Marathon Badassery, Part VI

I'm at least fairly confident this is the sixth installment of my "Marathon Badassery" series. We've got one, two, three, four, and five here, so unless I missed one this is lucky number six.

It's interesting enough that Runner's World is reporting that a man completed the recent Baltimore Marathon wearing flip-flops. 

The fact that Keith Levasseur posted a time of 2:46.58 makes it even more unbelievable. His goal was a sub-three-hour time, he told Runner's World. 

"I knew it was all about maintaining a very efficient and balanced stride," he told Runner's World. "There were times when my feet and ankles would get tired from maintaining a more rigid stride than I might otherwise have and I would start landing more on the outside of the my foot and cause my heel to slip off the sandal. It only happened a few times and when it did, it would refocus my concentration on my stride and posture." 

Oddball running stunts are nothing new, and countless runners have completed marathons in costumes or barefoot, but Levasseur's speed is remarkable.

Of course, the obvious question here is "why?", and I don't really have a good answer for that one. I don't usually like to recognize these kinds of stunts on the blog unless they're seriously badass—since so many of these stunts are just basic attention-whoring behavior—but in this case I figured why not?

At least this guy really did run a marathon in under three hours, unlike some people we know, and that deserves to be recognized one way or another. Nice running, big guy.

[Boston.com]