As for myself deserving of more publicity, I disagree. Let’s pretend for a moment that both Lance and I were nobodies (I know, I know, but we’ll just pretend that I am a nobody…heheh). What’s makes for a better story?

From the perspective of race performance, we were both unremarkable in terms of our overall place. From the perspective of percentages, we were both in the top 1.5-2% of finishers or so; when you are dealing with 38,000 finishers, there isn’t a big difference between being 400th or being 800th or whatever places we were.

From the perspective of race execution, I finished my 8th marathon and was barely out of breath. I paced a friend of mine through his first marathon, and didn’t leave him until mile 24. Lance was running his first marathon, and was clearly working a lot harder than me, and had a much more tangible goal to reach and was a lot more likely to miss out on his goal. From a story perspective, his race was much more interesting. People love watching marathoners suffer; otherwise, there’d be more people watching the start than the finish.

Third, from a story perspective, my contribution to humanity was a sub 3 hour first race introduction for a friend of mine from college. Lance raised some undoubtably large amount of money for cancer research. What makes the better story?

Now remember that neither Lance or I are nobodies. He does have a lot more celebrity than me.

Do you want to know the real reason that Lance gets so much press? Because more people care more about what he is doing because (a) he’s famous (b) he’s got a good story and (c) he’s raising a ton of money. Why should the networks who control the news care about who is the better story? Because more people will tune in and pay attention. That means that advertisers will pay more money during those time slots. More money = more coverage.

Anything liket his is going to boil down eventually to what will make the network more money. Some elite athletes running really fast for 2 hours and a few minutes, or somebody that people actually care about that is raising money for a good cause and who is going to be very obviously suffering the whole time?

Besides, for the last 16 miles Lance had Joannie running with him. How can you keep the camera away then? Everybody loves Joan.

Again, how far can you go to do something in the name of some cause? Is there someone out there who, after hearing about this, realized that people get cancer? Can’t he raise money for cancer without it being shoved in the face of those interested in the real race?

If you are not interested in the race, that is fine, but that does not mean that the New York Marathon has to be necessarily subordinated to publicity of Lance Armstrong. Nor does it mean that a 3-hour marathon is impressive. Insofar as he ran the race, Armstrong deserves less publicity than Blaine.

The backlash against Lance isn’t about passion for running – it is about misplaced ego.

Dear fast runners everywhere – get over yourselves. Running as a sport will never get anywhere near the publicity of team sports. Neither will swimming. The Tour de France has a lot of publicity because it is a one of a kind event and because it takes place in beautiful mountains and because someone manage to promote it sufficiently to get it all that publicity and because an American (Lance Armsrtong) won it 7 times in a row.

None of that makes Lance a bad person who is stealing publicity from more deserving runners. I am a runner but I know nothing about any of those elite runners because I don’t care. I can’t relate (I am slow and do this for personal, physical fitness, not to win) and I really don’t care. I don’t much care about Lance Armstrong, either other than to see him do some good by raising money for cancer research. I suspect that’s the way it is for most people who like Lance. The people who hate him are just being petty.

i would hate a dictator, people in charge of torturing, child molesters/killers, rapists, etc.

anyone else is just annoying and vexing. if i really don’t like someone, i’m not going to talk and obsess about them.

if one uses the term “hate” for lance, what word to they use for the truly horrid?

all that running on the pavement has pounded the brain cells in the area dedicated to language usage.