Navel Gazing by Michael Ian Black

Author:Michael Ian Black
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

Chapter Twelve

There are no good prizes

First of all, it’s not a race. They can call it a race if they want, but the fact of the matter is, 99 percent of all participants are not trying to win. They’re trying to survive. No recreational road race is truly a race, because races demand competition, and in these endeavors there is practically none. Most people just want to finish the damn thing. Sure, there’s always a few folks at the head of the pack trying to win, but those people are dickheads. I mean, what does it really gain you in life to be able to say, “I won the St. Mary’s Autumn Harvest 10K Road Race”?

Also, there are no good prizes. Real races would have good prizes. Cash, say. At these races, every single person who finishes the race receives a cheap medal to hang around their neck. Once they get home, the medal goes into a drawer along with all the other “prizes” they “won” for simply doing what they signed up to do in the first place.

So it’s not a race, but there’s probably no better name for what these events actually are. “Fun run” doesn’t quite cover it either, because they’re not that much fun, at least in the way I define fun, which can cover a wide range of undertakings but never includes any activity I am trying to bring to an end as quickly as possible.

Some races are described by their distances, as in the Waterloo Half Marathon. That’s a good name because it tells you where the race is and how far the race goes. There’s no need to jazz it up any further. If you are running a distance greater than from your front porch to the mailbox, you are already committed enough that you don’t need some creative race director to make it sound more exciting. Leafing through the back pages of Runner’s World magazine, however, it’s clear a lot of these directors disagree. There’s the Shamrock Shuffle, the Color Me Rad novelty race, the Hot Chocolate 15K, the Food Fight 5K, the Cherry Creek Sneak, Rock the Block, and the Viking Assault. (Granted, the Viking Assault actually does sound pretty cool.) But whatever they are called, and whatever gimmicks organizers use to make them seem like more than they are, road races all boil down to the same simple idea: Mark off a starting line and a finish line, then run between the two.

Some of these distances can get stupid. For years, people thought marathoners were nuts. The idea of running twenty-six (point two, as marathoners invariably point out) miles seemed insane. But as more and more people began participating in marathons, the distance lost some of its mystique. The marathon, commemorating the distance traveled by the Greek messenger Pheidippides, who allegedly died after running it, has become humdrum. This has paved the way for the “ultramarathon,” or “ultra.” Typical ultra distances are fifty or even a hundred miles. Some go two hundred miles or more.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.