AN UNCHARITABLE VIEW

“I have little doubt that such dumbing down will be successful if our aim is to maximize the total population count at our event. But when I protest that what is being marketed here is not real science, I am rebuked for my ‘elitism’ and told that luring people in, by any means, is a necessary first step. Well, if we must use the word (I wouldn’t), maybe elitism is not such a terrible thing. And there is a great difference between an exclusive snobbery and an embracing, flattering elitism that strives to help people to raise their game and join the elite. A calculated dumbing down is the worst: condescending and patronizing . . . I worry that to promote science as all fun and larky and easy is to store up trouble for the future. Real science can be hard (well, challenging, to give it a more positive spin) but, like classical literature or playing the violin, worth the struggle. If children are lured into science, or any other worthwhile occupation, by the promise of easy fun, what are they going to do when they finally have to confront the reality?”

—Richard Dawkins,
Unweaving the Rainbow

Last spring, a woman in my office came by cap in hand a few months before the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon. She was one of the legions doing the inaugural event as a first-timer to raise money for a charity. Happy that the office conversation had, ever so briefly, moved beyond the brevity of the previous weekend and what the following day’s weather might hold, I gave her a check for $52.40.

“That’s an odd amount,” she told me.

“Umm, divide $52.40 by 2 and you get . . . ?”

“$26.20.”

“Right . . . $26.20 . . . 26.2 dollars . . .”

Blank stare. I tried again. “26.2 dollars . . . 26.2 miles in a marathon.”

“Oh, that’s right” she said, her face lighting up. “I forgot how far it is.”

ULTIMATE REALITY

“What to do about the charity runners” has become almost as predictable and tiresome a topic of conversation among self-styled “real runners” as weekends and weather are in my office. For now, let’s put aside the false us-versus-them dichotomy that the debate usually degenerates into. Instead, let’s look at how these well-meaning, usually inexperienced marathoners are ill-served by the equally well-meaning groups they raise money for.

Consider my odometrically challenged officemate. For starters, ignorance certainly isn’t bliss at the 23-mile mark of a marathon. Even allowing for a momentary memory lapse, her answer speaks volumes about her indoctrination to running.

Look at any of the literature meant to lure charity marathoners, and one theme is a constant: completing a marathon is the ultimate achievement in running. (Never mind that the claim is belied precisely by the hundreds of thousands who do so every year.) Yes, completing a marathon, especially your first one, is a big deal. But that’s different than holding up the Platonic ideal of The Marathon to such an extent that your troops don’t know or care how long it is.

First things first. The marathon is no more the ultimate in running than was the first sub-4:00 mile. Some pessimists predicted that the first person to break 4:00 would die of a burst heart or some such deserved punishment for striving Icarus-like against the laws of nature. But the entirely arbitrary measures of a mile or a minute have no meaning to the human body; by now, the thought that a 3:59.9 mile is godlike is so archaic that we lament that no high schooler has run one in more than 30 years.

Same thing goes for 26.2 miles. Perhaps for a Tegla Loroupe or Moses Tanui, who attempt to race the distance more than a minute a mile faster than their already-swift training pace, a successful marathon is nonpareil. For most charity runners, though, who give their main goal as completing, not competing, there’s nothing inherently “ultimate” about the marathon distance. Why not run 26.3 miles? That would be all the more ultimate.

FALL OF THE RUNNER

What’s wrong with a little hype? Like Richard Dawkins, I worry that misrepresentations at the outset can have long-term negative consequences.

Take your typical first-time charity runner who finishes a fall marathon. It’s not uncommon for such a runner to have been, at best, an intermittent jogger just the previous spring. Six months after signing on to the charity program, our ambling fund-raiser accomplishes what is billed as the sport’s ultimate achievement. By now, it’s late October, early November. The days are short, the weather increasingly nasty. Long-time runners have a hard enough time maintaining motivation through the dark night of winter. How much more so must that be the case for someone who didn’t have the habit even a year ago, but who has been told that she has already mounted the sport’s summit? Where is there to go but down?

