Something I saw on the socials the morning I sat down to write this has stuck in my craw and got me (once again) a bit riled.
The Chicago Marathon happened recently and in a viral post a young woman who finished the race with a (respectable) four-thirty something was blasted in her comments for taking walk breaks during the race. The commenters told her (apparently) that her race didn’t count because she didn’t run the whole thing.
Let me be perfectly clear to those commenters: stop being fucking gatekeepers.
Seriously.
That’s just poor sportsmanship, be you a runner or a spectator, elite or the last fucking person across the line. The rules are set by the race, not by a handful of people who draw an imaginary line—close a gate—at some arbitrary point that they alone have passed.
I take walk breaks, and fuck you if you think that means I’m not running.
Am I going to win a race? Hell, no. Not like that. And every ableist, elitist, rule-making asshole who crosses ahead of me can remind me that I’ll never place that way. But to suggest that an athlete who traverses the distance of their own motivation and power is lesser for their method? They’ve missed the point.
Definitions
- advice
- This is NOT an advice site. I write for entertainment only. Please see my note on advice in my page called "Some Notes" in the menu at the top of each page.
- august
- In the month of August where I live summer peaks and the days are often relatively hot (in the high 20s or low 30s) muggy, smokey and dry. Rain is infrequent, but when it arrives it comes in the form of drenching downpours and epic thunderstorms. We begin our runs earlier in the day because the local marathon runs late in the month and our training distances are maxing.
- motivation
- Like many things in life, running is an act of motivation. You make yourself put on the gear. You put in the effort to lace up. You open the front door and you step out into the world and the weather. You press the start button on your watch and you go. Step after step, one footfall at a time.
- october
- Fully into autumn, October is a month of shifting seasons, short days, long shadows, and gorgeous sunsets. The cobwebs are hung on the eaves in preparation for halloween, and here in Canada we're running off Thanksgiving dinner for a couple weeks after a proper good meal mid-month.
- race
- You train and train and train some more, and then for no clear reason you pay a bunch of money to run as fast as you possibly can at a very specific time with a bunch of strangers along a course lined with more strangers (or along paths lined with trees if you are an ultra runner) at the end of which you are handed a medal and a banana and a sense of achievement unlike anything you will feel again (until you sign up for your next one.)
- september
- The days are noticeably shorter when we realize that September is upon us. The post-summer routine kicks in and people are back to regular work schedules and kids are back in school. It can still be warm, but the hottest days are behind us and most of the biggest races of the year are in the rear view. We savour September knowing winter is too soon to come.
