Road Races Benefit All

There’s an old Seinfeld episode where George and Jerry are at a party during the New York Marathon. A woman at the window shouts down to the runners: "You’re all winners!" Of course, the pessimistic duo find the woman to be a complete fool, but, even though I wouldn’t have expressed it as fanatically as she does, I do have to agree with her.
It will be two years ago tomorrow that I ran my first road race. Throughout the summer of 2004, the New Haven Road Race had been in my sights and served as the motivation to actually accomplish what I had struggled to do for the entire previous decade: get in shape.
As a lineman in high school, I used to cherish any extra pounds I could pack, but I was now approaching the catalytic age of thirty, and the grunts of opposing noseguards and linebackers had been replaced with the snorts of a family history of diabetes and heart disease. I weighed 245 pounds and I’m only five foot ten.
Some of the friends I played football with are now high school coaches themselves and run a summer fitness camp for teenagers. They knew I was attempting to shed the weight I had gained throughout my twenties, so they invited me to participate with the campers.
"Who’s the old fat guy?" I imagined the high school athletes saying, not able to grasp that I once resembled them.
I committed to the camp anyway.
By six o’clock every morning, I was warming up with kids half my age, needing twice as much time as they did to get ready for the day’s activities. For nearly two months, I stumbled through agilities, jumped rope, lifted weights, tossed medicine balls, tumbled on mats, sprinted the length of the football field, worked on core strength and then at the end of each session, I stretched my ragged muscles.
Then, when I got home, I’d go for a run.
My favorite part of that summer, though, was when I got up and weighed myself. The damage I had done during my twenties was melting away and I increasingly found myself hanging in there with the kids at camp. This was the same summer that I hiked to the highest point of each New England state, another goal I had put off for years.
By Labor Day, I was down to 190 pounds and was ready to run the 5k race. I had lost so much weight, in fact, that I couldn’t even register as a Clydesdale, the 200+ pound category I at one point considered competing in. Instead, I lined up on Elm Street, lean and bouncy, thinking about all I had done to get there. I still have a framed photo my wife took of me in the final block of the race. I remember exactly what I was thinking at the time: I did it.
I remember what else I was thinking. That the camaraderie of the runners was something I had never experienced before in my life. The competitiveness I had in high school football was just as strong, but I was now butting heads with myself. All the runners were fighting only themselves. It blew my mind that when I passed someone, he would only encourage me to keep it up. I returned the favor when someone dusted me, too.
I was hooked. I ran my next road race five days later. Since Labor Day 2004, I’ve run in approximately twenty races, including a 20k and a half marathon, and while most are not as big as tomorrow’s race, they all have something in common: lots of people doing good things for themselves and each other.
A road race is the perfect outlet for someone wanting to help a cause that’s important to them. It’s a physical challenge that allows you to dig deep and get some aggression out while you know your money will be spent well. A month after my first race, for example, I raised $1,000 for children grieving the loss of a loved one. My own mother died in a car accident when I was twelve, so I wrote her initials on my shoes and dedicated the race to her.
That doesn’t make me unique. In fact, I came up with the idea only after watching Lance Armstrong win the Tour de France that summer. His "Live Strong" campaign to cure cancer made me ask myself, "What’s important to me? Who can I help?"
Last year’s New Haven Road Race distributed over $100,000 to eighteen charity organizations in the area, from the American Red Cross to the Ronald MacDonald House. Now in its twenty ninth year, over 5,000 runners will participate in the New Haven Road Race, a number that will help benefit even more good causes.
I’ll be one of those 5,000 runners tomorrow. I’ll admit, I’ve fallen in and out of running shape several times in the past two years, but I still haven’t seen two hundred pounds on the scale again. And I have promised myself that I’ll never be so out of shape that I can’t run the New Haven Road Race, because even if I’m slow, I know I’ll be a winner!