Why I think "that guy" got it all wrong:

Okay, so by now everyone has read the article about how the “color run” is killing competitive running or is at the very least indicative of a general lack of competitiveness among younger runners. I am clearly oversimplifying the article. This is a bit of a challenge as I felt that the original article was oversimplified to start with.

Here is the link: Some guy grubling about kids these days...

The article starts our bemoaning that the author placed at about 15% in the Men’s 50-59 age group and that his AG outperformed the field such that he finished 11% deep into the field. The knee jerk reaction is to say that he has made the incredible discovery that men run faster on average than women. The more concerning issue is that from this limited data he draws the broad conclusion that the competitiveness of younger runners is gone.

“They're just not very fast. "There's not as many super-competitive athletes today as when the baby boomers were in their 20s and 30s," said Ryan Lamppa, spokesman for Running USA, an industry-funded research group.”

I have heard this before but I still don’t believe it.

I think that a 4 minute mile is a good measure of being a "super-competitive" runner.

What is that I see? The top runners in America aren’t getting slower? More people are breaking the 4 minute mile than ever? What about the lack of competitiveness in younger runners?

The 4 minute mile is a measure of the most competitive runners. Maybe the author of the aforementioned article might argue that he was not referring to elite runners but rather to the runners at an average weekend race. Perhaps the elite runners are supposed to be excluded when discussing “super-competitive athletes”?

What we do see over the past 20 years is a serious explosion of interest in racing. In 2012 there were 15.5 million race finishers, 44% of finishers were male. In 1990 there were about 4.75 million race finishers, 75% of which were male.

If we assume that the distribution in terms of racing speed across the entire American population is roughly normal it would look something like this:

What we should expect is that most of the people who fall into the >2 standard deviations faster than average were already racing 20 years ago. What we see now is that these people have not stopped racing. American records are getting faster; more people are breaking the 4 minute mile and there are still epic battles at the USATF New England championship races around here. What has happened is that more of us from the rest of the distribution have started racing and there are now >3x more race finishers than there were in 1990!

The shift from 75% male to 56% female has also helped to change the average finish time at every distance. It is not a controversial statement that men are on average faster than women.

So what does all of this mean? To me, this means that runners are as competitive now as they have ever been if not more. Some of us take the starting line knowing that we are not that fast yet and don’t care. We race the people around us and lay everything on the line to beat everyone we can. We race for PRs and we race to push ourselves. The average finishing time at any given race is slower but now the probability of the average person taking on the challenge of a race is much higher.

If you don’t see the competition at the local level then you’re not looking in the right place. Visit the New Bedford Half Marathon or the Lone Gull 10km. Look at the USATF New England Grand Prix site and come run one of these races. If these are not competitive enough for you there are Club Nationals both at XC and Track to try out.

“Of course, there are countless super-elite young athletes. And only because the young have no need to prove they're not old was I able to outrace so many of them last month. Still, apathetic competition offers little comfort to some aging athletes.”

I'm not a super-elite athlete, but sometimes I will pick a shorter race like a 10k or Half Marathon to run at MP to practice the pace and practice taking liquids at race speed. My 6:30 pace might let you beat me and you will think that I am apathetic but it is not my job to comfort “aging athletes”. It is my goal to run my target races as fast as I possibly can.

In take away; while the author is worried about a lack of competitiveness from the new runners who take on the challenge of a race even though they are slower than an experienced senior runner, I will not be worrying about how many people are behind me. I will be worrying about how many people are in front of me and what I can do in my training to get faster than them. But then I’m 30 years old and us kids just aren’t that competitive anymore.