My kids (being kids) have a lot to learn. On Sunday lunchtimes, when I get back from a race, they still ask me: “Daddy, did you win?”
The answer is, of course, no. Sometimes I had a good run, sometimes not; occasionally I come back super-pleased, because I’ve got a PB, though that’s not so common now. But win? I’ve never won a race, and, almost certainly, I never will. In this respect I’m like the vast majority of runners, serious and not so serious. There were 37,000 finishers in the London marathon and one (or two) winners. Perhaps 15 runners were seriously aiming to win the race. There were, then, 36,998 losers. But this gets things wrong. I don’t race expecting to win. I’m a not-too-shabby club runner: I train hard, run harder and don’t think of myself as a loser.
But compare my Sunday lunchtime experience with those of friends who play tennis, or Sunday league football, or cricket. Sometimes they win. Not always, but quite often. When they come home, and their kids ask them the “W” question, they have a simple answer: they don’t have any explaining to do.
Does this matter? No, and yes. I’ve not really worried about this too much. Winning is never part of the game for me: it’s all about pushing myself, setting a time, having a good race, maybe thinking about the odd interclub rivalry – but not winning (and so not losing, either). And for years, I’ve thought that this is what running is about. I’ve had an explanation for my daughters.
But, a few weeks ago, something changed this. I was part of my club vets team in the South Downs Way Relay. This is a fantastic race, 100 miles from Eastbourne to Winchester, almost all off road, along the (hilly) South Downs Way. Each runner in the team takes on three legs, around six miles each, handing over a baton to the next runner, jumping in a mini-bus, and heading off to the next checkpoint. The race takes all day. There’s an A race, a B race, a women’s race, and a vets race. And it was very different to trying for a decent time in my local 10k.
Our race was close (more of this later). And this had three interesting – philosophical – implications.
First. I’ve run hard, very hard, before, but I don’t think, until that Saturday, I’ve ever run scared. On all three of my legs I started just in the lead (for the vets race) but with a runner from our rivals (that’s you, Basingstoke) less than a minute behind. There’s running, there’s racing, and then there’s being chased down. Being chased is different. You listen for your chaser. Maybe you look behind, maybe you don’t, but for sure you think about looking behind (and fight against the temptation- they might see, and be encouraged – but you want to know!). It’s atavistic, this feeling, and scary. I realise that I was not literally going to be gobbled up by Chris from Basingstoke, but this diminishes the scariness only slightly – and it’s like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. One lesson: running scared makes it even harder than usual to keep to the steady pace that, we all know, is optimal for getting from A to B as quickly as possible. Being chased is, I assume, what the real elite feel all the time, so that the phenomenology of running, for them, is quite different. (Twice I was caught, the third time I held out.)
Second, “pressure”. The scare quotes are important: of course, nothing much depended on this race, no money, precious little prestige, and we were all grownups, with proper jobs, responsibilities, lives. This was a bit of fun. But because we were a team, because it was a race, because we were trying to win, and because it was so close, there was something like pressure. Calculations were made, strategies conceived, words were chosen. Towards the end, in the minibus, it all went a bit quiet. We exhaled deeply. Then we ran, each of us, to utter, utter, exhaustion.
Third, the virtues. Endeavour, commitment, striving are all things that you can deliver in your local 10k. But (the ugly but necessary word) sportspersonship, solidarity with your team mates, resilience under pressure, having exactly the right attitude to your rivals, something like sporting valour? These are different. And here’s the worrying thought: when you are going for a PB in your local 10k, or doing your local park run, you can do a lot, but you can’t exemplify these virtues. Most runners lose out against our mates who are footballers, tennis players, cricketers. We lose out on key parts of the experience and meaning of sport because we are never even close to winning.
In the end, we lost. We did our best, we came second, but after 100 miles, Basingstoke vets beat us by 59 seconds; less than a second a mile. Well done, well run.
My six-year-old daughter texted me: “Sorry you lost the marathon.” This time, I didn’t need a long explanation about not “losing”, doing your best and so on. I was just sorry we lost, too. And I learned a lot about running and racing from her innocent sympathy, and from Basingstoke Vets – till next year – and from my team mates; Mike, Donald, Miles, Bruce, John, and Andy.
Jon Pike is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Open University and runs for Brighton Phoenix. He tweets @thinkandrun
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