Boston 2018: A Signal For the Everyday Runner to Take Running Back.

If you're a distance runner, you know that it's a community of the best people in the world. But you may also know that it's not without its flaws. There's a darker undercurrent to running that I've seen surfacing in the past few years, and it's this: an obsession with being elite. With being the perfect, elite, pristine, "fit" runner. Running is supposed to be the underdog's sport, so why do we love the hegemony of the Big Names and, more infamously, the "runner body"?

I'll give you an example of what I mean. If you're a runner and you don't live under a rock, you've probably heard about the upsets at the Boston Marathon this year. A couple of girls on my team were talking about it today: how no one "really good" won, because the conditions were so unfavorable. How "a bunch of nobodies" beating Shalane Flanagan, for example, doesn't really count, because on any other day she would have crushed them. How "it was harder for fit runners to stay warm". All the runners started at the same time and ran in the same conditions. How is it fair to say that these runners' times "didn't really count" because they're not household names with blazing track PRs? Because they aren't sponsored? Because they weren't as "fit"?

What do you mean, "they weren't as fit"?, you may be asking. Didn't they just kick butt at the Boston Marathon? Yes, they did. Do you know what people mean by fit? In most circles it means "in good health, especially because of regular physical exercise." The way I hear it used in distance running means "weighs 120 pounds soaking wet, with shoes and three jackets on". Don't have a body mass index of 12.275%? Sorry, you can't be elite, no matter how fast you run. Form doesn't look like you're floating on a cloud? Sorry, you're out of luck. Your spandex ride up your butt in a race? Dude, that's just embarrassing. 

Times aren't what make you elite. How closely you can come to our greatest distance running ideal is what measures your eliteness, and when we are so saturated with a culture that ties great success to closely to an image that's frankly unachievable for a huge proportion of runners, that ideal manifests itself as a skinny, hot, muscular (but god forbid toooooo muscular) runner with perfect form. It manifests itself in the quiet awe and admiration when an already thin girl loses twenty pounds and a minute in the 5K. Never mind that she doesn't eat and has started to collapse at the end of races. She looks so elite, damn it! Conflating the huge improvement of the girl who stopped eating refined sugar with her weight loss also places this adulation in the wrong place. I can't even explain my frustration with the obsession with the "runner body type". It's a cycle that drives people into self-consciousness and eating disorder. We get our conception of "runner" from the elites. Why don't we get it from the droves of fast people who don't have 12.275% body fat? Why these people "exceptions" when we see them literally all the time?

So many people buy into this culture of wannabe elites that I think we lose sight of what this sport is all about. Having to face that I don't, and will never, have the perfect form or an elite body is wearing enough. But I know that I can be fast without these things. However, being told by my teammates that so-and-so's is toooo ripped, that my butt doesn't look like a distance runner's, and that the current Boston Marathon Champion doesn't look like a marathoner is extremely hurtful. Because it means implicitly that, although I believe in myself, a lot of people don't. Confusing potential speed with conformity to the paragon of the ideal runner is bad, because it ignores talent and work ethic and all the individual mental virtues that contribute so much to performance. 

To say that this year's Boston frontrunners did well because they weren't as thin as the elites is just an extension of this type of thinking, one that debases the hard work and success of these runners. (Huge respect for all the elites. Legends. I love you. But jeez, can't you just put on a another layer of pants??) We love our elites, and we love our big names. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, until we start saying that if you aren't elite, or well-known–or if you don't meet our ideal image of an amazing runner–you simply cannot be that fast. Which is just wrong. 

Running is, and has always been, a sport for the everyday masochist. Anyone can decide that they want to lace up their shoes and go out and pound the pavement until they vomit, and anyone who's ever seen someone with terrible form run really, really fast knows that natural talent transcends our cardboard cutout template for a runner. The fun of running is in the hideous race photos we scroll through after, in the massive sweat stains under our arms, peeing your pants, going to poop in the bushes. You don't have to look or be elite to run fast. You just have to love running. Boston 2018 is proof of that.

- Anonymous