One of the advantages of being on the long flight back from the US to China was that I caught up in reading several back issues of The New Yorker magazine from the summer and early fall. One of the better articles I read was about Ryan Hal’s quest for the gold in Beijing entitled “Running To Beijing: The Making Of A Long Distance Runner.”
A few months ago, one of the running blogs I read had a discussion on why does running seem to be a sport of the upper middle classes. Here are some excerpts from the article about that topic.
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Keflezighi’s silver was a breakthrough—the first time an American male marathoner had stood on the Olympic victory stand since Frank Shorter. Also in Athens, Deena Kastor, another Mammoth Lakes resident and member of Team Running USA, took the bronze in the women’s race. Their performances suggested that, finally, after three decades, the nation was learning how to tap into its running boom.
Since 1972, there has been no shortage of American runners. In the old days, the sport attracted primarily oddballs and obsessives, but that changed steadily in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Kenneth Cooper, the man behind the VO2 max tests of élite athletes, coined the term “aerobics,” and he published books that emphasized the benefits of exercising for health. People became more likely to run for rational reasons, and they trained accordingly; the hard-core competitiveness of my father’s generation slipped away. Mileage dropped for high-school and college runners, because of fear of injury and burnout. These days, recreational runners tend to be educated people with good jobs. The average participant in the ING New York City Marathon has an annual household income of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. The people who read Runner’s World have a median income virtually the same as that of the readers of Forbes. When I talked to Cliff Bosley, the director of the Bolder Boulder, one of the largest road races in America, he said, “Running has demographics that are comparable to golf.” Charity has become a major part of marathons, as runners claim limited entry spots by raising money for worthy causes. Mary Wittenberg, the president of the New York Road Runners, the nonprofit that organizes the city’s marathon, told me that participants tend to be type-A overachievers who are attractive to advertisers. “Why are ING and the Bank of America involved?” she said, referring to the title sponsors of the races in New York and Chicago. “You want a customer that’s in it for the long run, somebody who is going to look to retirement. That’s a goal-oriented, driven person. It’s all about the quest.”
It’s not, however, about the time. Today, most marathoners simply want to finish, and races have become dramatically slower, at least after the top runners. In 1982, the hundredth finisher in New York ran 2:25:45. Last year, in a race with nearly three times as many participants, the hundredth runner crossed the line at 2:39:26. It was also in 1982 that an American last won the New York marathon. Since then, the men’s races have been dominated by African runners, who have gravitated toward the longer distance. For élite athletes, it’s smart to focus on the marathon, because races are wealthy enough to offer appearance fees and prize money in amounts that are extremely unusual at track events. In the United States, track has never drawn significant income from television, and neither has the marathon—but American marathons don’t rely on TV money. Nor do they need to sell tickets to spectators. Instead, the participants raise the cash, because they can afford to pay high entry fees and their demographic appeals to advertisers. Marathoning may be the only sport in which sponsors target the losers, and the losers pay for the winners. That’s how the running boom played out for the Kenyans and the Ethiopians: it created a lot of slow, rich American marathoners willing to pay big money to get beat.
For many years there was a sense that even the best American runners couldn’t compete with the Africans. Recently, though, coaches have realized that athletes simply need to train harder. The “Big Three” high-school class of 2001—Ryan Hall, Alan Webb, and Dathan Ritzenhein—trained seriously at a young age, and all have become professionals capable of challenging the top runners in the world. In 2004, an Oregon boy named Galen Rupp finally broke the high-school record in the five thousand metres, set by Gerry Lindgren, in 1964. (Rupp made this year’s Olympic team in the ten thousand metres.) Meanwhile, the big-city marathons have started using some of their wealth to support élite training groups. Each year, the ING New York City Marathon helps pay for the Team Running USA camp in Mammoth Lakes, which has already produced two Olympic medallists. In Oregon, Nike sponsors another top group. Shoe contracts have become a prime source of income for many track runners; athletes are valuable marketers for the hordes of affluent recreational runners.
When Ryan Hall won the Olympic Trials marathon in 2007, he dominated the strongest field in Trials history. Keflezighi, the defending silver medallist, finished eighth—during training he had struggled with injuries, but even in good health he would have had to run well to make the team. Dathan Ritzenhein took second, and he told me that top American talent is increasingly drawn to the marathon, partly because of the payouts. “If I was to say that the money doesn’t mean anything to me, I’d be lying,” he said. “But it’s not about that at the end. You can’t fake it at twenty-four miles.”
The best runners still have that quality—they’re driven by obsessions other than wealth. Ryan Hall has quickly become one of the most marketable distance runners in the world, drawing big appearance fees from races. Mary Wittenberg, of the Road Runners, told me that she expected to pay two hundred thousand dollars just to get him on the starting line of the New York marathon in 2009. But he was still in his home town, running the old routes, and his life style had hardly changed. He drove a three-year-old Honda, and his and Sara’s modest house in Big Bear Lake had a “For Rent” sign in front, because they leased it out to vacationers whenever they trained elsewhere. In Mammoth Lakes, they lived in a mobile home. “We kind of see the money we have as God’s money,” Sara told me. They supported a Christian charity called Team World Vision, which gets entrants to the country’s major marathons to raise money for development projects in Africa. Once, when I was at lunch with Ryan and Team World Vision organizers, somebody mentioned that marathoners tend to have high incomes. “Really?” Ryan said, his eyes wide. “I didn’t know that!”
Few professional runners seemed to realize that their paychecks came from the guys at the back of the pack. Ian Dobson, an Olympian in the five thousand metres who lived mostly on the earnings of a shoe contract, told me that he was under the impression that it was a tax writeoff for somebody. “I don’t understand the economics,” he said. “I don’t understand how it could be worth it for Adidas to pay me.” In a way, the sport creates an unusual intimacy between the recreational and the élite: in a marathon, they all gather together on the same starting line. But in truth the top guys are still on the fringes, isolated, pounding out the miles as in the old days. And from the African perspective it couldn’t be stranger. Michael Chitwood, the director of Team World Vision, told me that when he went overseas he had trouble explaining his funding. “I go to Africa and say, ‘Well, I work with marathoners and we raise money for these projects,’ ” he said. “They’re like, ‘What do you mean? You guys don’t have that many good runners in America!’ I say, ‘No, no, no, they’re not good runners!’ ”
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If you would like to read this long, well-written article, the link is available below.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/08/11/080811fa_fact_hessler?currentPage=all
