Jogging is one way for people to transform themselves from couch potatoes to finely-tuned fitness mavens. Not only is it convenient, demanding a minimum of equipment, but it fulfills a range of needs -- weight loss, stress relief, leg toning and cardiovascular improvement. Most joggers eventually enter a road race, for the camaraderie and T-shirt if not necessarily to test the limits of their speed. These events span a number of common distances.
Track Distances
If you run or ran high-school track, you may have experience with the most common racing distances. The 1,500 meters, which is about 15/16ths of a mile, is far more common in Europe than the mile itself, although the mile remains common in the U.S. The 3,000 meters and its slightly longer counterpart, the two-mile, represent the longest high-school races held at most meets, although very occasionally, the 5,000 meters -- equivalent to 3.107 miles -- is held as well.
5 Kilometers
As of 2011, the 5-kilometer, or 5K, distance was the most popular road-race distance -- it's the shortest standard distance and, therefore, a good choice for novices and less-fit joggers. You have to train in order to finish a 5K comfortably, but you need not jog endlessly in order to prepare. Most 5K events encourage participation by walkers as well as joggers. Even at a slow jog, you are likely to finish a 5K in under 50 minutes at most. Most coaches recommend choosing a 5K for your first road race.
10 Kilometers
Back in the running boom of the 1970s, the 10K was more popular than the 5K and represented the standard by which most joggers assessed themselves and each other. In 2009, the two largest road races in the U.S., the Peachtree 10K in Atlanta and the Bolder Boulder 10K in Colorado, were 10-kilometer events. Training for a 10K requires more time and effort than training for a 5K, and so the sense of accomplishment is greater, but at the same time, joggers need not go deep into the well in terms of training time and energy as they must for a half-marathon or a marathon.
Half-Marathon and Marathon
These distances take joggers anywhere from about one hour, 30 minutes to two hours, 30 minutes for the half-marathon and three hours, 30 minutes to six hours for the marathon. Both are extremely challenging to prepare for and complete, yet they have continued to grow in popularity over the years, probably for this very reason. Running USA's 2009 National Runner Survey revealed that the half-marathon was the favorite distance among both men and women, and the number of finishers in U.S. marathons more than doubled in the two decades between 1990 and 2010, from 224,000 to 507,000.
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