Monday, April 19, 2010

MAM Day 19: Marathon Monday

In honor of the 2010 Boston Marathon, today is a shortened blog post with marathon related math.

Celebrating the 114th Annual Boston Marathon, 2,500 years since the first marathons were run in Greece, and celebrating the oldest annual marathon, the Boston Marathon is kindof a big deal here in Boston.


Marathons are long distance foot races, usually with a distance of 26.2 miles or 42.195 kilometers. While marathons are technically races, most runners strive to finish and best their personal times rather than beat competitors. I bet it's incredibly hard to race 26 miles against someone.

Given a rough estimate of 26,000 runners participating in today's marathon, a total 681,200 miles will be run tomorrow by all the Boston Marathon participants, which is roughly 681,198 more miles than I'm willing to run, ever. If everyone were to do a relay around the Earth's equator (an approximate 24,901.55 miles), they would have run more than 27 times around the Earth. It's like a marathon of marathons!


My other math interest in the marathon is how many calories runners are using per mile, or for the entire marathon.
This calculator notes that if I were to be running 10 minute miles, I would burn 1,976 calories over the course of a marathon.
Rough calculations of calorie consumption that says I would be burning roughly 1,867 calories in a marathon run.
Finally this article explains why some runners hit a wall at the 22~23 mile mark.

Boston Partners in Education has a Marathon team that been training hard and fundraising for Boston Partners since November. I'll be cheering them on before and after the race! Good luck Boston Partners team!


Some of the Boston Partners Marathon Team


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