The Slow American
How Americans have become slower over long-distance races.
I’m about to do that thing where somebody tells you a personal story that you really don’t care to here, but that somebody really doesn’t have any other stories that relate to their terribly crafted thesis; their buried nut graf; the lesson at the end of their (For the love of) Christ-like parable that just seems to run on and on and on.
Not unlike the previous sentence.
So if you don’t care to read the memoir-like (read: mundane navel-gazing) pedestrian story about my amateur pedestrianism then skip to the break. You’re a grown-ass (wo)man. Do what you want. I’m not your mother. I’m not your father.
But I answer to “Daddy.”
Anyway, I ran just the third 5K of my life at age 29 last Friday night into a headwind that seemed to last the length of the Roosevelt Administration—Franklin D., not Teddy, funny (wo)man—on the deceptively rolling hills of River West Festival Park in my native Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I ended up coming through the inflatable finish line in 20 minutes, 53 seconds. Once I was properly refueled with an appropriate amount of beer and accosted with a medal, I ascertained that I’d finished sixth overall. If you’re the kind of person who actually clicks on embedded hyperlinks, you’ll see I was beaten by an 11-year-old, a 13-year-old and a 56-year-old in addition to an 18-year-old and another 29-year-old.
If you’re a middle-distance and distancing running fan like me—if you aren’t what the hell are you even doing reading this?—you know that 20 minutes, 53 seconds is not a fast 5K. As a matter of fact, it’s not even fast for a girl. And, by girl, I mean a woman under the age of 18 like this one. When Alexa Efraimson was still in high school, she could cover 5,000 meters in 16 minutes and 8 seconds. She’s a fast girl, and I can’t WAIT to be a fast girl. (Though I’ll skip the heels and mini-skirt—for now.)
So you can imagine how confused I was to have people coming up to me and telling me how FAST I was. Remember this was only my third 5K, and I’m still learning what good road running etiquette is in 2016. So I took it all in stride until I got home and did some sloppy research. That’s when I learned, to the people out there? Running weekend 5Ks for participation shirt and medal and no prize money? A near-21-minute 5K IS fast.
Since 1983 no American-born man has won the Boston, Chicago or New York City Marathon. And the last American-born woman to win any of the prestigious three was Deena Kastor in 2005 over a decade ago. The discipline has been owned since the mid-80s by East Africans, mostly from Ethiopia and Kenyan on both the male and female side. Since Frank Shorter won the 1972 Olympic Marathon, no American male has won gold whether he was born on American soil or emigrated.
At the 2016 Rio Olympics, all three of the representatives for the United States in the men’s 5,000 meters—Bernard Lagat, Paul Chelimo and Hassan Mead—were naturalized citizens. In the women’s 5,000 meters only one of our representatives made the final, and poor Shelby Houlihan was never gonna win it with a time nearly 40 seconds slower than the gold medalist.
Galen Rupp represented my country’s greatest chance to medal in the men’s 10,000 meters after he secured silver in the 2012 London Games, but he finished a disappointing fifth in 2016, though he won bronze in the marathon. Bright side? Matthew Centrowitz won my country’s first gold medal in the men’s 1,500 meters since 1908, and Jenny Simpson captured the U.S.’s first medal in the event on the women’s side—ever. To say nothing of Clayton Murphy’s bronze medal in the men’s 800 meters.
But winning medals at distances below 800 meters isn’t a goal for the U.S. It’s what we expect. It’s in the distances beyond 800 meters where folks born on U.S. soil are slow. This is especially true in the marathon despite more Americans running now—just north of 40 million—than ever.
The average finish time for an American marathon in 1980 used to be 3 hours, 32 minutes and 17 seconds or about 8-minute-mile pace. In 2011 that finish time has ballooned by nearly 45 minutes to 4 hours, 16 minutes and 34 seconds or about 9 minutes, 46-second-mile pace. At the point, the tortoise is looking at you and yelling “Pick it up! C’mon, move your ass!”
In 1978 more than two thousand people broke three hours in the Boston Marathon. To do that, you have to pump out consecutive 6 minute, 50-second-miles for 26 miles and 385 yards. You also have to log close to 100 miles a week to have the aerobic capacity to main such a steady speed over hill, over dale on that well-paved trail. With America’s obesity problem, I doubt most amateurs get even a tenth of that mileage today.
