The Mahoney-Meandering-Marathon Distance
26.65 miles. That is the Mahoney-Meandering-Marathon Distance.
The WHAT?!
Bear with me. You can have your own meandering-marathon distance, too, but you might want to use mine for starters. (More on that in a moment.)
26.65 miles is the actual, average distance, rounded to two decimal places, that I covered over my last two marathons.
As discussed in another blog post, I found by tracking those marathons with a GPS wrist unit that I ran and walked farther than the official 26.21875 miles between starting-line mat and finish-line mat.
Why the longer distance? Because I did not cut all corners along each marathon course. Technically, this is not “meandering”, but you get the point, and I got the memory-jogging alliteration for the name of this distance.
Why should you care to know your or my meandering-marathon distance?
Let me explain with a comic-strip reference. In syndicated comic strip The Family Circus, one of cartoonist Bil Keane’s most popular themes, as noted at Wikipedia, “is the dotted line comics, showing the characters’ paths through the neighborhood or house followed by a thick dotted line.”
I love those dotted-line comics because they show how a child often will not walk or run in a straight line from point A to point B — such as from where the child is playing outside to the kitchen to which the mother is calling the child. Instead, the dotted line in those comics shows how a child will meander all around the lawn and house to arrive in front of the mother. So the child walks or runs probably three to five times the distance necessary to reach the mother.
My marathon meandering is not THAT bad, but it is valuable to know about and quantify. Here’s why:
If …
- you have a target duration between your crossing the starting-line mat and your crossing the finish-line mat — the chip-timed duration, often called the “chip-time”,
AND - you wear a GPS wrist unit during the marathon and use its pace readouts to keep you “on schedule”,
AND - you do not take the absolutely shortest path through the marathon course but instead “meander” (like most of us),
… then you will end up with a longer chip-time than what your GPS unit’s average pace was predicting.
The reason? You planned your pace based on the chip-time for the official distance of a marathon, but you went farther than that distance to get to the finish line.
There are at least two solutions to this:
- Wear a stopwatch that you start at the starting line, and memorize or wear a table of what your total time should be at each mile-marker, so that you know whether you are on schedule to cross the finish line in the chip-time that you want.
- Wear a GPS unit, and consult its pace readouts to know whether you are on schedule.
Solution #1 has the advantage of being simple and relatively inexpensive. You only need a stopwatch and a good memory or a plastic-covered printout of your desired total time at each mile-marker.
Solution #1 has the disadvantage of giving you feedback about your pace — about whether you are staying on schedule for your desired chip-time — only once per mile.
Solution #2 has the advantage of giving you constant feedback about your pace. Even if you run at a six- or seven-minutes-per-mile pace, that is a LOT more feedback than what you get with solution #1.
But solution #2 has a HUGE disadvantage, unless you know your meandering-marathon distance. That disadvantage comes not from the GPS unit but instead from you. Without knowing your meandering-marathon distance or at least being aware that you have one and using mine (26.65 miles) for starters, your actual chip-time will be longer than what you were expecting.
I still prefer solution #2, given that I have a GPS unit and that I know my meandering-marathon distance and therefore can calculate a pace for that distance based on my desired total time.
Here is the formula to calculate what your average pace should be when you account for meandering during a marathon:
- Identify your average official pace for your desired chip-time for the official marathon distance.
- For example, suppose you want to run a marathon in five hours.
- Then your official pace must be 11:27/mile.
- Convert your official pace from MM:SS/mile to seconds per mile.
- For example, 11:27/mile = 687 seconds/mile.
- Multiply that official pace in seconds per mile by the official distance divided by the meandering distance to get your meandering pace in seconds per mile.
- For example, suppose that your meandering distance is the same as mine — 26.65 miles.
- Then your meandering pace will be 687 seconds/mile x (26.21875/26.65), which equals 675.88 seconds/mile.
- Convert your meandering pace in seconds per mile to MM:SS/mile.
- For example, 675.88 seconds/mile = 11:15.88/mile.
- Rounding down to be sure that you finish in five hours, that is 11:15/mile.
This example illustrates:
- An 11:27/mile pace lets you cover the official distance in five hours.
- An 11:15/mile pace lets you cover my meandering distance in five hours.
That is twelve seconds/mile faster when you account for meandering!
This “twelve seconds/mile faster” is not a general rule of thumb. Instead, you must use the above formula to calculate your meandering pace.
For example, with my meandering distance,
- A 6:00/mile official pace equals a 5:54/mile meandering pace.
- An 8:00/mile official pace equals a 7:52/mile meandering pace.
- A 10:00/mile official pace equals a 9:50/mile meandering pace.
- A 12:00/mile official pace equals an 11:48/mile meandering pace.
- A 14:00/mile official pace equals a 13:46/mile meandering pace.
Because the math is harder for micro-level pacing, I have done the math for you — expanding my pace-tables report for the “Mahoney-Meandering-Marathon” distance for the 5:1 method and so on, all the way down to the 1:1 method (as well as flat-out running or walking).
What is your meandering-marathon distance? Leave a comment here. Thanks!