In other words, charity running programs are billed as a lever that springs thousands of new runners into our community every year. But, because of the manner in which they present their fund-raising vehicle, they likely contribute to fewer of their enrollees becoming lifelong runners. Gail Waesche Kislevitz’s book First Marathons cites a figure of 250,000 first-time marathoners a year. Where are they the next? Dennis Ahlman, president of Team in Training, once told me that his organization doesn’t track such statistics about their participants. The best data he could offer was that 11 percent repeat the program. Great, but where are the remaining 89 percent?

Common sense would seem to dictate that, once immersed—however briefly—in the running lifestyle, most people will stick with it. By this reasoning, however, nearly everyone soaked in Shakespeare for a semester would become lifelong readers of high-quality literature. The best sellers’ lists suggest otherwise. Closer to home, have the AIDS rides created a nation of cyclists?

In this space, Roger Robinson has written that the walk/run training that most of the charity marathoners rely on is classic American moderation. I must respectfully disagree. New York Times writer John Tierney has coined the word “explornography” to describe the growing hunger in American society for extreme adventure as therapy (suggested motto: “I want my peak experience, and I want it now!”). Entire industries have been built around helping impatient thrill seekers to the top of sundry pinnacles. Think of the would-be mountaineers and their escorts portrayed in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Certainly, aiming for a marathon finish line six months after one’s first run/walk around the block is running’s version of Tierney’s term. As Marine Corps Marathon race director Rick Nealis bipolarly told the Washington Post, “The main thing is for people to have a vision of crossing the finish line, getting off the couch.” The kinder, gentler approach to marathon training, with its curious mix of dumbing down and excess, is the only physiological way to accommodate such a goal. Again, though, once the goal is reached, then what? How many novice climbers who scale Everest then care to spend their lives walking up Little Round Top?

JUST DO IT OR JUST SAY NO?

The above lamentation, of course, assumes that our eager charity marathoner even makes it to the Himalayan foothills. The numbers of people who start such programs and aren’t running a year later fall through the statistical cracks even more than do first-time completers.

Last spring, another woman in my office got the charity marathon bug. After handing over my check for $52.40 (which she accepted with gratitude, not bewilderment), I probed a bit about her background and motivation. Turned out she had tried to get going on a walking program on her own a few times to no avail. She saw signing on for charity as a way of forcing herself into fitness while helping others. Obviously, any runner should encourage, not impugn, anyone trying simultaneously to better themselves and the world. With this in mind, I gave her a book I’d co-authored and, later, encouraged her when she hit snags in her training. I told her she’d do fine.

But I told her this with a decidedly forked tongue. Simply put, this woman had no business thinking about trying to run a marathon four months hence. She was—and I’m being generous here—at least 50 pounds overweight. She had no athletic history or basic fitness level to speak of. When, two months after a lifetime of being sedentary, it was time to do runs longer than 10 miles in brutal summer heat, she had nothing but her good intentions to see her through—and that wasn’t enough. She struggled on for several more weeks, each long run more frustrating than the last, until she was injured. A month and a half before her goal marathon, she dropped out of the program and hasn’t run since. (Incidentally, the other woman in my office finished her first marathon, dropped out of another one a few months later, and, similarly, has yet to lace up her trainers again.)

The dropout can be excused for not knowing what she got herself into. The supposed “expert coaches” supplied by her charity are not so blameless. A few looks and a few questions should easily have told them to tell her to set a more moderate goal. I would love to hear their counter-argument to Bill Rodgers’s suggestion that anyone contemplating a marathon should have a year’s worth of steady running in the bank. But what incentive did they have to tell this woman—and the thousands like her with similar backgrounds and backsides—that she would be in over her head as soon as she stuck a toe in the water? How then would money be raised? In my officemate’s case, her charity got the few thousand dollars she raised, while, in the end, she got a bitter introduction to our sport thanks to the all-too-common all-or-nothing presentation of running.

A MODEST PROPOSAL

Fortunately, a simple solution can prevent the improper education so many charity runners receive: hook them up with local running clubs.

Do I even need to detail the benefits that would result? Could anything but good come out of ending the charity runners’ sanctioned separatism? The charities would still meet their noble fund-raising goals, the novice marathoners would get better training advice, and the clubs would gain a few new members.