In a field six times the size of the Boston Marathon in 1978, only five hundred people broke 3 hours in 2012. Only a third of the men who qualified for the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials for 2012 would’ve met the standard in 1984.
In 2000 just one American man met the Olympic standard. That fella, Ron DeHaven, finished 69th at the Sydney Games with a time of 2 hours, 30 minutes and 46 seconds. That time would’ve placed him 15th on the same course, in the same year, as the women’s marathon. (It should be said that DeHaven bounced back the following year with a personal-best of 2 hours, 11 minutes and 40 seconds at the Chicago Marathon.)
This nice little dump I just took in your Cheerios leads to the obvious question: What the hell happened?
Technology has certainly gotten better. Long gone are the days of shouting an athlete’s bib number followed by a stopwatch time into a tape recorder. We’ve got computer chips for that. The days of running in shoes with soles seemingly built to INVITE plantar fasciitis are gone. Shoes are lighter and more comfortable than ever. And nobody tapes their nipples to keep them from bleeding through a cotton shirt anymore because breathable, form-fitting fabric is thing. How did we get to have all these useful things and become more useless runners?
So, again—to be redundant—what happened?
We happened.
With the Shorter’s marathon gold medal, running from point A to point B took on a romantic quality because winning will always be romantic in America. The marathon became less of a task for hippies with no future and something even the burgeoning group of yuppies and Young Republicans could do.
“My previous arcane discipline, the marathon, had sprouted into a trend,” Shorter said, “a movement, a sport and a pastime, and I had emerged as one of the movement’s role models. Across the nation, thousands of ordinary citizens now trained virtually as hard as I did.”
Then Jim Fixx wrote his best-selling book “The Complete Book of Running,” which sold over a million copies extolling the virtues of jogging and how it had taken him from a 220-pound smoker who was THIS CLOSE to heart attack to a lithe 140-pound middle-aged man who could now keep up with his sister on the tennis court.
(Fixx eventually died of a heart attack at 52 while jogging in Vermont because life is a comedy written by a sadistic comedian.)
All of a sudden running races were less about the racing and more about the moving street party nature of the events. It didn’t matter that it took you 45 minutes to run 3.15-miles because, hey, we’re all just out here to have a good time! And you should give yourself SO MUCH credit for just being “active!” Never mind that you might choose to be “active” in one of the most prestigious marathons or road races in the country.
“Today,” Cameron Stracher wrote in his book “King of the Roads,” “it is common for finishers in a major race not to know—and not to care—who won. What counts is the personal narrative of adversity and achievement. There are no heroes; there are only goody bags and fancy flavored waters.”
But there is a lot of money—in the United States at least.
In Kenya, you run to escape poverty. In the U.S., you run because you can’t play any other sport. You’re simply not good enough. But you’ll probably run cross-country in style.
The New York Times reports the average household income of the New York Marathon field is $130,000. A 2006 study by Runner’s World magazine reports its subscribers’ average household income is $139,000, and USA Triathlon said its membership’s average household income was $126,000. So rich people train for endurance events, which is fine. But rich people have no reason to run fast. Why would they? They make six figures a year on average.
When Americans were fast, they cared about beating the person next to them. Men cared about seeing Alberto Salazar and wanting to take him down. Women cared about watching Joan Benoit eat their dust. They cared about raising the next Shorter, the next Bill Rodgers, the next Steve Prefontaine.
Now we care more—we really ALWAYS cared more—about raising the next LeBron, the next Steph Curry, the next Tom Brady, the next Mike Trout. But for about a decade we were fast, and we were fast because road racing wasn’t a pop-up fitness festival where your personal-best was all that mattered, and, hey, where the hell is my participation medal and my racing shirt that I’m never going to wear? It was about winning.
Damn it. This argument sounds sounds really Republican, doesn’t it? Well, just so we’re clear: Black lives matter. The Affordable Care Act is awesome. Confirm Merrick Garland. Legalize marijuana. And get rid of mandatory minimums. OK, at least now I feel a little better. But we’re still slow. Damn it.
