What makes a runner?

I just finished a book called To The Edge by Kirk Johnson. This book is about a man who becomes a runner and decides to complete one of the toughest ultramarathons out there, Badwater.

Badwater is held in Death Valley. In July. It starts at about 7:00 AM and you run from Badwater (the lowest point in the US) to Mt. Whitney (the highest point in the US.) In July. The race starts in the daytime, so that you get to experience the heat of Death Valley at the hottest part of the year and the race is 135 miles, yes, I said miles, long. It's one of the toughest extreme sports races in the world.

This book was very interesting and I recommend it strongly if you want to understand what makes endurance sports tick. Any endurance sport. As the author says, it's just about refusing to quit and so you go on.

But another point that interested me was how much of this ultramarathon the competitors did not actually RUN but WALKED. They walked when it got to hot to run, or if their feet hurt to much, or if the road was to steep. Yeah, they ran part of it, but not all of it. The average mile time you must hit in order to complete this race in the time cutoff is around 26 minutes. This is ultra slow (maybe that's why they call it an ultramarathon.)

Think about that for a minute. A really good mile time is under 4 minutes. If we're talking about a marathon, 26.2 miles, a world class time would be under 2:10, or almost 5 minutes a mile. At Badwater, the record is about 24 hours 36 minutes, or about a 11 minute per mile pace.

So, the question is, what makes someone a runner? It's not that they run the whole darn way. Cause some of them don't. And, it's not that they are necessarily faster than other runners, cause we have fast runners and slow runners. And, it's not a certain distance, because whether you're busting your guts running a mile, or doing a 100 mile run, we still call both of those people runners.

So, my opinion is that a runner is someone who thinks that they are. In other words, if you ask a runner what they did, they'll say that they ran x amount of distance. Not that they walked it, not that they jogged it. That they RAN.

That self-declaration is what makes someone a runner. Or not.