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.