Ryan Hall Profile in The New Yorker

It's not every day that The New Yorker covers distance running, but the latest issue includes a lengthy profile of Ryan Hall (not available online, unfortunately).

Actually, the article wanders a bit from its purpose of describing the making of a long-distance runner to a long study of the question of what happened to American distance running -- marathoning, in particular - since Frank Shorter won Gold in Munich and Silver in Montreal to the present day.

The author, Peter Hessler, makes the argument that before the U.S. running boom, marathon runners in this country were on the fringe of what was already a fringe sport. And they were obsessed with the marathon and being as fast as they could be.
In other words, it wasn't about finishing, and it wasn't about being healthy; it was about "what can I get out of this machine?"

After the running boom, there were far more participants in marathons in the U.S., but they were slower. In 1982, the 100th finisher in the New York Marathon ran 2:25:45. In 2007, with three times as many participants, the 100th finisher ran 2:39:26.

These days, most marathon runners tend to be educated people with good jobs, not maniacs obsessed with running as many miles as possible, as fast as possible. The New Yorker quotes two remarkable statistics to support this argument: the average household income for participants in the New York Marathon is $130,000; and the median income of subscribers to Runner's World is approximately the same as the median income of people who subscribe to Forbes Magazine.

Or, to put it more bluntly: "For Kenyans and Ethiopians, The running boom...created a lot of slow, rich, American marathoners willing to pay big money to get beat."

But now, we have Hall...and Ritzenheim, and Sell, and a new generation of runners that shows signs of being every bit as obsessed as the marathoners of old. One thing that does come across in the article is that Ryan Hall is definitely an obsessed kind of guy, who struggles to reconcile his uber-competitiveness with his Christian faith.

Hall is also the fastest U.S. Marathoner of all time, and dominated the U.S. Trials last year against the strongest field in U.S. history. His preparations have included training on a Beijing-like course in Bishop, California.

Could he win the marathon like Shorter in 1972? That's the goal. Not just to finish, but to win.