Marathon - A misnomer

A: "I ran the marathon yesterday"
Me: Oh really? ( I wonder when this guy started running, leave alone running marathons)
A: Yeah
Me: How much time did you take?
A: Oh, around 30 minutes
Me: Huh? (A new world record) Oh, you mean you ran a 5km race
A: Yeah, they called the race a marathon

Ofcourse, they would call it a marathon if you ran the full distance of 42kms 195 metres. Anything less than that is called a fraction of the marathon or not-a-marathon. For example, a seattle marathon event will hold a marathon(42kms), a half marathon (21kms) and probably a "corporate" run of 5kms or 10kms. Many people run the 5km or 10km event and get an artificial sense of accomplishment. Do you know that training for a marathon can take as much as 4 months if you start from scratch? And how much time did you train for the 5km run? 3 days? Cut out that marathon crap. You either ran a full marathon or you didn't. Simple. Got to respect the distance man.

PS: This is not to say I disrespect a 5km run. I infact think 5kms is one of the toughest middle distance runs to compete in, but then I would call it a 5km race and not a marathon plus I would train for it, not just land up on the race day and run 5kms for the first time in my life and say "Oh I somehow managed to finish it". Yep, that's a wonder indeed, given you didn't train for it.
Some of my best moments in my running career have been running a 5km in 20 minutes. I have run a half-marathon, but finishing the half-marathon didn't give me even a fraction of the euphoria which running that 5km in 20 minutes gave me. Why? Because I ran the half marathon on a half-baked training of 11 days and well, for the 5km, I had been training for quite sometime.