The endless pursuit

Even the most reluctant and cynical competitors are always on the hunt for successors to the chase

Almost everyone who takes up distance running will never be an objectively great competitor. The strict stratification of finishers in (most) races by time and place, and the fact that the meter and the second represent fundamental physical units with constant values on Earth, make it easy to tell early in any individual’s running career whether that runner is likely to reach the world-class or even the American national-class level. Probably easier than in other sports, and easier than in most educational or vocational pursuits, where in many cases effort and external factors play stronger or predominating roles.

Rather than serving to discourage people, though, this reality can be flipped on its head. No matter how slow you may be starting out, or right now, the stopwatch offers a means of confirming your own undeniable improvement. And even if you’re not naturally gifted, you have access to the same map leading to improvement that everyone else does.

The main thing most competitive runners have traditionally wanted was to enjoy the challenge of doing something difficult and doing it better than they did before. If that means winning, be it an age-group prize at a semi-major marathon or the slowest heat in a freshman-sophomore 800-meter race, that’s motivation to keep working hard. But most runners I know want some combination of faster times or keeping ahead of their known age-group rivals.

Spending time fretting over the ways running has been warped by posers and narcissists, some of whom can or once could run a lick but have now relegated themselves to hounding publicity at any cost, is a very effective way to stop noticing the good things that happen and their importance. Running is not and never will be about fads like trashy non-running “influencers” waving their middle fingers at everything in sight being chosen for marketing retention by companies like HOKA over entire competitive running teams. It will not be about the dingbat and degenrate things retired blowhards or grifters leveraging their natural sexual preferences, intentional self-bloating, or overall social categorization for unabashed monetary gain.

For as long as the sport is allowed to continue, it will be about older runners doing their best to export intact whatever wisdom they have collected to younger competitive minds and spirits. That is what kept me going as a competitor for a few decades, and it’s what keeps me going as an interactive observer now. All along, I have enjoyed writing about this aspect of running, or life, no matter where it appears.

My nephew is a freshman, or first-year, or plebe, at a Division III school in New England. He dabbled in running as early as the fifth grade, and spent some time on the soccer field and the basketball court as well. He was a late bloomer, which is crippling to boys playing sports at the high-school level. As a senior, he never broke 20:00 for 5K. In his final prep track season last spring, he ran 59-point for the 400m, 2:23 for the 800m, 5:35 for the 1,600m and 12:40+ in his only 3,200-meter race (against one other person). Despite these times not being good enough for a scholarship to a collegiate women’s program, and in the face of a clear proclivity for shorter distances, he decided to run cross-country in college, where most races are 8K.

This kid trained all summer while working at one of the busiest McDonald’s restaurants in New Hampshire. He took to the challenge with gusto, managing to get himself down to a significantly faster pace on a muddy five-mile cross-country course than he had in that lonely 3,200 meters six months earlier. He was running varsity for a team that won its conference championship. And critically, one of his coaches was someone who ran for the same high school I did, ran very close to the same time I did at the Boston Marathon, is approximately a generation older, and has been a positive influence on my own running since I met him in the 1980s. He’s among the people whose presence reminds me that none of us invents anything as we progress in our journey through running, and that we all accumulate knowledge in accordance with our own hunger for and biases toward the sport and its disciplines.

Again, this is something immutable and eternal, even if it effervesces and resonates in accordance with ambient cultural shifts both welcome and noisome.

Once indoor track arrived last month, my nephew was more in his element. He’ll continue to progress in cross-country, because everything he does he seeks to do well. And he loves running. But he has grown fond of the relays and the long sprints, and has already won a 600 meters in a time within four seconds of the winner’s time in that event in the modified 2022 New Hampshire High School Indoor Track and Field Championships. He has since banged out a 2:12 800 meters, easily worth a sub-2:10 outdoors. He may, and probably will, eventually break two minutes. And in a demonstration of how much fun he is already having, he, historically not the most bombastic of personalities, started a fund-raiser for his own team at the end of cross-country season.

Unlike me, he is almost certain to exhaust his collegiate athletic eligibility. I quit the team after a little more than two years. I can say now that I wouldn’t have taken so enthusiastically to the roads later without this bump along the way; I can offer clean excuses for having quit, and note that I had a lot of self-de-rostering company at UVM. But either way, I did not enjoy the complete developmental, athletic, and social experience I could have.

You can tell I think this is all quite cool. No one else in my immediate or ever extended family has ever done any serious running except for my nephew’s dad, who now thinks he needs to step up his game as a 50-year-old recovering weightlifter to keep up on training runs during school breaks. Most of us have never earned a college degree.

It had to move laterally before worming its way down, but the running bug has been successfully transmitted, and has infected someone I know and deeply care about with all the right symptoms. It really is a beautiful condition to carry through life, and watching a fellow sufferer fall further into the abyss, and into the right hands, is an always-available tonic for alleviating the negative effects of almost every other misery.