We all know that running with headphones on can be dangerous, and that in nearly every race it is officially banned by the race organizers (though that ban is rarely enforced). But ESPN s Jeff Pearlman has discovered an even better reason to go pod-free in the marathon: wearing headphones makes you really slow. At least, that s why he thinks he finished the Philly Marathon in 3:41 instead of 3:05:
And lest you think it s just that he had the wrong music, bear this in mind:
Somehow, some way, an iPod does not merely cheapen the experience. It robs from it. Even the greatest marathoners of my lifetime — the Alberto Salazars, the Rod Dixons, the Martin Lels, the Paul Tergats — feel intensive pain upon reaching miles 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26. Your legs freeze up. Yours arms stiffen. You want to walk, to crawl, to literally die. Why am I doing this? Never again! Never, ever, ever again! No way in hell.
Torture is rarely fun. But it s an integral part of the marathon. What better to bond the legions of runners who do this semi-regularly?
Black or white, Jew or gentile, a 6-minute miler or a 12-minute miler — we can relate over the putrid hells of cramps and blisters; rain and snow.
But music … music softens things. It s a crutch, an enabler — excellent for training, wrong for racing. At the end of the day, I wanted my iPod to make the Philadelphia Marathon just a wee bit easier. I craved the euphoria of a PR, sans the struggle.
That may be the best summary of modern marathoning we ve seen. What better way to describe the headphoned hordes wearing cotton shirts that say “Didn t Train” as they shuffle along at a speed that has more in common with a Sunday stroll in the park than with any sort of running, than as people seeking euphoria without struggle?
But there is no euphoria without struggle, as Teddy Roosevelt noted over a century ago:
Finishing a marathon is no longer a triumph; the marathon boom of the last decades has shown us that with modern training methods, and enough time to finish, there is not a person on this earth who can not cover 26.2 miles, even if some of them have to crawl at the end. But while anyone can finish a marathon, there are fewer and fewer people who seem capable of actually running a marathon; of preparing for the race for months in an effort to cut 10 minutes  or even 10 seconds  off their PR, knowing the whole time that a thousand things could go wrong on race day to foil that goal; or even that they just may not have 10 more seconds in them.
The pod-people will never have to worry about that. They tap so little of their marathon potential, and set their goals so low, that there is no way for them to be disappointed. But what is that worth? As TR also said, “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”