The New York Times has an important news flash for you: There’s no such thing as a free lunch; scarcity is a fact of life; and when you make relatively inexpensive pastimes unnecessarily more expensive, they tend to get more expensive.
If you weren’t aware, the New York City Marathon took place on Sunday. It’s a big-time sporting event. Sweden’s Andreas Almgren won the men’s division with an incredible time of 2:06:01 — averaging an incredible 4 minutes 48 seconds per mile — and he took home $100,000 in prize money. But, of course, tens of thousands of amateurs run the race each year, and they’re paying for the privilege of racing — with zero shot of financial profit. Some of them, according to the Gray Lady, have complaints.
“When Michael Conway lines up for the New York City Marathon on Sunday,” Santul Nerkar reports, “he will have spent thousands of dollars before even starting to run across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.”
Mr. Conway, 30, is serious about his running. He owns five pairs of running sneakers, each of which cost at least $160 and serves a different training purpose. Edible liquid gels to sustain him set him back hundreds more each year.
Then there are the fees for New York’s many competitive races, which he needs to run to gain entry into the marathon. And if his friends and family want to see him cross the finish line in Central Park, they’ll have to pay $60 to watch from the metal bleachers.
“While the sport has long been celebrated as cheap and accessible,” Nerkar writes, “amateur athletes now routinely shell out thousands of dollars each year on carbon-plated shoes, track club memberships and race fees, not to mention fuel pouches and flashy apparel.”
Carbon-plated shoes? Fuel pouches? Track club memberships? Flashy apparel?
Call me a curmudgeon, but these are wants not needs. As a serious amateur runner myself, I feel confident that all one really needs to train for a marathon is a couple pairs of shoes per year and eggs à la Rocky.
I wasn’t on hand to witness the event, but I somehow doubt that Pheidippides was shod in carbon-plated sandals when he made his famous trek from Marathon to Athens in order to announce nenikēkamen! And I’d bet the house that he didn’t run in “flashy apparel.” (The Hellenes generally raced in the nude.)
But on second thought . . . Pheidippides may have found some use for Mr. Conway’s liquid fuel gels.