Why are hobby joggers drawn to road races and not track meets?

runneronafriday wrote:

Well how can you even sign up for a track event?

I once did a 1 hour event on the track. That was the closest I came to track running.

If you not started your running career on track chances are high that you never run on track ever.

36 + years of running here.

Jeremy R wrote:

Idk where you are, but we don't have track meets...

runner dadguy wrote:

I’ve been a semi-serious hobby jogger for 15 years in a major city, run about a million 5k/10k/HMs, and I’ve never heard of an open invitation track meet.

Were track meets really that hard to find? In 2019, you could just Google something like "all comers" track, and quite a few meets would pop up in winter and summer that were within a half day's drive. And that's before we get to the small college meets that sometimes allow unattached runners.

I've run in close to a hundred track meets since graduating from college, and I'm a no-talent who would get lapped in the 1500 by the WR holder.

mystery wrote:

I looked up some results from the local road race (pre 2020), and the median men's time was around 27 minutes for guys under 40.

I then looked up results from the local all comers track meet (no pre-registration, no time standards, and a much cheaper entrance fee). The median men's 3200 time was in the low 12s, which is equivalent to a sub 20 5K.

So why are hobby joggers drawn to road races and not track races? Is it only because they want some race swag? I've seen all-comers meets hand out ribbons with runner's times on them and had T-shirts available for purchase, and it's still rare to see anything slower than a 6:00 mile at those meets.

Why would they run track meets? I´m 52 years old, but I can still run a 17 minute 5k. I wouldn´t dream of running someting as boring as a track race. I was a 15-low 5000 runner in my mid-25, but even then I found track racing boring. Running laps around an oval almost felt a little stupid.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a former D1 runner while watching our adult track group do a workout. I was setting out the workout for some reason I can't remember. He was asking why these runners could beat me routinely in these 5k-oriented workouts, but then I would beat most of them in the next 5k.

I said, "The reason we're faster than them is that we can endure more pain than they can." He nodded in agreement.

When hobby joggers run the marathon, by the time the pain starts, endorphins have been manufactured to ease the pain a little.

In the mile and 800, the pain starts after the first minute and then builds. Endorphins can't help much because the pain builds up too fast.

I liken it to holding your hand over a candle flame. It's warm at first, but then it becomes uncomfortable and the pain builds to a level that cannot be understood by a nonrunner. It's a matter of pushing on when every fiber of your body is screaming to slow down.

Hobbyjoggers have never experienced this type of pain. They aren't willing to put in the work to manage it and they certainly aren't going to pay to experience it in a track meet while also suffering the embarrassment of being the only person left on the track after the "slow" runners finish the mile in 6:00 and they're still chugging along to run sub-9... the only person left on the track and everyone is impatiently waiting for them to finish so the next event can start. Everyone watching is embarrassed for them and you can feel it on the track.

In the US - nearly every track is owned by a secondary and tertiary education institution. They typically operate these like a school resource/training facility, not public amenity, which means a large portion of the population cannot train on a track.

Furthermore, there are a lot more road races than open track meets.

Finally at a road race, competitors have a reasonable expectation of when they're going to start and don't have to wait for other events to finish.

Has this actually happened though? I'd think if you're a hobbyjogger at sub-9 mile, the race organizer wouldn't allow you into the field to start with.

Road races are bigger and simpler.

Everyone signs up for the save event and they all start at the sane time.

They run a course and finish.

Track meets take forever.

You have to follow the events to determine when your event is.

There are fewer people running.

Road races are more fun.

Track meets are for people a little more serious about testing their speed at different distances.

Road races have more people, so the average time is slower.

Are there track meets where 2000 runners can show up and race a 5k at the same time on the same course and get an accurate finish time?

That's a really good point. I have no idea how you'd go about proving it objectively but I have thought too that people who raced seriously for high school and/or college teams understand that it's supposed to hurt and accept that while people who began running for health or were maybe back markers, e.g. kids running for an activity to pad their college apps or because they have friends in the team, for their high school teams shy away. That's obviously a major generalization but I do think you're onto something. I hate this whole business of distinguishing between serious runners and hobby joggers but if I were to create a distinguishing criterion I might make it how much pain you endure to achieve your race results.

Track just isn't really attractive to a newcomer, and even having run track for years I'd usually rather just do a road race. Show up an hour ahead of time, the race starts when it says it will, go home. No sitting around for 4 hours, hoping you get in a good heat, worrying about warming up without missing the race.

HRE wrote:

That's a really good point. I have no idea how you'd go about proving it objectively but I have thought too that people who raced seriously for high school and/or college teams understand that it's supposed to hurt and accept that while people who began running for health or were maybe back markers, e.g. kids running for an activity to pad their college apps or because they have friends in the team, for their high school teams shy away. That's obviously a major generalization but I do think you're onto something. I hate this whole business of distinguishing between serious runners and hobby joggers but if I were to create a distinguishing criterion I might make it how much pain you endure to achieve your race results.

Good points.

A survey might ask these questions as a proxy to the motivation to seek out and manage pain as a means of improving performance. I'm guessing the responses of LetsRunners and HJ would be something like this.

Do you ever do hard interval workouts?

LR: 99%

HJ: 5%

Halfway through an interval workout, do you ever think, "There's no way I can start the next rep, " but you do, and then you start the next and the next until you're finished?

LR: 100%

HJ: 25%

Bottom line: 100% of LRs have gone far beyond their comfort zone into a level of pain that can't really be described to nonrunners because, in virtually every other aspect of life, severe pain is something to be avoided.

