please dont squeeze the garmin wrote:
Sure, we all agree the mega-races have a circus character full of unprepared waddlers who aren't getting the full benefits and experience of real runners. But do people truly think these penguins ought to be prohibited by law from running a marathon?
Because shy of some regulation, non-runners want to run marathons, and for-profit marathons want to take their money. That's the free market, no? Supply meeting the demand, and - Chicago debacle aside - both parties are generally happy.
The only ones not happy are competitive runners who feel the penguins are ruining the sport. But what should really be done? Keeping in mind, we don't have the real-world option of implanting chips in all the penguins' brains to make them want to train 70+ MPW and defer their marathon debut until they're running at least a sub-40 10k.
If you want say a 4 hour qualifying time for Chicago, realize that you're asking for a couple things here:
(a) Some form of coercion - nation legislation? protests? boycotts? terrorism? what do you propose? - since severely cutting back one's customer base is pretty much 180 degrees counter to the business profit motive. Geez, even left-of-center me with my philosophy degree knows that. So keeping penguins out of marathons is important enough to justify regulating this free market?
(b) Much smaller fields, which means the races no longer make millions in entry fees and sponsorships to pay the big appearance fees and prize money. So is l-run gonna hold bake sales to make up the difference? And are the proceeds going to the races or directly to athletes? Or are we gonna settle for less $$$ in the sport supporting fewer pros?
Living in NYC I'm accustomed to mega-races - I've run NYCM and even the regular NYRR races in Central Park draw several thousand. A little secret: as long as you start up front, you can pretty much ignore the thousands behind you. Their presence creates some annoyances - logistics, especially at NYCM where you gotta be at the start for so damn long before the race, and the expense of local races because god forbid that you could simply race 5000 meters without everyone getting tee shirts and a postrace buffet.
But aside from those things, I don't see how they're "ruining the sport". It's not like the slowest 40,000 who registered for Chicago squeezed out 40,000 legitimate runners - no, they're just joining the 5000 legitimate runners who would otherwise be alone out there. (Choose your own numbers, for reference #5000 last year in more normal weather was somewhere between 3:35-3:40.)
And if you really can't stand to have a circus of tens of thousands of waddlers behind you, there's tons of smaller marathons out there to choose from. And nobody's preventing any of us from holding our own "runners-only" marathons with qualifying times and all. Who says Boston and the OT have a monopoly on this? Geez, as much as we like to point at ultras and laugh, that's a world with a much higher proportion of races requiring qualification than road racing.
If you say "let the penguins run the smaller marathons, save Chicago for real runners" then Chicago will become a smaller marathon, lose its money hence its elites, and some other race will draw tens of thousands of penguins, hence big sponsorship deals, hence world class runners. Again assuming you could force Chicago to agree to this.