What Is a Race?
IN FEBRUARY I attended the Running USA Conference, in Savannah, Georgia. There were about 500 attendees, many of them race directors—traditional race directors, the kind who put on events where you wear a bib, follow a course on paved roads, grab water at regular aid stations, and eventually dash across a finish line below a clock that tells you how fast you ran. More people than ever are running these races, especially 5-Ks (5.3 million finishers in 2011, more than any other distance) and half marathons (1.85 million last year, nearly four times as many as in 2000). But the topic that got the most buzz—and produced the most hand-wringing—were the races with words like mud and adventure and warrior in their names. Races run in…
