I'm not at the point the OP is but I'm drifting in his direction so I'm going to take a stab at this hoping you'll find it useful. It may run kind of long for which I apologize in advance.
As you get older it is much tougher to keep track of individual athletes. When I was a kid, for example, there was a time when I knew the starting line ups of every MLB team. Now it's not uncommon for me to not recognize the names of guys who are in the discussion for MVP or the Cy Young award. My interest in the game hasn't diminished but I don't have the time or inclination to go through multiple box scores pretty much daily. I'm a Celtics fan. Twenty years ago I knew pretty much the whole roster. Now I can't even identify their whole starting five.
The same is true for track. When I look at Track and Field News' annual rankings most of the names mean nothing to me outside of the distance events, which I follow a lot more closely than other ones. But even there the percentage of recognizable names has dropped for me and as that's happened my interest in the elite level of the sport has dropped to a greater degree than it has with other sports.
I think the reason for that is in team sports I can not know the athletes especially well but still get interested in the win-loss angle, in games strategies, etc. I like it when the Celtics or Pirates win. I really don't care if Rondo puts up a triple double or not or whether or not Andrew McCutcheon goes 4 for 5. Eventually they'll both be gone but the teams will still be there and whatever interest I have in the individual athletes is dependent upon the effect they have on whether their teams win or not.
When I look at the 100 meters in a big track meet, it generally doesn't matter to me who wins. I may suspect some guys of being drug cheats and hope that they lose or maybe I like one who runs for a smaller shoe company than adidas or Nike, but aside from that, they're all generic running pros, they have similar lives, and there's no equivalent to hoping one of them has a triple double because I'm a fan of their team and that performance will help the team win.
Maybe this is just my age showing, but I thought the sport was more interesting when it was an amateur sport because it forced the athletes to have lives outside of the sport. It was neat that Jack Bacheler was sneaking insects from Mexico back into the US after the '68 Olympics for his Ph. D research. I was a huge fan of Ron Hill making himself the best marathoner in the world while running back and forth from his full time job or of George Young waking up a couple hours before he had to go and teach school thinking, "Those Russians have already been training for hours" to get himself out the door for his first run. It was interesting and inspiring to see people whose lives were like mine doing what I did but doing it so much better. To me, a pro who can do his first run at 10-11 AM, eat, nap, do a little gym work, then head out for run #2 is just not as interesting as the old "amateurs" were.
I'm not suggesting a return to amateur running. If good bowlers can get paid for bowling good runners should get paid for running. But, well, you asked.