Victor Ortiz Runs In LA Marathon

After his fight with Andre Berto was delayed until June 23rd, Victor Ortiz needed to find something to do with his free time. I guess his idea was to train and run in the LA marathon. According to Kevin Iole he ran the LA marathon in a decent time, three hours and twenty-seven minutes last Sunday, a personal best for Victor.

When I think about marathon times, I usually try to group them in the following fashion. If the final time is three hours or else, you are an elite runner. In order to get to three hours or under you have to keep a pace of 6:52/mile for the entire race. To keep that pace for 26.2 miles is very impressive in my eyes and that would make you an elite runner.

The next time is about three hours and thirty minutes. To get this time you would have to keep an eight-minute mile pace. Now I think that most people who consider themselves athletes should be able to do this with the right amount of training. Of course, that training will vary depending upon the amount of natural endurance that you have. I would need a good amount of training, my endurance sucks. This time seems to be almost a ceiling for people who do not identify themselves as runners.

The final time is around four hours or higher. The person who runs this time is that guy or girl who is in their late twenties and used to be athletic. They made a resolution to finish a marathon and they constantly tell you about their training on Facebook.

Anyways, Victor Ortiz was very happy with his performance, as he should be, and spoke coherently about the differences between boxing and running.

"It was such great fun running with all these world class marathoners," Ortiz said. "I know that made me run better than ever. In many ways, it couldn't be any more different than boxing. I mean, nobody is punching you in the nose, the gut, the kidneys and on the chin and up the side of your head. But in other ways, doing this very much relates to boxing. Conditioning the lungs, the legs and building endurance. That's why all fighters do road work. But 26-plus miles is something else.

"I won't say going 12 three-minute championship rounds is easy. Anything but. But Berto must know how prepared I'll be when he hears I ran this well three months before our fight. I'm very happy."

Now I'm not going to say that Ortiz is going to have monster endurance in his next fight, but it does seem that he has a decent gas tank. It should also be noted that interval training, three minutes on one minute off, is drastically different physiologically than keeping a pace for a long period of time. A marathon tests the ability to go a long period of time at a moderate level. Boxing endurance would be the ability to keep a high pace and recover fully within the minute between rounds. Do you think that Ortiz's marathon training will help him in his fight against Andre Berto?