Unless I'm missing something, that's "just" the uphill. In most cases (with the exception of 3 hikers from Nebraska), you need to go back down after you summit.
One more thing: I don't like beer. I do like Gin and Tequila :-)
yeah just comparing uphill, trying to reasonably compare apples to oranges.
of course whitney will take longer including downhill. downhill is not hard, but tedious.
when people want to compare two things about which is "harder", one way to somewhat scale by is "pace" i.e. rate of energy use. if you are walking up Whitney at a moderate pace, it simply is not as hard as a marathon in energy expenditure. The only thing that makes Whitney hard while moving at 3mph is the altitude.
if you had a flat 26 mile trail at 13,000 ft, it would be harder to run a marathon on it than hike Whitney.
