Mini-Marathons

Ok – I don’t get it.  Why do people call things a “Mini-Marathon”?  Why does someone go around and say “I ran a mini-marathon, have you run a mini-marathon?”.  I don’t know, what the heck is a mini-marathon?  Is it a marathon you run with mini-mouse, like a variation of the Disney Marathon? Upon Googling I found that generally a Mini-Marathon is simply a Half-Marathon.  Ok…umm…why not call it that?

To be clear – I think the half-marathon distance is awesome.  It’s my favorite distance.  It’s just right in terms of length and not as painful as a full marathon.  It takes a fair amount of effort; but you can still go on and have a normal remainder of the day.  As once described to me – “The half marathon is really a much more gentlemanly distance than a full marathon”.

But where does the ‘mini’ part come in?  It’s a qualitative word that doesn’t really describe anything.  It doesn’t tell me (or anyone else) how long the race is.  For all I know it could be 1/4th the length of a Marathon, or even 1/8th.  To me ‘mini’ doesn’t mean half – but some small amount – like 10% or 20%.  It means tiny, small – or rather very small.

Finishing a half-marathon is just as important as finishing a marathon.  People don’t look down on someone because they ‘only’ ran 13.1 miles.  Seriously. 

I think before I ran a marathon I thought that everyone who had run a marathon thought people who hadn’t run one before were “inferior runners”.  I think many forums perpetuate attitude.  After completing the distance – I now believe what some say – it just doesn’t matter.  To me I don’t care that the longest distance you’ve gone is 1K, 10K, 10 Miles or 100 miles.  As long as you’ve found whatever distance you like running – and go out and run your hardest, that’s all that really matter.  (Although, the people that run those weird 8 Mile races do need some professional help)

You’re no less of a runner for calling it a ‘half-marathon’ than calling it a ‘mini-marathon’.  To me the term ‘mini-marathon’ tries to imply full marathon status by conjuring up confusion around what it really is.  People don’t go around calling a 5K race a ‘mini-10K’ – do they?  Nope.  Call it what it is, not some made-up name. 

Be proud of the fact that you ran 13.1 miles – don’t try and cover it up with ‘mini-marathon’ branding.  99.9% of the people around you can’t run 13.1 miles (or probably even 2 miles), so telling someone that you ran half-marathon is impressive enough.  If someone doesn’t think that 13.1 miles is impressive – tell them to run it faster then.  There is always room for improvement. :)

Ok…my random rainmaker rant is complete.

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