Stick with me a bit, and I’ll tell you why some people get so worked up by charity runners and other fine-feathered recent additions to the flock.

Last October, I boarded a plane with a dozen of my coworkers. As with most of you, my identity as a runner has nothing to do with how I pay my mortgage; in this case, my colleagues and I were headed to the annual meeting of the nonprofit association we work for. It just so happened that the meeting was to be held in Chicago coincident with that city’s marathon. So on our flight from Washington, D.C. that Friday morning, more than a few passengers were runners in transit, easily identifiable to me by their carry-on luggage and bellies that didn’t spill over into their aisle mates’ space.

It further just so happened that among those runners were Kristy Johnston, who would place 10^th at Chicago, and her husband, masters star Chris Fox. As the three of us traded how’s-your-training tales at baggage claim in Chicago, I noticed some of my coworkers hovering nearby, with distinct does-not-compute stares being shared among them. After all, this guy looked like me, but he was talking to others, animatedly, laughing and making them laugh, rather than, as at the office, permanently looking like he’s next in line for the dentist’s chair. Their looks said, “This has nothing to do with the Scott Douglas we see five days a week.”

In part, that’s because most of my coworkers don’t know about my spare-time dabbling as a magazine and book author. (A coworker once pointed out to me that the day’s Washington Post contained an article about running written by someone with my name from my town. Wow—what are the odds?) They would be especially stunned to learn that the tongue-tied floorstarer they work with is occasionally invited to talk to groups of runners. 

More important, their will-the-real-Scott-Douglas-please-stand-up confusion stems from not knowing that I’m a runner. Sure, many of them have heard that I run. But that’s different than knowing that I derive a large part of my self identify from being a runner and quite little from what occurs in the workaday world, and that, in circumstances when my running identity is encouraged, a looser, friendlier, more life-enjoying person emerges. It’s not so much that talking about last week’s mileage is any less trivial than the usual office chitchat of the previous day’s stock market and the coming evening’s dinner. Rather, it’s the unspoken fraternity undergirding those words, the sense of being among those with shared experiences, outlooks and approaches. It’s the shackles-removing treat of being in the company of people who, in all of life’s little emergencies, have one question unceasingly humming in the mental background: When am I going to get my miles in? 

Enter our much-maligned charity runners. Part of the above appeal of being a runner is the incognito effect—the perverse pleasure of thinking oneself in, but not of the 9-to-5 world, with a dash of Shakespeare’s, “The fewer…the greater share of honor” thrown in. The incognito effect, however, is largely dashed when an ever-growing number of runners enter the sport under different terms, often blissfully ignorant of ages-old orthodoxy and orthopraxis. Nerves are touched not so much by these runners’ impact within the running community—the effect on my performance in my next 5K by those covering the distance at a conversational amble is exactly nil—but in the larger society’s perception of runners.

That is, self-styled “real runners” partially define themselves in opposition to the mass of society and are quite happy to appear nobly inscrutable to the sedentary. (“I get tired just driving that far,” and so on.) These days, however, that divide is being filled by the troops of the second running boom, whose more casual approach to running is sometimes discussed in inverse proportion to weekly mileage. The result: Save perhaps for the corporate suites at Philip Morris, nearly every office in the country has its runners, old-schoolers are lumped in the public mind with the aw-shucks fledgling marathoner hitting up officemates for a pledge and hardcore runners sometimes feel the need to anathematize their new brethren lest their identities disappear. After all, it’s usually better to be ignored than misunderstood.

To which I say, alas and alack. Charity runners have their defenders en masse, and they don’t need me to stick up for them. But neither do they need me to chastise, denigrate or mock them because their presence sometimes clouds people’s perceptions of me as a runner. Years of living incognito as a runner—of waiting for those chance Kristy Johnston encounters in airports—should have taught me that not just charity, but also self identity begins at home.

Back in Chicago, one morning I caught a cab with a coworker. She asked if I had run the marathon the day before. “No,” I said. “Yeah, that’s a long way,” she said in obvious sympathy to my wimpiness. I thought about my 20 years of running, my 2:49 marathon in high school, my years in which I averaged more than 90 miles a week, my six-year streak. I thought about running through blizzards and heat waves, from airports and hotels. I thought about having risen at 5 that morning to run and about that evening’s 10-miler. And I thought about the best way to respond to my coworker.

“Sure is,” I said.

Return to Article Index