We’re All In This Together Now
It wasn’t all that long ago that running was, for the most part, inherently solitary and shrouded in mystery. When I first decided to get serious about running again as an adult back in 2005, social media didn’t really exist. Twitter had yet to be created and Facebook didn’t have any traction. So, I scoured message boards and discovered that there were only a few books worth reading that would help me figure out how to train on my own for a marathon. I say on my own because I had no idea which running club to join and how to get in touch with one, as few seemed to bother with a website.
Of those books I was recommended on a forum, only two of them, Jack Daniels’s Running Formula and Pete Pf it zinger’s intimidatingly titled Advanced Marathoning, were still in print. In retrospect, the period before social media was like living in an information dark age for runners.
Ten years later, running is arguably a different experience than it’s ever been before. Today, we connect just as easily with other runners where we live and as we do with those from around the world through all sorts of channels, including Strava. Regular contributor Madeleine Cummings’s feature story (p.56) on the quickly growing app and community reveals how rich and complex our relationships are to running and each other. As most of us are inherently A-type personalities, Strava’s rich analytic quality makes it far too easy for us to gamify our training and be seduced by what others are doing, which can be incredibly dangerous, particularly if you need that easy day to be really easy (and not, say, a race to recapture a lost segment).
But what’s most exciting about tools such as Strava is how knowledge is no longer only accessible to the privileged few. Of course, the only real secret when it comes to training is that there are no secrets. That said, there are many different ways to be successful, and before the advent of social media, this information seemed to be passed around by those “in the know,” loaning out dog-eared, out-of-print copies of the few books that seemed to withstand the test of time. By contrast, today you can go take a look at what a world-class marathoner like Reid Coolsaet is doing on a regular basis – and be shocked to discover that he runs his easy runs almost as easy as you probably do.
Another unusual byproduct of social media’s inf luence upon running has been in the unexpected explosion in popularity of the beer mile. Chugging a beer to start off each of the four laps that add up to a mile on the track may sound like a college prank (and it actually started off that way), but it also may be the single toughest event in running. Before Canadian James Neilsen posted a video of himself running the first ever sub-5:00 beer mile on YouTube in 2014, the event operated in the shadows. Less than two years later, it’s become a huge attraction, with the world championships getting as much attention as a major marathon from the mainstream media. And as writer Tania Haas learned (p. 46), the beer mile has humble Canadian roots, as it was born on small track in Burlington, Ont. by a group of Canadian university students. Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that, some 25 years later, Canadians dominate the beer mile. Lewis Kent, a student athlete at Western University and the current world record holder, has parlayed his social media fame into a shoe deal and is arguably the most recognizable Canadian distance runner going into 2016, which says a lot about the power of social media, as it’s an Olympic year.
As runners, we live in strange, wonderfully interconnected times.