European Marathon Classics: Abbott World Marathon Majors Wannabe?

Feb. 25, the European Marathon Classics challenge series was launched from Vienna, Austria. 

As they state, "the initiative combines sport, tourism and culture, encourages regular physical activity, promotes responsible participation, and supports integration among runners from around the world."

The EMC challenge comprises eight marathons in:

• Rome (March)
• Vienna (April)
• London (April)
• Madrid (April)
• Copenhagen (May)
• Warsaw (September)
• Lisbon (October)
• Frankfurt (October)

As you complete each marathon, you get a coin/e-coin. Once you complete any five cities, you can get a medal into which these five coins can be placed. (The launch announcement made it sound like they were simply virtual coins and possibly just a virtual medal. The website implies physical items.) Based on the graphics, the coins are relatively underwhelming: each has its own specific color and grayscale version of that country's flag with the name of the city across the top rim of the coin.

As I've said for a while, marathoning is a great excuse for travel. Well, for anyone looking to add more countries to their passport (I know, entry/exit stamps aren't given out most times any more), this seems like a great method. It just might encourage me to go to some of these cities that I didn't have floating all that high on my list of places to visit.

For those who have run one or more of these marathons previously, sometime this summer the EMC will add the ability to put that prior result into your profile. (Neat -- I'll have 1 e-coin at that point, to account for London, where I finished my Abbott World Marathon Majors 6-star challenge journey.)

It will be interesting to see, over the next few years, how well (or not) this challenge is received by the running community. Will the fields increase in size? Or, if they are already capped, will the number of people trying to register keep increasing, making it increasingly difficult to get into them? (Certainly London will be even harder to get into, now. After all, this year over 1.1 million people tried to register for the approx. 50,000 spots.) And if registrations increase for these, will they diminish the number of people registering for some of the overlapping Majors races (Boston, Sydney, Berlin, and Chicago being the most likely to be affected at all -- Tokyo precedes Rome in March, and New York is in November)?

As the tagline for Marathon Talk goes: Enjoy the run, wherever it takes you.