Political marathoners

By now, I’m sure most everyone has heard about Paul Ryan’s gaffe regarding his marathon time.

For the handful of you who haven’t: In a radio interview last month, Ryan claimed to have run a sub 3-hour marathon.

When asked his personal best, Ryan said, “Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.”

Now, to put that in perspective, a 3-hour marathon would require 6:51 mile pace for 26.2 miles. In the 2011 Boston Marathon, only 1,536 of the 23,965 runners finished under 3 hours – that’s about 6 percent of the entrants.

Runner’s World did some digging and found out Ryan’s personal best – and only – marathon time was 4:01:25. He ran that time in the Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minn., in 1990, when he was 20 years old.

Ryan isn’t the only person on a national ticket to have run a marathon, though. According to Runner’s World, John Edwards ran a 3:30, George W. Bush has run 3:44; Sarah Palin has run 3:59; and Al Gore has run 4:58.

I’d like to point out that Palin ran her sub 4-hour marathon (2 minutes faster than Ryan) at age 41, after having four kids.

The greatest thing that’s come from this whole issue is the Paul Ryan Time Calculator.

The calculator, created by a grad student, takes your race time and recalculates it to produce a Paul Ryan time.

I’ve never ran a marathon, but I have finished a couple half marathons. The calculator does wonders for my time.

My 1:31:56 personal best (here is the results page, for proof) translates to a 1:06:39 – only 49 seconds away from a Paul Ryan-certified world record!