Quote of the Week

Following up on yesterday's Boston Marathon theme, I'll just keep things rolling for Quote of the Week and give the honors to Darren Rovell, for putting things in perspective (which can be hard to do when somebody just ran 26 miles in a tow at a sub-4:42 pace).

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"The men's and women's winners in the Boston Marathon today win $150K each. Josh Beckett will make about $680K per start."
                      - Darren Rovell, CNBC reporter

Well, for what it's worth, until 1986 the Boston Marathon winners didn't get anything at all (save a laurel wreath and maybe a bowl of soup), but yet they still ran. So I guess we can consider this progress, or else just agree that people run marathons for reasons other than money alone.

That would certainly help explain why 24,000 people ran yesterday's race, even when 23,950 or so had zero chance of winning it or even coming close. I, for one, played baseball my whole life, and I loved it. But I definitely wouldn't have loved it if I'd been as hopelessly mediocre as I was in last year's marathon--which I loved every minute of.

Maybe running is one of those things (like golf and sex) that you just don't have to be good at to enjoy. Or maybe we runners just train ourselves not to derive our sense of self-worth from our victory (or lack thereof), because there's always someone faster (just ask Ryan Hall).

Or, more likely, we're all just willing to pay more to see a baseball game than we are to see a race. Yeah, considering that nobody out of the tens of thousands who watched yesterday's race actually bought a ticket, that's probably a pretty important piece to the puzzle. At any rate, congrats once again to Geoffrey Mutai for one of the more impressive feats I've ever seen--even if Josh Beckett did make more for beating the Blue Jays over the weekend.