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?”

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.