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?”

Racing’s Best-Kept Secret: It’s Fun!

People who haven’t been to races aren’t going to know this, so you’ll just have to take my word for it until you see it for yourself: You’d be hard-pressed to find an event more filled with smiles and unambiguous goodwill than your local road race. Put another way, why should you race? Because it’s fun!
A road race is the closest thing to a mobile party that I can think of. (Well, the closest legal thing.) Everywhere you look, there are smiles, cheers, laughs, and heartfelt congratulations from one runner to another. There’s music before and after (sometimes even during), there’s great food after, prizes are given out, and kids are roaming all around—sounds more like a circus than someplace where a bunch of skinny masochists gather to be miserable together, doesn’t it?
Of course, most people aren’t laughing it up and smiling during the race; they’re working pretty darned hard. But that effort explains the festive atmosphere afterward. The runners have pushed and challenged themselves, and now they’re all celebrating the sense of accomplishment that doing so brings.
In life, isn’t one extreme of something usually more enjoyable if you’ve recently been near the other extreme? Isn’t a sunny day more special when it’s been raining for a week than when it’s the 10th bright day in a row? Doesn’t your easy chair feel best when you’ve been working your hardest? That’s why races are so much fun. Once you’ve experienced a race, you’ll agree with me that there’s a certain kind of fun that comes from challenging yourself within sharply defined parameters while others around you are doing the same.

People Pay to Do This?

The average road race is held early on a Sunday morning. A standard road race with T-shirts, awards, post-race refreshments, and so on costs $15 to $25 to enter. In other words, most people running in them have gone to bed early on a Saturday night, gotten up at least as early on a Sunday morning as on a regular workday, and then handed over the cost of a nice dinner for the opportunity to inflict pain on themselves. Sounds like they’re the idiots, huh?
They’re far from it, and I’m not just sensitive to that charge because I go to 25 to 30 races a year. At some level, these runners realize that far from being masochists, they’re indulging themselves. That’s right—indulging themselves! Racing is the proverbial icing on the running cake.
Your regular training gives you the big health and fitness benefits that are the most
important thing about running for most people, but experiencing only that part of
running can get a little tedious. You need some excitement and some variety in anything
that you do regularly, no matter how much you love it. In running, that excitement and
variety most often comes from going to a race. You don’t even have to try to run harder
than you do when you run on your own. There’s just something about lining up with
your fellow runners and experiencing the same course together that adds an element to
your running that’s impossible to find otherwise. Say you really like to cook. Which would you rather do: Always cook for just you and
your spouse, making pretty much the same types of dishes at the same time of day? Or would you rather use those daily cooking sessions as the main way to enjoy your hobby, but also throw a dinner party once in a while where you get to put it all on the line and let yourself and others see just what you’re capable of? Most people would choose the second option, and that’s why you see so many people at races. Let’s continue that dinner party analogy just a bit farther. Say you invite a few friends over for dinner. You don’t worry about how your culinary skills compare to Wolfgang Puck’s, do you? No. You do the best you can given your background and ability, and afterward you’re rewarded with the feeling of a job well done.
The same is true of nearly all of the people in any race. They know that they don’t have to look like Frank Shorter or Joan Benoit Samuelson to race. They know that races give their running a focus and are a great source of motivation for getting out the door most days.
Many beginning runners have a sense that their running would be more exciting if they went to races, but they’re afraid that they’ll finish last and be embarrassed. As Richard
Nixon would have said, let me say this about that: First, most races have at least a few hundred runners in them. Just like only one person is going to finish first, only one person is going to finish last. The odds of that being you are pretty long, believe me. More important, if it is you, so what? No one has ever been shot or even booed for finishing last in a road race. In fact, some of the loudest applause from spectators in races are for those near the back of the pack. The spectators recognize the extra effort that these runners are putting out. Adding to that applause are often many of the runners who have finished their races, and then hung around the finish area to cheer on their fellow runners. That kind of camaraderie with your fellow runners is one of the main draws that races have.