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Runners Need To Stop Calling Ourselves “Slow”
“You wouldn’t want to run with me — I’m slow.”
Saying this is a terrific way to get me fired up.
I don’t believe in slow runners.
Slow is a comparative term, which means it’s automatically changeable based on the comparison.
My friend Andy is slower than Mo Farah, but I don’t think Andy’s 8-minute-mile makes him a slow runner. (Yes, I work with words all day.)
But the primary problems I have with this statement run deeper than just semantics.
The first problem I have with the concept of “slow runners” is that it’s hard to tell what anyone’s pace is in comparison to our own unless we’ve run with them for a decent amount of time, or seen what pace group they join at a sponsored or group run, and so it is really easy to insult someone by claiming to be a slow runner.
Imagine someone says to you, “You wouldn’t want to run with me — I’m slow.”
So you say, “Oh yeah? What’s your pace?”
And they respond with a pace that’s faster than yours.
