Show Me the Money

Ted Poulos, of McLean, Virginia, runs more than 200 races a year. When you figure that the average race costs between $15 and $25 to enter, Ted has found himself an expensive little habit. Why do road races cost that much? I mean, aren’t you just running down a public road? Who’s getting rich off of these things?
Nobody is. The entry fee that races charge usually covers only about one third of the costs of putting on races. Events are a lot more expensive to stage than they used to be. Local governments didn’t use to charge for the police who are often necessary for traffic control. Municipalities are also increasingly requiring races to pay for permits to stage events, even though there’s really not a whole lot of demand for the space by others at 8 a.m. on Sundays. San Francisco’s Bay to Breakers race shells out $30,000 for police services, plus $50,000 for park fees.
Most of the expenses to put on a race are picked up by the race sponsors. Donations also go a long way to keeping race costs down. Because most races are to benefit some charity or nonprofit group, the organizers can appeal to the goodwill of local merchants to donate food and prizes. Given all that goes into putting on a race, a $20 entry fee is quite a bargain.
Some runners try to rebel against what they think are high entry fees by being bandits. They run the race, but don’t sign up for it. Bandits are bad. Not only do they sometimes mess up the timing of the race because they’re not wearing numbers, but they leech off of the majority of the runners who paid the entry fee. If everyone acted that way, then there wouldn’t be any races for them to be mad at. If you think that a race charges too much, then voice your disagreement with a letter and by staying away, not by being a bandit and thinking that you’re accomplishing anything more than ripping off fellow runners.
You can usually save money on races by registering a month or more before the race. Race day entry fees are usually about $5 higher than early registration.

Choose Your Road

For the most part, road races basically fall into two main categories: those put on by various community organizations and those put on by local running clubs. The most popular time for both types of road races to be held is early on a weekend morning. Start time is usually 9 a.m. in the cooler months, 8 a.m. in the warmer months. More races are held on Sundays than on Saturdays.
Races in the first category are usually held in conjunction with a local event or as a oncea-year fundraiser for a charity. The people involved in organizing the race are usually volunteers from whatever organization will benefit from the race. The organizers usually pay a professional finish-line coordinator to handle timing, scoring, and other race-day logistics. In these races, you almost always wear a number during the race, and you almost always get a T-shirt as part of your entry fee. There’s probably also going to be nice post-race refreshments, decent prizes for the top runners, and other amenities.
Local running clubs also put on races as part of their regular schedule of events. These races are usually more low-key and have smaller fields. Most of the people running them are members of the club, although all runners are certainly welcome to take part.
Organization and logistics are handled entirely by volunteers lined up from the club. These races often cost only a few dollars to enter, because there are no Tshirts or other major costs to cover. (These races often take place in more rural areas, so the organizers don’t have to pay as much, if anything, for permits, police, and so on.)

Takin’ It to the Streets

More than 90 percent of the non-scholastic races held in the United States are road races. If you know someone who has run a race, it’s almost guaranteed that he or she ran in a road race. There are road races of pretty much every distance you can imagine from the mile to the marathon. The most popular distances are 5K (3.1 miles), 8K (about 50 yards short of 5 miles), and 10K (6.2 miles).
The size of the fields in road races runs the gamut, too: You can find small rural affairs among 15 people all the way up to the country’s biggest road race in terms of official entrants, The Lilac Bloomsday Run, a 12K (7.4 miles) run by more than 55,000 every May in Spokane, Washington. (Bay to Breakers, a 12K held every May in San Francisco, sometimes has as many as 100,000 people running it, but only about half of them have registered for the race.) A typical road race, in which runners wear race numbers and receive T-shirts, will have anywhere from a few hundred to 1,000 runners in it. Races with more than 1,000 runners are major productions.
I’m obviously biased toward road races, having earned the nickname “King of the Roads” in the ’70s. I like how the course of each road race has its own quirks that you have to master. I also like the (usually) firm footing and long stretches so that I can get in a good rhythm. The party atmosphere that I told you so many races have is almost exclusively at road races.
Another cool aspect of road races is that they are one of the few, if not the only, instances in sports where an average participant competes at the same time on the same course as the best in the world. Want to play baseball with Cal Ripken? Good luck. But line up with the 50,000 runners who run the Peachtree 10K in Atlanta every Fourth of July, and some of the fastest runners around are at the front of the field. Sure, you’re not going to be going head to head with them, but running is different because you’re experiencing the race exactly as the elite runners do. It’s fun to see how your time compares to theirs. You can’t do that in baseball, football, basketball, or almost any other sport.

What is Master Running?

Enter masters running. With awards given out in fiveyear brackets, you’re not forced to fight it out with the young bucks if taking home loot is part of the appeal of racing to you. Instead, it’s just you and your contemporaries, who are more likely to have the body and schedule that you do than some just-out-of-college hotshot is. The age-group categories level the playing field.
More importantly, masters running does a tremendous job of keeping runners motivated enough to keep attending races by giving you a way to set goals. In the last few years of my 30s, I was a little bit adrift. I was no longer fast enough to duke it out with the top guys in most races, and I wasn’t running as fast I used to, even though I was training as hard. It was tough to know how to assess my performances and how to set goals for future ones.
But when I turned 40, suddenly there were all these masters records to aim for—I got to see how close I could get to what other runners past the age of 40 had done. Mentally, I wiped the slate clean. I concentrated on setting masters personal records and took each personal record as a new standard, rather than comparing it to my faster times from my 20s and 30s. I start fresh every time I enter a new five-year age group. That kind of attitude helps to explain why in some races, more than half the runners are past the age of 40. They’ve figured out that they can continue to find meaning in their race performances by comparing them to what they have achieved recently. Racing gives them a fresh outlook and new goals to shoot for every few years. When you do that, you’ve found the fountain of youth, regardless of how old your birth certificate says you are.

