated by all the school events, birthday parties, and study obligations that The Son puts me under. The majority of my runs take place during the working day as I abuse my hour(ish) lunch break to use the treadmill or go for a run around the local area. At the weekend I get at least an hour of karate training as The Son attends school and Mrs Dan attends an aerobics class and I then head off for a long run sometime on the Sunday. I doubt that I could prioritize the time to commit to a team based sport that would require me to attend training at set times and attend related scheduled events (e.g. matches).
Back in my younger days the marathon was seen as the unattainable goal for exercise nutters aficionados but now every man, woman, and dog is out there raising the money demanded of their chosen charity so they can run the London Marathon. Now that the marathon is so mainstream it seems logical that other ‘tougher’ events are going to flourish because who really wants to be perceived as mainstream?
The only problem… What are we all going to do now that the maintstream BBC has published an article on all the extreme events we used to prove how tough and cool we are?
