The popularity of the half-marathon (21.1 kilometers) has grown in the last few years. Alicia Cevallos won the 2006 ING Miami Half Marathon.

By JOHN HANC

What comes after a marathon boom- Perhaps a half-marathon boom.
Half-marathons - races of 21.1 kilometers, or 13.1 miles - have been growing in the last five years, partly due to an influx of newer runners who consider the half a friendlier challenge than the marathon. Half-marathon training is neither as hard nor as all-consuming as marathon training can be.
But those in the running community say there is another reason the distance is catching on: veteran runners who completed multiple quests for marathon glory no longer see 13.1 miles as just a pointalong the journey.¡°A lot of people have checked the marathon off their ¡®life list,¡¯¡± said Ryan Lamppa, a spokesman for Running USA, a nonprofit organization in Santa Barbara, California, that tracks trends in running. ¡°But they don¡¯t want running out of their lives.¡±
According to Running USA, the halfmarathon is the sport¡¯s fastest-growing distance . In 2007, there were more than 500 half-marathon events and an estimated 650,000 finishers, a 10 percent increase from 2006. It was the second consecutive year that the number of finishers and events increased by 10 percent .
Clearly, what makes the half-marathon attractive is that it takes a lot less time and energy than a full. Even with the less-ismore marathon programs now in vogue, participants still need to build up to long conditioning runs of at least 32 kilometers before tackling the 42.2-kilometer marathon distance on race day. A half-marathon, by contrast, can be completed by most people with a weekly long run of no more than 17 or 18 kilometers.
¡°The half-marathon gives you almost all of the satisfaction and achievement of the marathon and far less than half of the aches and pains and fatigue,¡± said Jeff Galloway, a 1972 Olympian who is now a popular marathon coach and the author of a best-selling book on running.
Linda Ottaviano of Cold Spring Harbor, New York, started running in the early 1990s to help her get in shape; along the way, she became taken with the mystique of the marathon. Over a decade, she finished 12 marathons, the last when she was 50, and completed the 2005 Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in just under 3 hours, 30 minutes.
When she crossed the finish line, she decided she was finished with marathons. ¡°I felt I had accomplished what I had set out to,¡± she said. And, ¡°I was starting to wonder just how good it was for my body.¡±
The name has been an issue - running ¡°half¡± of something doesn¡¯t sound too impressive.
When the US Road Sports & Entertainment Group, a Dallas company that produces endurance events, announced a series of 21.1-kilometer (13.1-mile) races, the words ¡°half marathon¡± were conspicuously absent. Instead, the series - which starts in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on November 16 - is called ¡°13.1 Marathon.¡±
Robert Pozo, the executive director for the series, and his colleagues have even come up with an informal slogan: ¡°13.1 Miles: It isn¡¯t half of anything.¡±

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courtesy of asiphoto.com


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