“America’s runners have never been slower, fatter or more out of shape”

Cameron Stracher is a Harvard-educated law professor, a successful writer, and a pretty fast dude. But he confuses cause and correlation, and elite runners with back-of-the-packers, in his Wall Street Journal editorial headlined, “Slow and Steady Loses the Race.” Since WSJ is a pay site and most of you are probably not subscribers, I’m going to excerpt it here:

This summer, more Americans than ever have laced up their running shoes and entered road races. That’s the good news. The bad news is that America’s runners have never been slower, fatter or more out of shape. How is this possible? How can running enjoy a new wave of popularity while the sport itself has never been in more trouble? The answer lies in the peculiarity of foot races on the road.

Stracher goes through the statistics on American futility in distance racing against international competition and couples it with slower average times among the hoi polloi in American road races.

The demise of the American runner was hastened by the success of the first running boom in the 1970s and the embrace of running as a “pastime” rather than a sport. As more people were encouraged to “just do it,” racing (and training) were dumbed down for the masses. Runners were told they could do a perfectly respectable marathon on 30 miles a week, 5k road races popped up all around the country (replacing the more difficult 10k), and running culture celebrated (and elevated) the participant over the winner. Today, it is not unusual for most runners to neither know, nor care, who won the race in which they were running.

Of course, physical activity—of any kind—is good. At a time of increasing obesity it seems counterproductive to complain about more people trying to keep fit. Yet the Sunday golfer has managed to keep his love of the game separate from his appreciation of Tiger Woods’s chip shot. The former gets him out on the course; the latter keeps him glued to the TV. Until running finds a way to do the same, we are doomed to numerical inferiority, celebrating mediocrity as if it were victory.

Mr. Stracher is writing a book about the 1970s and the running boom.

Stracher conveniently omits one crucial difference between the 1970s running boom and today’s. Women.

During those so-called glory days in the Seventies female participation in distance running was minimal. Now women routinely outnumber the men in road races. Since, on average, they are slower than men, it will naturally reduce the overall average time. Stracher also wrote, “It’s been two decades since an American-born athlete has won a major U.S. marathon.” That’s true of the men. But Kristy Johnson (1994) and Deena Kastor (2005) both won the Chicago Marathon. It’s also an underhanded dig at Meb Keflezighi’s 2009 New York City Marathon win. Meb was born in Eritrea, but didn’t start running until emigrating to America at age 12.

America’s relatively poor record in distance running over the past two decades has been the subject of endless analysis. Trying to pin it on the fact that more people – especially more women – are running than ever before is a weak argument.

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