Depending on the speed of your computer and what effects/compositing/filters/format you are using, normal rendering time for 59 minutes of video would be somewhere between 15 minutes and 15 days.
That sounds very reasonable then. I can render an hour of straight video to MPEG1 single pass in about 90 minutes or to MPEG2 two-pass in about 3.5 hours. I've got a 2.66GHz Celeron.