Sun, Jun 16, 2019 page11

• Lacking its former luster, running is on the decline

  • Bloomberg Opinion
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  Midlife crises are not what they used to be. Serious running is in decline. One reason? Completing that marathon at the age of 40 might no longer confer the bragging rights it once did.

  Researchers have noted a downward trend in the number of people participating in events such as marathons and community 5km races.

  In a paper published last year, Heather Kennedy from Temple University and her collaborators dubbed the phenomenon a “running recession.”

  

  Runners participate in the Rock ’n’ Roll Seattle Marathon and Half Marathon on Sunday last week.

  Photo: AFP

  Obviously, not everyone signs up for these races, but they are one of the few objective measures of interest in the activity.

  As Kennedy and her colleagues say, events are a powerful motivation to keep training. At their peak, they represented a US$1.4 billion industry that fed even bigger ones, from shoes and apparel to wearable devices.

  RunRepeat founder Jens Jakob Andersen analyzed the results of 70,000 road races in 193 countries since 1986 and observed a declining trend in the past two years. The total number of finishers was down 13 percent from 2016.

  However, Andersen’s study is not complete. It excludes many lower-level gatherings such as park runs and charity races, but data from Running USA, which track a much larger number of events, still show a downward trend.

  So what explains the decline? Boredom and high fees to enter the most popular races have been identified as some of the causes, but there is more to it than that.

  There are plenty of cheap events in any major city, and running has always been a rather monotonous pastime. The age distribution of marathon runners provides an important clue to what is really going on.

  In the early days of the running boom, particularly in the early 2000s, there used to be peaks around what Andersen calls “milestone ages.”

  In 2003, a lot of runners did a marathon when they turned 40, 50, 60, but today, that thought process is not dominating anymore, he said.

  Millions of people have now completed a marathon, expanding what used to be an exclusive club of fanatical achievers to a crowd of more-or-less committed amateurs.

  As that cachet disappeared, extreme athletes moved on to other pastimes; ultramarathons have boomed and Ironman has became a valuable brand.

  There are other signs in Andersen’s data that achievement is no longer as important to runners as it used to be.

  Races are slowing down. Male competitors in 10K or 5K races in 2003 completed a mile every 9 minutes, 8 seconds on average. Last year, they took 48 seconds longer. For women, the pace slowed from 11 minutes per mile to 11 minutes, 43 seconds. The figures for marathons, half-marathons and 5Ks show similar drops in speed.

  Since participation has declined, these weaker results are not a sign that more relatively untrained people have taken up the sport. They suggest that runners are less interested in maximum exertion.

  All this dovetails with the conclusions of Kennedy’s paper, which includes results from a survey of participants in a US event taken from 2011 to 2017.

  “Participants are reporting less enjoyment and gratification from the physical act of running, placing less value on using running as a signal of self-concept and impression management, and reporting a diminished role of running as an important part of their life,” the researchers wrote.

  In other words, the hobby is no longer something around which someone can build a self-image or even be particularly proud of — so, naturally, a person feels less elation from the process itself.

  Events are becoming an increasingly social pastime — an experience rather than a sport. Athletes mingle, make friends and travel more to events in other cities.

  On the other hand, the clannish culture of long-distance runners a decade ago — the clothes, the jargon and emphasis on training — was faintly ridiculous.

  Running, after all, is something a child learns immediately after walking. It is not rocket science.

  Perhaps the “running recession” is merely recognition of the pastime’s rather pedestrian place in our lives. We run to keep reasonably fit, and sometimes to meet other people and see places from a new perspective. That is good enough. There is no need to build it into an expensive, overly demanding fetish. Leave that bit to the pros.
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