For all its prestige, the Boston Marathon represents one event in a busy marathon season. There are almost 300 such races around the world, including one in Antarctica.

This widespread interest in marathon racing has developed only recently. Although the Boston Marathon has been run for 106 consecutive years, it took stars like Bill Rodgers to put the sport on the map. "My college roommate had won the Boston Marathon as a senior," Rodgers recalls, "so I had some understanding of the event. But when I saw it, that's what really got me to give it a try."

Rodgers had run for his college cross-country and track teams, but the one-to five-mile distances he covered were well short of the 26-plus miles required in a marathon. The Boston-based Rodgers made up the difference in a hurry and won his hometown marathon four times between 1975 and 1980.

"It's just about as American as apple pie and baseball these days," says Rodgers. "The word's gotten out for so long, and everyone sees people just like themselves out there. It's not just a sport of men who are 25 years old. Now there's a real cross section of society out there."

The first wheelchair racer completed the Boston Marathon in 1975; now there is an official wheelchair division of the race with men's and women's winners and prize money. Other athletes with mobility or vision impairments now run in the Boston Marathon as well.

Calculating a Race
Many runners, including Bill Rodgers, divide the distance of marathons into sections and aim to achieve a certain time for each. For instance, Rodgers calculates these times — or splits — for the first 5 miles, 10 miles, and the halfway point in a race (approximately 13 miles). Marathoners tend to start slowly in order to conserve energy for the long road ahead.

"You've got to pace yourself well," Rodgers says. "You try to compete with your competition sensibly. Here at Boston, it's a famous course because of 'Heartbreak Hill' at about the 21-mile mark. It's the last hill in a series of four hills, so you really need to conserve your energy for these hills. If you don't, well that's why they call it 'Heartbreak Hill.' Suddenly you feel really tired, and you might even drop out of the race. I've dropped out three times in the Boston Marathon."

If a marathoner runs at a pace of:

• 5 1/2 minutes a mile for the first 10 miles
• 5 1/4 minutes a mile for the next 8 miles
• 6 minutes a mile for the next 4 miles
• 5 minutes a mile for the final 4 1/4 miles

How long will it take the runner to finish the entire race? How much more (or less) time is this than last year's winning times for the men (129 minutes, 47 seconds) and women (146 minutes, 11 seconds) in the Boston Marathon?

History by the Numbers
The following table includes some of the winning times in the Boston for men during the past 50 years. (These times are measured in hours:minutes:seconds, so the time 2:32:39 means 2 hours, 32 minutes, and 39 seconds.)

Year	Runner/ Country	Winning time
1950	Kee Yong Ham/Korea	2:32:39
1980	Bill Rodgers/ United States	2:12:11
2001	Lee Bong Ju/ Korea	2:09:43

• By how many minutes and seconds did Bill Rodgers improve over the time of Kee Yong Ham 30 years earlier?
• By how many minutes and seconds did last year's winner Lee Bong Ju beat the time of Bill Rodgers?
• By what percentage is Lee Bong Ju's time an improvement over Kee Yong Ham's 50 years ago?
• By what percentage would each of the above competitors have to improve their times to beat the course record of 2:07:15, set by Kenya's Cosmas Ndeti in 1994?
• Get help with these percentage problems from Dijit in Destination Math. Try the tutorial on finding percents of a whole. If you're not a Riverdeep subscriber, you'll need a free trial subscription to try the tutorial out.

The results of the Boston Marathon are in! Get information about the race at Boston.com's Marathon Central.