When everyone is super

Both of Canada’s national newspapers have increased their coverage of running the past year, devoting inches of space about the pastime in their Life sections. Not the Sports sections, but the Life sections. Perhaps that’s why the tone of these  pieces is always so similar, formulaic and heavily sweetened.

For example, a recent article in the Globe and Mail chronicled a writer’s experience in training for and running the Sporting Life 10K in Toronto. The Globe’s series invited readers to follow her training and bare witness to her journey as she attempted to run her first 10K race. The article detailed the struggle of what seemed like grand athletic proportions to even make it to start line. From the hyperbolic tone, it would have been easy to mistake this mission to complete a downhill 10K with an all out assault on the summit of K2, or at the very least, mistake her weekly accounts as a chronicle of significant athletic aspiration.

It seemed more like a New Year’s resolution, and after the final article of the series was published, readers from across Canada celebrated the writer’s accomplishment of 1:16:17 for 10K, while offering advice for her next race. It soon became clear that the writer had no intentions of racing again, and she believed in running for “running sake,” further lamenting the fact that road races are, in fact, races, where the competition seems to inconvenience many people’s personal goals.

This kind of attitude is pervasive in the mainstream media’s coverage of running today. The derision towards competition isn’t a misunderstanding; it’s a manifestation of the new status quo.

There isn’t anything inherently wrong with participation, and one of the distinctively appealing aspects of running is that it is open to all, regardless of ability. Athletes of every stripe regularly run in the same venue as elite level athletes. Running may be unique in its embrace of a singular kind of athletic egalitarianism that solicits involvement from all walks of life, age and ability. Certainly pinning on a number and stepping to the line entitles people to a start and a finish line and pre-paid medals for completion of the course, but does it entitle the average runner sole rights to the narrative?

The Sporting Life 10K wasn’t won by warriors from a magic running tribe nor was the tape broken by imported Kenyans, as is often incorrectly assumed. The race was won by a humble runner from Guelph, Ont., that, for the most part, had gone unnoticed in the melee. Most people who ran on May 1 didn’t know that Canadians Eric Gillis and Reid Coolsaet ran an incredible race, and that Gillis succumbed only in the last few metres. This wasn’t an accident that most people didn’t know and didn’t care. It’s the sad reality of a movement that has run out of euphemisms to conjure.

Defining this place isn’t difficult.

It’s the place where racing becomes fitness and fitness becomes something called, “physical well-being.” It’s a place punctuated by feelings of discomfort associated with antiquated concepts like timing of a race, placing, and winning. It’s the place where the celebration of perceived effort always trumps excellence, and the place where the latest incarnation of relativism equates and confuses running a 5:30 marathon with a 2:30 performance.