Becoming Master Runner

No matter how long you’ve been running, once you’re 40 or older, you’ll be called a masters runner. For long-time runners like me, the phrase makes a certain amount of sense—after all those years of putting in the miles, you’ve mastered how to keep at it and with enough interest that you’re still showing up at races. What’s so great about masters running? There must be something to it because I know I’m not alone in finding my running revitalized by the turning of the clock. Competition for the top prizes in the masters category are among the toughest in running. Masters running has become such a big deal that the Indianapolis Life Insurance Company sponsors a circuit of races around the country that’s open only to masters runners.
Masters racing recognizes that no matter how intelligently you go about your running, it’s a lot tougher to run fast when you’re 45 than when you’re 25. That’s especially so for people who have been at it for a long time. Most runners reach their best performances in the first 8 to 12 years of running, regardless of the age at which they start. So if you start at a young age, by the time you’re 40, your times in races are almost assured to be slower than they were in your early 30s.
This inevitable slowing with age can be pretty depressing if you don’t have a way to deal with it. Say there were no age-group awards in races, but just prizes for the top 10. Who would ever have a chance to take home a trophy except for the young and the breathless? Even if you were never an award winner in your youth, how would you go about setting goals when you know that no matter how hard you work, you’re never going to run as fast as you once could?

Running for Charity

Races have long been venues for raising money for charities. I’ve always liked being able to tie in doing something good for myself with helping others.Most of the people running these kinds of races would probably have participated in them anyway; the money raised for charity is a nice side consequence of them doing so.
However, one of the biggest trends in American racing is charity running that works the other way around—people enter races (usually marathons) solely for the purpose of raising money for charity. This approach has long been applied to other activities. For example, think of the AIDS Walks or the March of Dimes. The new charity running emphasis at races is much the same, except that the runners use races that already exist, rather than events that are created specifically for them. The biggest of these types of programs is called Team in Training, run by the Leukemia Society of America. Runners sign up to participate in one of the many marathons that Team in Training sends people to. In exchange for raising a specified amount of money (usually in the neighborhood of $3,000) in pledges, program participants receive free entry, travel, and lodging at their chosen marathon. The locales can be pretty exotic, such as the program’s most popular race, the Mayor’s Midnight Sun Marathon in Anchorage, Alaska. Other big Team in Training sites are Bermuda, Honolulu, San Diego, Dublin, and Paris.
Runners in the program receive free coaching from knowledgeable runners in their area. Most groups meet once a week for a long run and a pre-run clinic from their coach. The usual training program lasts for six months so that the runners gradually build up to being able to finish the marathon.
Team in Training has been phenomenally successful in meeting its goals; it has raised more than $25 million for leukemia research, and now is the source of more than half of the Leukemia Society’s revenue. Similar groups have sprung up that raise money for arthritis research (Joints in Motion) and cancer research (Fred’s Team).
Many runners join these groups for emotional reasons—they know someone who suffers from the disease that their fundraising will battle. Almost all of the participants in these programs are first-time marathoners. In some cases, they’re even first-time runners, having started to run only after deciding to finish a marathon to raise money for charity.
Charity runners care mostly about finishing their marathon to raise money, not how fast they can run the marathon. They’ve added an important new element to the sport and have helped running to continue to grow. (About 14,000 people take part in Team in Training each year.) Because of the good coaching they receive, nearly all of them complete their marathon.

Personal Betting

I’ve always been a competitor, ever since I was the fastest kid in a run during gym class in school. Seeing how fast I can run has long been my primary motivation to be a runner. Oddly enough, that’s why I stopped running for a few years after college. My goal then had been to break 9:00 for two miles, and I did. I didn’t see the point in racing anymore, so I didn’t see the point in running anymore. (Now, of course, I know better. What’s that about youth being wasted on the young?)
I was fortunate to be able to win races when I was younger. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that doing so wasn’t incredibly satisfying. Let me tell you, if you ever need motivation to get out the door for a run on a tough New England winter day, try telling yourself that you’ll be defending your title at the Boston Marathon in a couple of months. It worked wonders for me.
But even when I raced for place, I was also always focused on my finishing times in races. Now that I don’t win races anymore, I’m even more fanatical about them. I’m certainly not alone in that regard. For many runners, setting personal records, or getting under a certain barrier for a distance, or seeing how their time at a race this year compares to what they ran there last year, or any of the million other ways that you can look at your running times provides the biggest reason to race. There’s something intoxicating about racing against yourself.
Your race times provide an objective record of your accomplishment on that day. There’s just no way around it—your race time is how long it took you to run this course on this day. Unlike other sports competitions, races are about unadulterated human performance. In other sports, you’re maneuvering against your opponents and trying to finesse some piece of equipment. When you race for time, it’s just you, the elements, and the clock.
Nothing else I’ve found in sports gives you that yes-or-no sense of accomplishment that racing for time does. Suppose you play on a softball team. How do you know whether you’ve had a good game? There are so many variables that you don’t have primary control over. Did you get two hits because you swung the bat well or because the other team’s pitcher stunk? What about when you made that nice play at third base, but the first baseman flubbed your throw, or the umpire made the wrong call? There’s none of that uncertainty when you race for time.
Earlier in this chapter, I told you how aiming for a race is one of the best ways to set the short-term goals I keep recommending. On top of that, aiming toward a race and having a time goal for it helps to keep you running even more. It lends a logic to your training—with the race as your goal, you have a better idea of what types of running you should be doing. Those time goals are a great answer for that little voice in your head that’s occasionally going to say, “Why are you doing this?”