Or New Jack City as my partner Rex calls it.

My wife Amy and I had a fabulous day. We spent the morning with Theresa Chong, an artist who Amy went to high school in Alaska with. While hanging out in Teresa’s studio, Amy noticed The Death Artist by Jonathan Santlofer. It turns out that Jonathan’s studio is adjacent to Teresa’s and he was there working on his third book (he proudly showed us the galley proof of Color Blind, his second book). Only in Gotham – two hours, full immersion with two artists – one of which is also a best selling author who Amy randomly read recently.

We drove with Teresa and her husband Brian to the Edgewater section of New Jersey and feasted on Korean food. Dinner was at Danube – which was mindblowingly good.

In The Slowing of The Marathon, Dan Ackman discusses how the median male runner in the 1983 NY Marathon clocked a time of 3:41:49 (8:27 / mile) while the median male runner in the 2003 NY Marathon was 4:28:41 (10:25 / mile). Clearly, middle of the pack runners are going slower, although this is clearly attributed to the greatly increased number of people who are taking on the marathon.

John Cianca – the medical director of the HP Houston Marathon, calls this phenomenon “the dumbing-down of the marathon. … though a ten-minute pace arguably is not running at all … In a way, it’s an insult to the distance.”

Even though Cianca appears to be well published, he’s actually an insult to all runners. Having done it a couple of times now, 10 minutes / mile for 26.2 miles is definitely running and is not an insult to anything. Anyone who’s ever finished a marathon, independent of their pace, should be commended.

Matt Blumberg started a blog yesterday called OnlyOnce. It’s about being a first time CEO – Matt’s one of the best – he’s the CEO of Return Path – one of my companies that I’m an investor with Fred Wilson. Matt is a great first time CEO – his blog is worth reading for any entrepreneur.

Yes – I posted this one offline also, although the href thing (vs. automatic links) is a major drag. I haven’t manually typed HTML in – oh – 8 years – so it’s entertaining to trip over it again.

And I’m now manually fixing this in Typepad (the original said Matt’s one of the best – he’s the CEO of Fred Wilson since I left an “‘” out of my HREF – proving some point (the one that says I shouldn’t be manually typing HTML?)

I ran the fourth marathon of my life today – the Ft. Collins Old Town Marathon. It wasn’t my fastest marathon (that was at Chicago last fall), but I was very happy with the results. I’ve been on a steady training regimen since the beginning of the year – which – given winter and travel has been challenging to keep up. However, my coach, Jeff Kline of RunFitUSA is both supportive and relentless – which helps.

Now running a marathon in 4:30 isn’t quite the same level of accomplishment as running a sub-4 minute mile – something that was first done 50 years ago. For a fabulous book on this quest – try The Perfect Mile : Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It – both historically detailed and extremely inspiring. However, a marathon and a mile are radically different races.

I’ve heard the cliche “this is a marathon, not a sprint” a bunch of times and decided to poke around on the web looking for it. Apparently even Meg Whitman said it at some point. E-businesses must be like marathoners – at least according to Chris Pickering. Enterprisewide supply chain technology initiatives should be like marathons – according to Ram Reddy as recently as May 1, 2004. I even ran across I guy I hadn’t thought of in about 10 years – Scott Johnson – the founder of Ntergaid who is now the co-founder of Feedster – who has an old blog where he refers to businesses as marathons.

You get the picture – it’s a cliche. But – it’s a good one. Anyone that has run a marathon knows that it’s a long way to run.

Anyone who has created a sustainable and valuable business knows it’s a long way to run.