….and My Story Runs On….

One of our ChiRunning Instructors just posted an interesting article in our Instructor faceook page.  I am rarely this motivated to write a blog post but I scanned the study and I was inspired immediately!  I haven’t even really read through the full thing but just picked out a few of things that really got me excited!

Something I’ll never forget from my Psychology 101 class in college is that most “studies” are really BS.  There are many variables required to have an effective study so it’s easy to believe every article in every magazine that claims the effectiveness of such study .  So truly most of the time they are BS. I actually just saw one yesterday that mentioned a study with a sample size of 8 people!  Hardly representative of any population!

The first sentence before the title of the article says: “This is the first mapping of Global running participation. The analysis covers 107.9 million race results from more than 70 thousand events from 1986 to 2018. This is by far the largest study of race results in history. “

hmmmm that sounds like a pretty decent sample size!

You can go ahead and read the findings here: The State of Running 2019 by Jens Jakob Anderson

Here are the the key points that got me fired up with my 2 cents under them 😉

• Runners have never been slower – male runners in particular. In 1986 the average finish time was 3:52:35, whereas today it’s 4:32:49 – a slowdown of 40 minutes and 14 seconds. (marathon)
  • Yeah!  It’s about time we don’t care about speed when it comes to running!

• Runners have never been older aging from 35.2 in 1986 to 39.3 in 2018.
  • Based on the people I hang out with, this is actually still young!  Great to see people getting out of their comfort zones as they age!

• For the first time in history, there are more female than male runners. In 2018, 50.24% of runners were female.
  • Yes! I am working on getting more women running first…then more women running trails…then more women running ultras 😉

• Traveling to race has never been more popular than today.
  • Definitely something I started doing more for some of my races as well as my groups.  One of the reasons I love trail and ultra running is to getting to see new beautiful places.  Ladies Training Programs so far have been to Flagstaff (2x), Vail AZ, Tucson and Moab.  Future plans are to have more programs out of town.

• The motives for participating in running are potentially changing from being achievement-focused to being psychological, health and socially focused, which in part can be proved by more people traveling to race, slower finish times and how milestone-ages (30, 40, 50) now are much less dominant than 15 and 30 years ago.
  • This makes me the happiest!  This is the kind of running I promote!
    • Learn how to do it right so you don’t hurt yourself as you age and you can run forever!
    • Be social! Make sure you are having fun by doing it with friends!
    • Travel!
    • Take your time, there is no rush!  Your pace, your race!
    • Run to eat, run to drink beers, run for cookies…or whatever floats your boat!

Doing all of this will make it so running can be part of your lifestyle!  This is how and why I run!

From My Running Story to Yours….
(if you feel inspired to share your comments, do so below…I want to hear your story too!)