Concerning Christian fellowship, St. Paul wrote, "There is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female." Would that the metaphor applied to American running and race.

Running in this country is primarily a middle- and upper-class white phenomenon, as reflected in the non-sport ads that appear in running publications. (You don’t see a lot of minivan or life insurance promotions in White Trash Weekly or rap music magazines.) Still, running has often been praised for breaking down barriers that separate us in much of our lives. Consider your local running club’s training group of 4-hour marathoners: it’s likely to include a 50-year-old female lawyer, a 60-year-old retired male school teacher, a 30-year-old female homemaker, and so on. Physiology tends to have a leveling effect over occupation, neighborhood and other signs of status that’s hard to find in other common pursuits. (Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t the first to note that 11 a.m. Sunday is the most segregated hour in American society.) Even most sports can’t match running’s potential for inclusiveness—pickup basketball games, for example, are usually played by age peers, while wealthy golfers have their private clubs. So all hail running for bringing together people who would otherwise not know each other.

But look around after your next race. See many blacks? They won’t constitute 12% of the field, as they do of the U.S. population. Sure, the same could be said about the rate of female participation, given that only at 5Ks do women come close to being half of the entrants. But let’s not too quickly equate race entry with runner status. While waiting for a friend to run past my corner for pre-work runs in Boston, I used to count a more than 5-to-1 ratio of female to male runners. For whatever reasons, these women aren’t often at races, but they’re nonetheless part of our sport. The same is simply not true of blacks.

Things are even worse at the leadership level. To see running’s monochromaticity on display in, pardon the pun, glaring color, go to the annual Road Race Management conference, at which race directors and other professional sorts gather. You’d be excused if you thought that you’d stumbled upon a 25-year reunion of Vassar College alumni. Sure, all groups reflect their members, but running shouldn’t be constrained by unintentional solipsism to the degree that it is. After all, we’re not talking about the Knights of Columbus or the local bar association here, groups whose basis for existence is an element of identification such as creed, ethnic background, common political goals or profession. Rather, runners’ organizations are based on mutual discovery of an activity that’s available to almost everyone. There’s no good reason for them to so lack diversity.

Yet think about how we try to entice new runners. The current preoccupation among running insiders is cyberspace. Shoe company Web sites, on-line registration for races, running user groups, etc., proliferate in a keep-up-with-the-Jones attempt to be plugged in to the mores of the late 20th century white middle class. Problem is, if those Jones happen to be black, the ability to preview a race course on the Internet isn’t likely to be much of a draw. The federal government estimates that the top quartile of income earners—the segment most likely to be occupied by current runners—are more than ten times as likely to own a computer than the bottom quartile, of which blacks constitute more than 12%. (For the statistical minded, black median income is 57.7% of non-Hispanic white median income.) And no, the irony of making this point in a magazine whose demographics are pretty much limited to those that I’m decrying isn’t lost on me. We’re undeniably guilty of sending off-putting messages, such as, "The great thing about running is that all you need is a good pair of shoes, which can be had for less than $70. Oh, and if you’re interested, here are some nice $160 sunglasses."

All this is bad for more important reasons than missed markets for shoe companies and race directors. It’s been known for years that American blacks have a higher rate of heart disease than whites. To date, the running movement has failed to convince this segment of the population of our sport’s effectiveness against its leading killer.

And let’s not ignore the harder-to-quantify but even more vital matter of quality of life. We know that, health benefits aside, our lives are simply more enjoyable because we run. A study published last fall posited racial discrimination as a risk factor for hypertension, the theory being that heart disease can be caused by the daily stress of surviving in such an environment. In what many blacks perceive to be a perpetually hostile society, think about how running could help impart feelings of control, self-definition and accomplishment.

Certainly, running isn’t a panacea for 400 years of racism. But wouldn’t it be nice if our sport helped to make the fire next time harder to spark?

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