The desire behind the Sub 3 marathon

The Sub 3 hour Marathon is one THE barriers in running and endurance sports. In this article series write about my knowledge, tools, actionable strategies and how I reached this goal. The first topic is the desire behind achieving the goal of a marathon under 3 hours.

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A marathon under 3 hours is a performance that shows that you know a lot about yourself. Your training. Your body. Your passion for running.

It is an incredible tough goal that is not for all marathoners. It’s only for those willing to train hard and put everything into it. This is what makes this goal so appealing, at least for a runner like me.

As a normal person you don’t earn your money as a professional athlete. You can’t spend most of your time training and recovering. You work in a 40h+ 9 to 5 job and sacrifice your free time to do this.

A Sub 3 marathon is way above average. It sets you apart from the normal running crowd. It is an ambitious athletic achievement.

Why Sub 3 is a highly valued goal

1. Running is a sport of honesty:
Everyone who finished in a fast time has put in the work and effort.

– 5-6 days of training per week.
– Long runs up to and over 2 hours.
– Intensive suffering in interval and tempo workouts.

There is no other way around achieving this fast time. You have to do these things to get your body ready to an effort like this.

2. You proof to yourself that you can do hard things:
It demonstrates what is possible with determination, hard work and perseverance over years. I say years deliberately. A Sub 3 is not the result of months of training, but of consistent effort over years of learning and failure. It’s a process where you learn a lot about your abilities.

3. Your local community will consider you a darn good marathon runner:
Remember: Most of the people aren’t capable of holding this pace for 200m.

When you speak to friends who are running and know what times they run in their training they’re always stunned and ask: “How is that possible? How did you do that?”. As an ambitious runner you will know what I talk about. Every runner has these conversations.

4. Imagine running through a cheering crowd as one of the first runners in a marathon:
The feeling was crazy. It was my first approach breaking Sub 3 in my second marathon ever.

I run in front of my home crowd in a neighboring town. Here and there were people I knew under the spectators.

Until the 30km mark I was among the best 30 people of ca. 1500 people. The feeling of being one of the first to pass the spectators and especially the waiting relay runners was overwhelming and pushed me hard. Overall, the desire behind a Sub 3 hour Marathon is often multifaceted, combining elements of personal challenge, competition, prestige, health, personal growth, and inspiration.

How rare is a Sub 3 hour marathon?

Every year 1.1 million people run a marathon worldwide. That’s approximately 0.01% of worlds population. A Sub 3-hour marathon puts you probably in the bottom 5 percent of all runners. That means only 55.000 worldwide are running these fast times. A very exclusive club.

In my first Sub 3 hour marathon back in 2022, I came 57th out of 1493 participants.

I analyzed some major marathons from the 2023. It shows how many participants stayed under 3 hours:

Berlin 2023: 3202 / 43050 = 7,4%

New York 2023: 1372 / 51,348 = 2,7%

Tokyo 2023: 1,808 / 38,423 = 4,9%

Frankfurt 2023: 872 / 7576 = 11,5% (men) 54/2102 = 2,6% (woman)

Boston 2023: 3915 / 15176 = 25,8% (men) 272 / 11423 = 2,4% (woman)

Of course these are big marathons where very competitive people start. So the real number for men I think is more under 5%. When you look at the data from the woman’s side this time is even more exclusive.

RunRepeat compares the race results of millionth of races. The result: A 20-29 year old male runner with a Sub 3 Marathon time of 2:59:59 is faster than 98.10% of all runners.