Marathon, the Word

I would like to thank Merriam Webster for the following information on the word “marathon”:
Pronunciation: \ˈmer-ə-ˌthän, ˈma-rə-\
Function: noun
Etymology: Marathon, Greece, site of a victory of Greeks over Persians in 490 b.c., the news of which was carried to Athens by a long-distance runner
Date: 1896
1: a long-distance race: a: a footrace run on an open course usually of 26 miles 385 yards (42.2 kilometers) b: a race other than a footrace marked especially by great length 2 a: an endurance contest b: something (as an event, activity, or session) characterized by great length or concentrated effort

I especially love the pronunciation guides in dictionaries, don’t you? I have no idea what the little mark above the a means or what the dots before some letters and not others means. Maybe that was a basic skill I should have picked up sometime in school, but do these dictionary-writer people honestly think the general public benefits from the effort they put into splitting up the word like that? I have actually tried to make sense of the pronunciation section, but, let’s be honest here, it takes so many turns of pages and way too many verbal attempts to finally get the word to sound right. Then, all of a sudden, you’re sitting in the middle of the library, talking to yourself like a fool and everyone’s staring at you as the little granny librarian is running over with a yardstick to “ask” you to be quiet. So anyway, I know how to pronounce the word, that’s not the point.

The point is, I have signed up for any of the above definitions, and not one seems like a “normal” thing to do. A long distance race, a footrace of 26miles 385yards, a foot race marked especially by great length, an endurance contest, and something characterized by great length or concentrated effort (the last one is the worst), are all perfect definitions of what I will go through on April 21st. What this definition fails to recognize is that the marathon actually begins for me when I start fundraising for MetroLacrosse (a really neat and important, free, year-round lacrosse program for urban Boston neighborhood kids) and training, which is a good four and a half months before the actual race day and a hell of a lot of miles pounded out from my feet.

So, yes, the marathon was originally run from Marathon to Athens in Greece, in order to tell the capital about victory over the Persians, and the word now means that a running race is 26.2 miles long. But for me, the 2008 Boston Marathon is a lot more than that. What follows is just “that”.