The title is not an attempt at scaremongering, the foreign applications are flowing in faster than ever this year, and more are coming in the post every day.
Last year, the races had a total of 889 official applicants, and over 800 finishers. When ordering the medals for this year (which contain the date imprinted in the design), the organisers put a cap on 900 medals. Once the applications reach that number, entries will close, irrespective of the date when that occurs.
Of concern to local runners is that there are already over 400 foreign applications in hand, and only 15 Maltese. If the foreign entry forms keep arriving at the same rate, then it may unfortunately be the case that local athletes have to be turned away.
The official closing date is February 1, but any Maltese athlete waiting till the final day is in danger of having their application turned down.
Don't risk being one of them; Apply today. Entry forms should be downloaded from the marathon website (maltamarathon.com) and sent along with the fee to the address on the back of the form as soon as possible.
Potential champions
Long distance running is surely one of the simplest of sports. We can all understand and appreciate the exquisite levels of technical skills required in sports like golf, and tennis. In comparison, running in a straight line for a number of miles seems so easy.
While appreciating skillful play in football and basketball, we somehow also get the impression that we too could learn such skills if we simply applied ourselves enough.
Put in the hours, like Tiger Woods who first took up golf at four years of age, or the many Russian female tennis players who flocked to Florida to train as young girls, and worldwide fame and success seems not only possible, but very doable.
This is not so in distance running; skill plays a very minor role. Success comes almost purely from the physical ability to maintain a fast power output or running pace for a long time without fatigue.
This physical ability (aerobic endurance) can be very simply defined as the capacity to get as much oxygen to the working muscles as possible.
In the same way that cutting off the air supply to a petrol engine car will soon cause the engine to stall, and that putting an unturned glass tumbler over a lit candle will cause the flame to go out, all success in running ultimately relies on a continuous uptake of oxygen.
The faster the runner wishes to go, the greater the supply of oxygen required. Scientists refer to this ability as the "oxygen uptake" or (more cryptically) the VO2max (the maximal volume of oxygen the runner can utilise). As a general rule, the greater a runner's VO2max the better the possible race performance (all else being equal).
Sports science research tells us that every individual's upper limit of VO2max is genetically affected by as much as 30 per cent thus helping to explain why some people can begin training and improve much more rapidly, and to higher levels than others who began at the same time and did similar training.
Steven Cram, who would go on to set world mile and 1,500m records, also set the world mile best time (3:57.04) while still a 17-year old.
When questioned on how he managed such a feat, Cram remarked that he was doing exactly the same training as others in his club in the North of England. Needless to say, the training was not having a similar effect on all his club-mates. Cram was "genetically gifted".
All the training in the world cannot overcome a lack of genetic endowment in a distance runner, unlike a technical sport like tennis in which tiny Belgian Justine Henin can skillfully overcome much more powerfully built players and earn world no.1 status.
In contrast to physical ability, there does not seem to be a genetic upper-limit to how much we can improve in skill.
In the coming weeks I hope to discuss the simple tests we can implement to discover "physically gifted" Maltese youngsters.
More next week. Enjoy your running. And don't forget to post your entry form today!
johnwalsh42195@yahoo.it