Pheidippides’ Postulate*

Journal of Runners’ Predictive Justifications, Vol 3, No. 1, pp 1345-1347

Connecticut is in a deep freeze. My favorite trails are impassable, the roads are narrowed by mountains of snow, and the temperatures are routinely dipping into areas where even I fear to tread.  Ergo, I am spending this memorable winter in my soul-sucking fluorescent-lit fitness center with nary a window in sight, obsessively pounding on a treadmill with a dozen other like minded maniacal gerbils.

Like a gardener, I maintain my sanity by turning my thoughts to spring. Unlike a gardener, I’m not dreaming of heirloom vegetables or 400 pound pumpkins.  What I think about for hours and hours and hours on end is math. Yes. Math. (Trust me, when your only other options are a garishly painted wall or a 3-month old People magazine, math starts to look downright entertaining.) In particular, I’ve been trying to calculate my estimated finishing time for the 2009 Boston Marathon. Lest you think I am irrational or over the edge on this, go directly to your local Google search bar and type in “estimated marathon time.” I’ll wait.

See? EVERY runner obsesses about their marathon finishing time. There are more equations for estimating your marathon time than there are for estimating your compound interest or the number of pounds you will gain from that pint of Chunky Monkey or the number of neurons you lose every time your children need help with their multiplication tables.

The general idea behind these things is that you take a recent official time from a race of some considerable distance and use a formula to calculate potential marathon time.  The simplest equation calls for multiplying average time per minute by 26.2 and adding 10%. The problem with all of these equations is that they seem so…so one dimensional. So flat. So easy.

I have never met an equation that I understood at first glance, so I am right away suspicious when one makes sense without my head hurting. But there’s something else that just doesn’t add up.  As I mulled these equations over in my cage one day, I realized that they incorporate absolutely NOTHING about a marathon other than the running. Given, the running is kind of important, it being a marathon and all, but there are a veritable multiplicity of additional variables that come into play.  Otherwise, why not just line up 25,000 treadmills and set us loose on them?

The equations in their current state do nothing to capture the poetry of these things.  How does one incorporate intangibles like weather? Or connective tissue catastrophes? How do we account for the music, the Wellesley Scream Tunnel, or the Mile 17 Port-o-potty line?  What about the ability of the Green Line to get your pit crew to the right mile marker at the right time?

Now, I’m not saying that we should throw in the towel on these equations.  Far from it.  Instead, I think we should ramp things up a little.  For this reason, and because I am apparently the only maniacal gerbil that hasn’t already done so, I am throwing my own equation into the ring.  After about 50 miles on the treadmill, here is what I have come up with:

where:

h = Rough Boston marathon time, calculated here as half marathon time by x 14.4

♫ = Battery life of my i-phone.

β = The Boston Factor. (β= bib # x 0.01 seconds).  (Note: Say what you will about chip times, trying to get across the start line with 25,000 other people costs you time, especially if your bib # happens to be 24,900. The inverse of the Reynolds number (Я) is occasionally used in place of β, particularly for overweight athletes. (i.e. Fillies, Clydesdales, Clowns)

£ = (Life) = (# days the children are unexpectedly home from school) x (number of faculty meetings) x (# of hours in soul sucking gym) + (fill-in the-blank-here) /(the collective IQ of my students)

Þ= Port-a-potty stops (related to but not fully incorporated by β). Failure to incorporate Port-a-potty lines into your race strategy could result in unrecoverable time losses, unless you intend to forgo Þ altogether (NOT recommended).

wx* = Logarithmic function incorporating wind direction, wind velocity, temperature and precipitation. {0.9 to 0}>Wind at the back, 60^o overcast day = 0.9, Patriot’s Day Storm of 2007 = 0. Note: when wx*=0, equation is void)

I *= Ingestion rate (It’s not just for copepods anymore!) I* = I^r (Ingestion rate during race (limited to gels, jelly beans, and chocolate covered espresso beans – a blissfully synergistic combination of pure sugar and pure caffeine)) X I^T (Ingestion rate in the months before race, a logarithmic function incorporating food quantity, nutritional quality and total body mass, expressed in kilograms) X I^P (total carbohydrate ingestion rate in the three days immediately prior to the race (expressed as number of noodles cleared per hour)).

= Relative paralysis of the Boston Green Line on race day, measured in mph  (directly impacts I^r and is related to average alcohol consumption of Red Sox fans departing the Fenway).

= the Bozo Factor. Note that while all other factors have the potential to increase overall time, the Bozo Factor is the only term that significantly decreases it. (The Bozo Factor can be increased, thereby decreasing overall time, by re-reading the Boston Marathon 2008 Finishing Time Catalog prior to start time.) i.e. The clown is everything.

It can easily be shown that the entire equation simplifies to x², where x = 16.

Solution: I am absolutely confident (some would say to the 95% level) that I will finish the Boston Marathon between 2:30 and 3:30 PM EST.

Assumptions:  My hatred for the clown will prevail.  Without it, the competitive spirit is lost, and it is all just a stroll in the park.

Speaking of the competitive spirit, for those of you who were hoping to be the FIRST to donate to my 2009 Marathon fund, you have been beaten to the punch by Sandy Lester.  (Go Sandy!) Note that 2nd, 3d, 4th and 5th place are still available.  And there is always the coveted “Most Donated” prize.  Just click on the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge image above to make all of your dreams come true. (Now isn’t that a LOT easier than running the damn thing?)

*Pheidippides was the first ever marathon runner.  He kind of, uh, died at the end of the run.  Nothing is known of how long is took him to complete his 26 mile odyssey.

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