What is the value of running?
Any time a school system brings up the idea of doing away with tests, the achievement-minded parents of elementary schoolers put up a common refrain: But how will we know if our children are learning?
As a runner, maybe you feel this way. If you don't capture times or paces, if you don't enter commercial races, how will you measure the impact of your training? How will you know if your training is working? Heck, how will you measure your value and your self-worth?
The human mind is absolutely obsessed with measurement.
We don't have more or less value because we run. We run because it has value - because we have value. Because running adds life to our days, not the other way around.
There are many upsides to testing oneself. The downside is that when the test becomes the objective, the learning becomes incidental. When the personal best, the qualifying time, the world record, or the ranking becomes the objective, the learning becomes incidental.
But the learning is how you figure out what has most value to you. It's how you filter out the noise - whether that noise for you is the pressure to try a new training trend, or the peer pressure of 'you're not a real runner if you don't do marathons', or simply the lure of yet another pair of running shorts. (If I buy this pair of baggy shorts and casually throw on a vintage t-shirt I'll be as effortlessly cool as all the influencers look!) Maybe you love the process of structured training. Maybe you prefer to roll out of bed and run for two hours wherever the spirit takes you. Maybe group runs at 6pm are fine, but group runs at 6am are too grumpy. The learning is not incidental.
Oh, and you'll know that your children are learning by watching them change and grow in realtime. By talking to them. By all the other measures of a human.
On running and identity
I wrote this as a comment on Raziq Rauf's Running Sucks (one of the most insightful Substacks on running culture I can find) - go look at the original post:
There's this great quote about athletic identity from Bill McKibben's book Long Distance, in which he spends a year training like an Olympian cross-country skiier:
"Having convinced myself that I was a brain, not a jock, in many ways I truly ceased to care. Debate team absorbed my competitive urges - I was state champion by my senior year. I constructed my identity successfully enough, which seems to be the task of adolescence. But that identity always had a hole - the shameful sense that my body really didn't work - and that hole caused me more unhappiness than I cared to admit. I got through high school and then college without ever putting on a uniform or pinning a number on my chest, without ever challenging my assumed weeniness."
So much of our identity formation goes back to those teenage years. I was a debate kid, a dance kid, an angsty writer kid, not a runner, not a competitive athlete, not a member of the track or cross-country team. As though there was only one way to 'be a runner'! Even though I ran through high school for stress relief and mental health, and have continued that to this day.
I think I finally began to identify as a Runner when my practice of running became 'eudaimonic' - finding meaning in the regular practice and refinement of my skills and abilities. It's possible to find meaning (vs simply hedonic pleasure, not that there is anything wrong with that) in running in many ways. Ask all the people who try and run in all 50 US states, or all the majors, or pace a marathon, or use running to highlight the shrinking Salton Sea. So first: challenging my own preconceived notions of who I was. And second: finding meaning in a structured practice.
What is the value of running to you?
When did you start calling yourself a runner?