Exposing charity marathoners to running’s strong infrastructure would keep more of them on the road for life. Get the fledgling runners off the

tour bus that always take the same, monothematic, quick ride, and let the locals show them the funky twists and turns, the detours and digressions. Let them learn about track workouts, trail runs, fun runs, and 5Ks. It might even be safe to expose them to the radical notion that some people consider themselves serious runners who—prepare yourself—plan never to run a marathon. If they’re set on achieving “the ultimate” soon after starting to run, so be it. They’re adults with free will, so caveat emptor and all that. But at least it will be more likely that, having done so, they won’t be stranded, shrugging, “What now?” but licking their lips, thinking, “What’s next?”

COMING TO CLOSURE

Linking charity marathoners to local clubs might also help alleviate a growing problem in American marathoning—namely, the increasing early closing of fields.

It’s early April as I write this, and October 24’s Marine Corps Marathon filled its 16,000-runner field more than a month ago. Sorry, Al Gore and Oprah, but as the race’s Web site claims, “No exceptions, no transfers.”

A few points. First, it’s absurd that runners must commit in February to being ready for a marathon eight months hence, especially if your self-standard for satisfaction extends beyond completing the distance regardless of time. Yet the impetus to do so sets in motion an autocatalytic entry process, in which prospective marathoners hear that the race will fill soon, so they better get their entry in soon, which leaves that many fewer spots, so you really need to sign up now, leaving just a few spots left, so hurry, it’s really getting close, and so on.

The race gets its quota of entries (and, of course, their fees), but it also gets a lesser field than it deserves. An official of Washington, D.C.’s Capital Running Company has estimated that last year’s Marine Corps Marathon, which didn’t close until the now seemingly luxurious June, saw 27 percent of the starters pull out before the finish. And I wonder how many of the 16,000 never even made it to the start. I know I didn’t, having signed up under the lemming program in June, at least two months earlier than I would have liked, only to be a cross-trainer come race day thanks to a stress fracture. My $40 and my race number could have been better used.

In addition, it’s unfair that X number of slots are set aside for charity runners—4,000 for this year’s Marine Corps—regardless of who those runners are, whereas you might as well put your head on a platter if you were to suggest that, say, anyone who in the previous year ran faster than the 90th percentile for the race should be guaranteed entry. Marine Corps’ Nealis told the Washington Post that all runners had a chance to register for the race he directs. True, but misleading, given that charity marathoners, who often enroll in their programs in May, need not commit when others have to for “The People’s Marathon.” Perhaps some people are more equal than others?

I’m not saying that charity runners have no right to be in “our races.” If they’re running the race (or run/walking, coffeebreaking it, whatever), who am I to say they shouldn’t be there? We’re all slower than someone, so I see neither merit nor value in some of the arbitrary standards offered to supposedly settle this matter (don’t bother if you can’t break five hours, no walking allowed, and so on). By the one-foot-off-the-ground-at-all-times standard, Orlando Pizzolato would have to turn in his 1984 NYC winner’s medallion. The point is that charity runners often take numbers without full knowledge of what the marathon entails, thereby not only taking that slot but forcing others to commit earlier than is desirable. Perhaps linking charity groups to running clubs would help the novices see that there’s plenty of time and plenty of marathons; maybe then marathon fields could swing back toward being filled mainly by those really ready for the race.

Some say that even this degree of criticism is unwelcoming, that new runners need all the encouragement they can get. Perhaps. But I’ll side with Dawkins about how patronizing the you’ll-frighten-the-children approach can be. Besides, someone committing to running a marathon shouldn’t need perpetual pats on the back from every aspect of the running community, especially when that person is unconnected to the running community in most other ways, as is the case with most charity runners. It would seem that committing to the marathon would signify a degree of self-directedness that can survive environments other than those where never is heard a discouraging word.

For my part, next time someone comes collecting for her inaugural marathon, I’ll give her a check for $52.40. But I’ll also point her in the direction of the nearest running club in the hope that, five years from now, I won’t again be the only runner in the office.

Scott Douglas can be reached at scottdouglas@mindspring.com