Paying attention to the really great stories

It always amazes me how some of the most amazing stories in sports get overlooked by so many people.

This is maybe the craziest story of the year, and I feel like most people missed it.

Over the weekend, at the New York Marathon, a pair of British dudes finished their seventh marathon in seven days, on six different continents.

For those of you who skimmed over the last paragraph, let me reiterate. Seven marathons. Seven days. Six continents.

This is beyond absurd. It's beyond unfathomable. It's impossible, but somehow it's true.

Of course the mission wasn't a complete success. The original plan called for the duo (Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Mike Stroud) to run seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, but engine trouble kept them from getting to Antarctica. What a bunch of losers. Honestly, if you're gonna do something, at least do it right.

Fiennes and Stroud covered 183 miles on foot, and flew over 45,000 miles in a week. Forget about the physical impossibility of this trip, the sheer logistics of it are mind boggling. Most people have enough trouble booking one flight and getting to it on time. Try flying to six different continents in seven days while literally running a marathon every day. This is making me dizzy.

They apparently got the idea after Fiennes called up Stroud and asked him if he wanted to climb Mt. Everest with him, but Stroud said he didn't have time and proposed a new idea. I can just imagine that conversation...

Fiennes: Hey buddy, you wanna go climb Everest with me?

Stroud: Love to pal, but I'm just swamped. How about we run seven marathons in a week instead?

Fiennes: Hmm, well I had kinda wanted to challenge myself this year... I know! Let's run them all on seven different continents!

But that's not even the half of it. Apparently Fiennes had double bypass surgery in June after he had a heart attack. They had to carry a mini-defibrillator on all of their marathons, just in case Fiennes had another episode. I know that my first move after I had a heart attack would be to go and run seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. I mean, you can't let one minor setback control your whole damn life, right?

And it's not like these guys were jogging through these marathons, either. They finished the first one in three hours and 45 minutes. That's a seven minute mile, for 26.3 miles. Not too bad for a 59-year-old man with a shaky heart. I'm not sure that I can run a seven minute mile for two miles.

Such a great story, and most people in the United States missed it. This story was huge in Britain, as British media followed Fiennes and Stroud nearly every step of the way. But here we would never have heard of it if the two didn't finish up their journey on one of the biggest marathon stages in the world. We were too occupied watching Diddy run the city, I guess.

There are so many great stories in sports, it's a shame that we tend to only pay attention to the ones with the highest paid athletes. It's funny how we always pretend to love the athletes who "just play for the love of the game," and then spend all of our time watching the ones with $100 million contracts. We pretend that players like Gary Payton and Karl Malone are making huge sacrifices by playing with the Lakers for only $1 or $2 million, just so they can win a championship.

I guess if we really valued the athletes who play for no other reason than that they love to, we would have huge crowds at every Tufts game. We would show up by the thousands to watch the students, who spend hours every day lifting, practicing, and training, play games for nothing but the satisfaction of competing, and don't complain for two seconds about it.

If we really valued the athlete who competes for the love of the game, we would turn out in hoards to watch ultra-marathoners run 100 miles across the desert for absolutely no money.

But we like the show as much as we like the sport, so we spend most of our time watching millionaires jump around from team to team so they can make enough money to buy their seventh house and their 15th Hummer. And we don't pay attention to the really impressive things, like two guys running seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, because they're not doing it just because they're in a contract year.

I'm not saying that we should stop watching baseball or football or anything else just because it's on TV. Hell I'm as guilty as anybody. I'm just saying that we should appreciate the athletes who really do make sacrifices in order to participate in a sport. There are a lot of other sports in the world besides baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, and there are a lot of great stories in each and every one of them. So just keep your eyes open, and maybe next time when somebody does something crazy like seven marathons in seven days, we won't let it pass us by.