Now I Have To Tell You… It’s An Incredibly Complex Issue. Nobody knew how complicated the sub-3 hour moonshot would be.
There were no dogs today… but I was well off a sub-3 hour pace. Doing the math, I need to run 9 miles per hour, or 6:40 minute miles for the 26.2 mile distance. I… did not do that today.
I googled “sub-3 hour marathon pace” as I didn’t feel like doing the math myself. Why not outsource and farm out thinking, right? It’s good enough for government work. Anyhoo, there’s apparently a whole website for folks trying to do their own moonshot of a sub-3 hour marathon… and they’re not even really looking at it as a moonshot. In a world where people are striving to break the sub 2 hour barrier, and in a world where winning times are well below sub-3 hours, I get it. Hell, I may be the only one who cares about this silly goal, but it’s my goal. It’s my moonshot and I’ll strive if I want to.
And man oh man is it going to be a struggle. A complicated, difficult struggle. But that’s why I’m doing it.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
–John F. Kennedy
Rice University
September 12, 1962