How to Find a Race

Where can you find details on races in your area? The best place to start is with a local running club. Don’t worry if you don’t know anyone in the club or even how to contact them. If you don’t know any runners in your area who you can ask about local clubs, call the national office of the Road Runners Club of America at (703) 836-0558. Ask for the name and number of the club nearest to you. Once you know the club in your area, give it a call. Most clubs maintain a hotline that has a recording of upcoming club races.
If you know of a running store near you, visit it. Ask the salespeople (who are usually local runners) if they know where you can find information about local races. Many areas have local running publications that do a fantastic job of listing all of the upcoming races in a locale. Most running stores are also depositories for race flyers. Look through them to see if any of them interest you.
If you have Internet access, next stop is the World Wide Web. Appendix B, “Resources for Runners,” lists some of the best running Web sites. Because of the nature of this book, most of those Web sites are national in scope, but many have links to local running Web sites. There, you can often find race listings.
The two top national running magazines, Runner’s World and Running Times, list upcoming races in their calendar sections. Of the two, Running Times maintains a more in-depth calendar, but neither can possibly list all of the 15,000 races that are held in the United States every year. Their calendars are handy resources, however, if you’re going to be traveling and want to sneak in a race while you’re away.

Over Hill, Over Dale

The most elemental of races is cross-country. These races take place on grass and dirt, usually through woods, on golf courses, or in other pleasant settings. Cross-country races are usually from 5K to 10K in length and are usually held in the fall. Like track races, they’re usually put on by local running clubs and have, at most, a couple of hundred runners. They usually are low-key affairs with no T-shirts and a small entry fee. Crosscountry races are often team races, and many people like that aspect of them. Times are pretty meaningless in cross-country, so runners concentrate on feeling that they ran strongly.
Building on this attitude is the growing number of trail races. These races are usually much longer than standard cross-country races; sometimes they’re as long as 50 miles or more. In spirit, these races are more akin to marathons, as most of the participants care more about finishing honorably than getting a certain time.
Training for and racing cross-country can do a lot to help you as a runner on other surfaces. You learn to run strongly over uneven terrain, and you become a better hill runner. Kenyan men have won the team title at the World Cross-Country Championships every year since 1986, and every year they produce an astonishing percentage of the top track and road runners in the world.

Get on Track

Races held on the track can be hard to find once you’re out of school. But especially during the summer, many local running clubs will put on one or more all comer’s meets. In some parts of the country, you also can find indoor track meets open to all runners during the winter. These track meets are usually sparsely populated events, with less than 100 runners taking part. There are no T-shirts, and the entry fee is nominal. All comer’s meets have an intimate atmosphere that’s hard to match at a big road race.
Whereas road races are often about doing the best you can on the course you find yourself on, there’s no such mystery in track races. Seen one, you’ve seen them all. Because of this universality of tracks, most runners are going to be there to chase after a time goal. As a result, many runners are intimidated by track races because they associate racing on the track with something that only really fast people do. That’s a shame, because I think all racers should experiment with different types of races occasionally. Track races are usually shorter than road races; 5K (12.5 laps of the track) is usually the longest race. Many runners gravitate to the longer distances because that’s what’s available on the road. But by running track races in addition to road races, you might find that you have a talent for speed-based events such as the mile. Track races are also a good place to develop a strong sense of pace. Because there’s no variation from lap to lap, you do best by getting in a rhythm. Learning how to get in a rhythm can help you on flat road courses as well. You also develop the ability to concentrate when you compete on the track frequently because churning lap after lap can get so boring.