Is it lame to run balls-to-the-wall in a pretty slow mass participation race where no one else cares?

If your goal is to race hard and test yourself, to hell with what anyone thinks on the day. You do you.

it's a race. by definition the point of the event is to get from start to finish as quickly as possible. if other people decide to not put in effort or have brunch and mimosas and vaccinate their autistic English bulldogs while out on the course, that's not on you. it's not the gym class mile where everyone is in a competition to see who can try the least. never be ashamed for your work ethic or pain tolerance.

More questions for the OP:

- Is a course record kept for the race?
If so, you should want to break it, and you should want to bury it. If you are a 1:10 guy, you don't want to run a comfortable 1:15 on the books as a soft record (in your name) for next year's hotshot to pick off and laugh about.

- Why do you even run?

Has to be asked here. Serious question. You seem to be saying that would race hard against good competition on a given Sunday, but can't be bothered to race hard without someone near you? It sounds like you lack intrinsic motivation, and maybe running hard without the 'perfect' competitive situation would be good for you.

It is lame to start threads advertising how your whole life revolves around what other people think of you. Especially in situations where nobody cares.

At any non-competitive road race, once you're beating the field by more than a minute its all the same. People don't comprehend or think its any less impressive if you win by 1 or 10 minutes. In high school I would win the local turkey trot in 17min and people were convinced I was going to the Olympics. I could have ran 13:30 and everyone's reactions would have been the same.

just tempo run the first 10 miles and then speed up and cruise through the last 3 miles. i personally don't recommend the HM enroute to the full marathon because it takes too long to recover and by the time you do recover, you could've just did 3 hard days that would've put you at a better fitness level than the HM would have. i'd stick to 5k as a speed workout and 10k as a better indicator to your performance level.

Everyone loves a go-getter. They'll be so impressed with how much better you are than them!

Here is the thing, you seem pretty confident you can easily win the race which I have no reason to doubt. So, let's play out two victory scenarios.

A. You run the best you can: In this scenario you go out at your own pace probably front running when all of the kids/teenagers who want to get their 5 minutes of leading the race out of their system and you settle into a long hard effort which you ramp up and get a good time out of it. In this scenario, you finish well ahead of anyone else, are gassed/clearly exerted yourself and people, probably not knowing anything about you or running, will congratulate you and say how well you did. You know that it is not a world beating time and there was no real doubt you would win. However, the time you got is respectable to how hard you tried and even in a major half would have been something you would have been proud of even if you finished 40th.

B. You do the minimal effort necessary and still win. It will be a bit uncomfortable but you will pull away when you need to and win the race knowing you could have at least tried for a faster time solo. People will congratulate you, even thought they probably don't know anything about you or running, just like the first scenario but you will know that you didn't try your best and the result will be even more hollow than scenario A. You made an excuse for yourself but still got credit for it.

I think scenario B is way more cringe than A because if you win either way you will know the difference between an earned kudos and a unearned one.

Alert: at the end of the day no one will care what you did. You still need to hope that some chick doesn't show that runs D1. Don't forget to get a 13.1 bumper sticker.

I won our city 2K three years in a row! Believe it or not the winners in the other races said the 2K was short without me even asking. There are way too many haters and jealous people in this world.

So, why did you comment? Do you, in fact, care?

Does your life revolve around posting this stupid response every time someone says they don’t care? I hope you generate the critical thinking skills to separate a message board response from the real world. Caring how some kid does in some random half vs thinking it’s stupid to post your insecurities on a website are two different issues.

I don’t think anyone has even asked where the half marathon is, so even the most invested posters literally did not care to ask when or where the race was or to see how the OP did or does. Similarly, I don’t care about how hard the OP tries in his fun run, but for the sake of society I’d love for you to improve your critical thinking skills.

I hear this all the time-

Why is it fun for you to see some random really fast runner? What is fun about that?

If you are posting on Letsrun I'd assume you would like to or, at the very least, not mind going to spectate an Olympic final, championship race, trials, pro league event, or something right? Sure the stakes are high for the competitors but you won't get anything out of it except seeing people at the peak of their powers battle it out. It's a beautiful story. Having someone run "fast" for a local race is the same sort of human love of seeing another person channel their passions into a feat that others simply cannot do even if it is at an amateur level.

The narrative is what we love in so much of what we do and when you see someone running faster than anyone else the story is instantly understandable and usually uplifting. I almost want to take back the qualifier of it being an "amateur level" because people might like that even better than seeing a pro athlete do pro levels of achievement. It is almost more interesting to see a somewhat normal person do something abnormally good. It is compelling. For pro's to be compelling they need to have something that differentiates themselves from the other pro's and it usually isn't just their performance. Jakob is compelling because he speaks his mind, is a bit of a showman, and has been dominant in most of the races he does. He has got an obvious personality, love it or leave it. Had he been the exact same performer without the personality and showmanship he would be respected, well not universally especially on these forums, but he wouldn't be getting Amazon Prime shows about him.

I diverged a bit, and I do hope the question was in good faith but my short answer is: people like seeing others do something they find difficult/know how hard it is in an excellent way because it is a simple, relatable, positive narrative we hard almost hardwired to get excited by.