RACING 101

Imagine a softball team comprised of several players striving to make their league’s playoffs while the remainder of the team sees the games as a time to play a little ball, drink a little beer, and have fun. Sounds like a bad experience all around for everyone, doesn’t it?

What value do you put on winning? Is competition the important element in sports or is the experience the thing you value? This is an ongoing issue for many of us. Witness the debate between parents who would like school sports to include every child who goes out for the team and those parents who want to have a merit based selection and participation process.

More so than in most other sports, running offers an outlet for people who compete at the most intense levels to those who run for the social and festive side of races. In a single race, Olympic hopefuls and elite runners may be jockeying for position at the front of the pack while folks in costumes and run/walkers pursue their own goals farther back. One of the intriguing aspects of running is how people change over time in terms of their attitude to competition. It is not uncommon for recreational runners to develop some competitive juices as their running habit becomes more ingrained.

How does this happen? At first, you take up running for health and fitness reasons. You start a run/walk program and find you develop the stamina to run a mile. It feels good! One mile becomes two miles. Friends notice and say: “You look good!” You see a 5K Run advert at the gym and consider working up to three miles. You register. Now you’re determined to add that third mile in your training so you can complete the entire run without walking.

Race day dawns. You have butterflies in your stomach and a race bib pinned to your shirt. Noticing the speedy young things at the front of the crowd, you find a place well back of the start. The gun goes off and you’re running, running faster than you’ve run on any of your training runs. The adrenalin, the other runners, the knowledge that you are in a race spurs you ahead. You are flying! Not wanting to run out of steam, you make yourself slow down and breath deeply, falling into a good pace for you. All around you are other runners. You actually pass some people who went out too fast and are now slowing down considerably.

Before you know it, you are crossing the finish line. You walk around a bit to catch your breath and keep your muscles moving, exchanging smiles and impressions with the other finishers. You get some water and some carbs, maybe a banana or bagel. You head over to the results board, where there’s a bit of a crowd. There is your number and your name.
There it is, for anyone to see. You finished your first race. Chances are, it will not be your last.

Perhaps this race has an awards ceremony, so you stick around and watch. You notice that not just the fastest runner is acknowledged. There are awards for both the fastest man and fastest woman. Then, there are awards for people by age groups. That nice 62 year old who finished not all that far ahead of you won an award in her age group. You go back to the results board and check out the winning times in your age group and compare it with your time. “Hmmm, I wonder what I could do to try and get faster,” you think.

And thus a recreational runner begins to turn into a competitive runner. Of course, there are varying degrees of being competitive. Sure, there are a small segment of folks who allow themselves to become obsessed, focusing every run and much of their non-running time on improving their times. Most runners find a balance, choosing to train for a race now and then, at which times they will become a bit more focused and might follow a training schedule designed by a running coach. These are available in books and often on line as well. The rest of the time, they incorporate running into their weekly schedules as a valued activity they practice either by themselves or with a running partner, and at times, with a running club.

Races are definitely fun; I see them as a celebration of running. Most of the time, I run alone. I love running with my club, the Black Hills Runners Club, but can only do about once a week, if that. Races bring together people of all ages and speeds, not to mention occupations, outlooks, and all the other qualities that make each of us unique. What we share is a love of running. While races are competitive, not everyone in the race is there to compete.

One of the best pieces of advice on racing I can pass along is this: “Never take finishing for granted.” This tenet, if you truly embrace it and keep it foremost in your heart and mind, will keep your running balanced. No matter what the distance, what the circumstances, know that you could pull up short with an injury, you could fall, any number of things might occur that would prevent you from finishing the race. Olympics fans might recall watching the women’s 3000-meter finals in the ’84 games when USA’s Mary Decker, bumped by a British runner, stumbled and fell, crushing her Olympic dreams into the track. Four years of sweat, toil, and training undone in an instant.

If you have run races in the past, hold on to that feeling you had when you finished your first race. The pride, the sense of accomplishment, the thrill of having achieved something you had only wondered at doing just a short time earlier; these are pure emotions worth reliving. Of course, it is fine to set loftier goals. You need to have a sense of how to pace yourself. A realistic estimate of how you think you’ll finish going at “race pace” is in order. It’s also good to set a second, faster goal—one that is at your outer limits and that would really please you if you were to reach it.

The trick is not to feel depressed at the end of the race should you fail to achieve those time goals you set. Sure, a little disappointment is in order. At some point, you’ll want to review what did not go as planned and what you learned from any mistakes or your experience. As difficult as they are, the races where you don’t do as well as you want are the best teachers. I went out too fast on an unseasonably warm day at a race one May and had a miserable final quarter. As a result, I am a much better runner in the heat today. And yes, I hung in there and finished, for which I am both grateful and proud. You put your disappointment in perspective so you walk away feeling good about something. Finishing—even if it isn’t pretty-- is an accomplishment.

John Bingham is a national columnist on running who calls himself and others like him “penguins.” He describes a penguin as person who runs for the joy of running, who is “consumed by the pleasure of movement.” Bingham runs races, and does so with verve, a smile, and an infectious spirit. He has a slightly different focus on finishing a race, as you can tell from his motto: “The miracle isn’t that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start.” On his website (http://www.johnbingham.com/penguin.html), he lists a number of ways you can tell if you might be a penguin. Some of them include:
--during a race, you keep turning around to see if there is still anyone behind you.
--you shoot a 24 shot roll of film during a marathon.
--the truck picking up the cones is pressing on your behind.
--you recognize all the regular runners on your favorite route from behind.
--the awards ceremony is over before you cross the finish line.

His sense of humor and open approach have inspired many people to get off the couch and start running. You can read more about John and his “Penguin Manifesto” in his book No Need for Speed.

If you are running or run/walking but have never thought before about entering a race, why not consider it? The lovely thing about running in a race is that people of all different abilities can compete in the same race and share that race experience. Unlike the softball team with its potentially warring factions (the strivers and the fun-seekers), a race has room for the seriously intense and the joyous penguins and for everyone in between.

One new runner once confided to me she was afraid to enter a race because she was she thought she’d be last. My response to that is that sure, someone always has to be last in the race. It might be you. How you do at any race on any day is always a function of who else shows up to run. You can feel bad about finishing last if you compare yourself to the other people in the race. You can deal yourself out of a potentially great time if you let that stop you from trying.

In the alternative, you can get up on race day, put on your shoes and go down to the start and register. Look around you and get excited about the race that is about to begin. Think about all the other people in town or in your social network who are not there, who are going to be perhaps surprised and impressed if you tell them you competed in a race. Runners are a pretty good group of people overall. We all started sometime, somewhere, and we’ll be really supportive if you tell us it is your first race. You’ll get lots of grins and congratulations from most if not all of the rest of pack, even if you do finish last.

Set your goals by your own internal standards. Finishing the race is a good goal. Having the courage to start, as John Bingham points out, is an even better one. And having fun is the best one of all. See you at the races!