Back in May, the New York Yankees beat the Chicago Cubs 5-4. It took 18 innings and 6 hours and 5 minutes. The game started on May 7 and ended on May 8.
The game ran so long they ran out of baseballs.
Also on May 7, elite long-distance runner Benji Durden ran the Colorado Marathon — 26 miles — in 3:48:25, finishing second in his 65-69 age group.
Courtesy Benji Durden
I hate math, but by my inexpert calculations, Benji could have run a marathon-and-a-half in the time it took the Yankees to win that single game.
Benji ranked among the top 10 U.S. marathoners for six straight years in the 1980s. He was ranked seventh in the world in 1982.
He has trophies, awards, and ribbons galore celebrating his still-running running.
(I have one award, in case you were wondering, from the time I won a Jell-O contest where I built an amazingly lifelike Washington DC Metro car out of Jell-O, clogged with unsmiling peanut passengers and stuck in a snow drift made out of stale miniature marshmallows. This was a long time ago, and it’s still one of my proudest moments. I won a sash cut out of butcher paper with “Miss Congealiality” written on it in Sharpie. I still have it. The sash, I mean. I still have the sash.)
Please note the period. Jell-O is a complete sentence.
Back to Benji. To add to his still-growing list of accolades is this – Benji Durden is the 4,000th follower of The Baseball Bloggess.
(I know. This accomplishment falls a little flat, especially now that you know about the Jell-O award.)
Real bloggers know that, like my Jell-O Metro car, blog follower lists can get clogged with a lot of spam, weird bots, and people whose names resemble passwords. (Hi, 5nML$234HN00C!) No one is quite sure why this happens or what’s in it for the bots that follow. So, while 4,000 is a real number, it is also an unreal number, and I can say that my real live readership – of non-bots who speak English and like to read about baseball – is smaller. Much smaller. Much, much smaller.
But, fake number or not, when I hit 3,999 earlier this summer, I put out the call to my friends to push me to 4K.
Meet my friend Benji Durden. #4,000.
The Baseball Bloggess 