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Interesting Facts - Page 71
351
People used to be bad at running the marathon. The gold medalist at the 1948 Olympics won with a time of 2:34:51, a time regularly bested by modern high school athletes.
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Live Aid was a pair of concerts held in London and Philadelphia in 1985 to raise money for Ethiopian famine relief. Unfortunately, much of the money raised by the concerts ended up in the hands of the brutal communist regime that had caused the crisis in the first place. Some of the money was used to buy weapons.
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Nowhere in the nursery rhyme does it ever say that Humpty Dumpty was an egg.
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"Dunbar's Number" is the theoretical number of people with which you can have an active social relationship. It is estimated to be between 100 and 250 people. Societies that exceed this limit are often said to have issues with social trust and cohesion.
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Many people believe that, in the early United States, only white male landowners over the age of 21 could vote. This isn't strictly true. The original Constitution left eligibility up to the states. African-Americans and women were eligible to vote in many states prior to the Constitutional amendments that gave them the vote universally.
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Nowadays, if the temperature is 70ºF (21.1ªC) or higher, the marathon can be suspended on medical grounds. This was unheard of back in the day. For example, in the 1904 Olympics:
The temperature for the marathon was reported as 100ªF (37.8ªC), in humid St. Louis.The path taken was composed by dirt roads.There was only one water station: an untreated well.
And these things were set by James Sullivan (the marathon organizer, today in the US Track and Field Hall of Fame), to prove his most radical ideas on the human resistance. There's a brillant video on the matter by the great Jon Bois.
That's the most extreme example, but it proves the ignorance in the topic that prevailed then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_world_record_progression
Trivia: Phil Collins performed in both cities that day.
There was one Lydia Taft in Uxbridge in Town Meetings. New Jersey allowed voting up until 1807. And Kentucky was on paper allowing any women to vote from 1838 onwards, but few actual voters existed. While yes not explicitly prohibited by the Constitution itself, nearly every state in every meaningful way prohibited voting to women, and or limited it to landowners and or whites.
So if your point was to say the right existed on paper I get that, showing how it wasn't in the founding-est document. But for all practical and execution based history it was a ban on voting for these groups, and this question may raise the assumption that amongst them, voting was common, when it was in fact nearly unheard of.
in fact it would be nice to have a list of sources for these Interesting Facts across the board, seems like good practice
Also, high schoolers rarely race the marathon distance, so it seems silly to include the statement that they regularly run faster. They may run faster equivalent times at 5k, 2 miles and the mile, but that is not the same thing.
2:35 is elite -- It's better than 90% percentile for the men's under-35s at the Boston Marathon. There are Olympic performances worse than that every year, just not medal contenders.