Racing for Time, Not for Company

Last Friday I read an article about young adults turning to recreational sports and organized races to find connection without needing alcohol. Generation Z, it said, is showing up for marathons and other events in larger numbers. Two days later I saw the shift in person when I ran a 10K.

Unlike most races, this one started with the 5K and 10K fields together. We split around 2.5 miles and rejoined near the finish. I passed a surprisingly large number of 5K runners near the end, which meant I had covered roughly twice the distance in the same amount of time. Hundreds of them were moving at a very easy pace.

This result matched something I have been noticing for a while. My own race times are many minutes slower than they were decades ago, yet I am placing at about the same spot in percentage terms. I still finish in the top 10 percent, and sometimes a bit better. That only makes sense if the average runner is considerably slower than in the past. When I checked the large studies of race results, the pattern held, especially at the 5K and 10K distances. Participation is up, and the newer participants—other than those at the top—are much slower.

I do not know how to feel about this development. I race to see how good a time I can get. I train with that in mind. Trying to improve is not the only reason I run, but it is an important one. I have always assumed that my fellow racers share some version of the impulse that the point of the race, at least in part, is to find out how fast you can go that day. The numbers and the scene on Sunday make it clear that this is not true for everyone.

Many of the people I passed looked like they were there for company and an event rather than for a time. That is fine as far as it goes. People can run for whatever reasons they want. The difficulty for me is that I have a hard time imagining racing for social connection. When I pin on a number, I am testing myself against a clock and against whatever version of myself showed up that morning. The social part is real—I like the shared start, the crowd at the finish, the conversation afterward—but it is secondary. The primary question is still "How fast can I go?"

Friends tell me that the fact that so many people are now running races is an unalloyed good. I can see the argument. More people moving is better than fewer people moving, and a race can be a low-pressure way into regular exercise. Still, I keep returning to a simpler idea: athletic endeavors, at their core, involve trying to get better. Not better than everyone else, and not better by any standard other people set, but better than you were. That effort is what makes the activity athletic rather than purely recreational.

I do not need everyone else to share that view. I just notice that I do, and that the gap between my reasons and the reasons filling a lot of shorter races is larger than I expected. When I line up, the question is still how fast I can go that day. That question is what keeps the race athletic for me, even when the field around me has other questions in mind.