>increase your chances of finishing Now you're saying something different. Which is it, are these races "all about" preparation, or is preparation only a way t

>increase your chances of finishing Now you're saying something different. Which is it, are these races "all about" preparation, or is preparation only a way to increase your chances? I'm saying there is an upper limit to what you can prepare for. Assuming your 5000+ claim is true, even if a portion of that was part of a marathon or two, you still wouldn't have a metric to understand a race like this. It's in a different class. If you've won a few county fair hot dog eating contests by eating 40 hot dogs, you wouldn't be giving tips to a participant of a contest to eat 400. It's beyond the limits of normal human capacity. So maybe training can increase your chances, but it is not the deciding factor. A fat dude trying this race would have 0 chance of finishing, but the fittest dude on earth would still have a chance closer to 0 than to 1.