. It's why hobby joggers train and train and can't improve. It's not even taught to hobby joggers in their "18 week marathon training" plans. This is also why obesity is rampant. People aren't willing to face the pain of training or dieting to be the best that they can be.

There aren't that many of them. I've looked in my area, and all I can find are a few events that make no effort to promote themselves and have 2 or 3 competitors per event who are all either 8 or 69 years old. What's the point? Most road races I can find someone else around my level to try to beat.

What we really need is beer league track & field. Kegs next to the pole vault pits and start/finish.

I think there have been a lot of good answers in this thread, but mostly it just boils down to the logistics of putting on a meet. There's a lot that goes into a road race, but it scales up very easily. If you can do a 5K for 100 people, you can do a 5K for 1000 people. Contrast that with a track meet. If you go from 100 people to 1000 people, you've massively increased the amount of time you're going to be out there. The timing equipment is going to be way more complicated for a track meet. If you have field events, you need people judging them. Also, people have already pointed out how hard it is to get access to a track--it's a lot easier to find some roads or a park with a jogging path.

That said I'm surprised that youth track meets don't go after an adult/masters audience more aggressively. I live in a reasonably large metro area and the only (pre-corona) all-comers track meets were a series of free, local meets with no official timing (just stopwatches), no field events, no hurdles. They were held at a local private HS and put on by the biggest local running club. Those drew a fairly decent sized but not huge crowd. Some adults, mostly high school XC kids doing summer training and youth sprinters getting another race in.

To compete in an actual, timed meet, I had to drive about an hour and a half. There were a few local youth meets, but none of them were open to adults. I ended up running the 1500 (although the organizers started us from the wrong spot, so it was more like a 1490) against a dozen kids. I beat them all handily. I doubled back for the 800 but finished a few seconds behind a couple of high school boys. There were a few other masters in the sprints and the race walks. Still, I only paid maybe $15 or so. If that meet could've attracted 30 or so adults, that's a few hundred bucks in almost pure profit without a huge impact on the structure and timing of the meet.

As to why the demand isn't there from hobby joggers: I think they're just looking to do whatever's convenient, whatever has free food, t-shirts, etc. And on their end, the logistics are simpler, too. 5K at 8 am? No problem. Race a 3000 on the track but maybe it'll be at 10 am, maybe 11, maybe 2 pm? They'll pass. And there's just so many more road races out there. Prior to COVID I probably could've found a 5K (or 10K or 10-mile) every single weekend within a 30-minute drive. There are never going to be that many track meets.

Open track meetings are easy to find in the UK but parkruns are in every park in town these days too. As others point out if you're doing the 3000m/5000m you might end up racing 9pm+ having gone there straight from work, by which time you're starving and getting cold too. The other aspect I used to hate at open meetings was people gaming the seeding by claiming a better recent pb than they really have so they can 'get in a faster race'.

The Scot wrote:

Open track meetings are easy to find in the UK but parkruns are in every park in town these days too. As others point out if you're doing the 3000m/5000m you might end up racing 9pm+ having gone there straight from work, by which time you're starving and getting cold too. The other aspect I used to hate at open meetings was people gaming the seeding by claiming a better recent pb than they really have so they can 'get in a faster race'.

Here's an example from TVH which is one of the places I used to race when I lived in London. The 3000ms START at 8.30. If you are lucky. Want to get bumped down to the B or C race? Often they'll be 30min behind schedule by then anyway.

The Scot wrote:

The Scot wrote:

Open track meetings are easy to find in the UK but parkruns are in every park in town these days too. As others point out if you're doing the 3000m/5000m you might end up racing 9pm+ having gone there straight from work, by which time you're starving and getting cold too. The other aspect I used to hate at open meetings was people gaming the seeding by claiming a better recent pb than they really have so they can 'get in a faster race'.

Here's an example from TVH which is one of the places I used to race when I lived in London. The 3000ms START at 8.30. If you are lucky. Want to get bumped down to the B or C race? Often they'll be 30min behind schedule by then anyway.

jecht wrote:

Has this actually happened though? I'd think if you're a hobbyjogger at sub-9 mile, the race organizer wouldn't allow you into the field to start with.

By definition, all-comers means all abilities, ages, experience levels, and so on. 70 year olds and 7 year olds would both be welcome even if neither can run sub 9. So if you're a 9 minute miler, there shouldn't be an issue with getting into the field as long as you're not trying to get into a fast heat.

I've lapped people in an all-comers mile (one of them seemed to be a fit, slim young guy, oddly enough), and I'm sure that my time was slower than 5:1x in that race. He may not have run 9:00, but his time wasn't much faster than that.

Hmmm, shouldn't the HJ percentages be reversed (25% for the first question and 5% for the second question, instead of vice-versa). If you've never done an interval workout, you can't answer "yes" to the second question.

Anyway, I think a slightly more relevant question would be this:

"You're a bit more than halfway through a tough interval workout. You're exhausted, the wind's picking up, and rain has started to fall. What would you do?"

LR: 90+% would finish the workout

HJ: 0% would finish the workout

Unless you ran track when you were younger, I think most people take up running on the roads and that's where they're comfortable. Roadrunning is also kind of a group social activity. That's not true of track running. I remember a roadrunner tell me he was uncomfortable running a race on a track because "everyone would be looking" at him.

Where does running rank in your life?

LR: what else is there?

HJ: it comes after family, friends, etc.

What do your friends think about your running?

LR: what are friends

HJ: happy I stay active so I can join them on brew tours.

What does your family think?

LR: mom says at least you are taking a break from the internet.

HJ: supportive, just happy I can find time to do it and glad I am staying active.