A few weeks ago I had a column about a book I found in my old storage cabinet that had a woman running down the road reading a book on running. The caption was, “Marilyn tried hard to understand her new sport’s language: 10K; 43:20; 5K; pronate tapering; peaking; lateral stability; shin splints; and cross training.” Almost any sport or occupation has a language that defines what you do. Think of people knowledgeable in computer science; being a carpenter building a house, a mechanic working on a big motor, or an electrician or plumber. Each of these occupations has their own language. In sports basketball, football, baseball, track, soccer, and even golf has terms used in that sport. Why does tennis use the words ”Love,” “Ad In,” and “Deuce,” for a score? How many people understand the hand signals the third base coach is using in baseball? And golf has ‘birdies’ and ‘eagles’ and ‘bogeys’.
Runners have a language that takes some time to learn. One of the most uncommon words is ‘fartlek’ as a training method. Even a number of runners don’t know the meaning of the word. The most common use by runners is how they tell other people how far they ran. Ask a runner how much he or she ran and they invariably will say they averaged so many miles day, or have run so many miles this week, or even how many miles they ran in a year. They record this distance in their log books to refer back to training and any improvements that have been made. I was a much to blame on this recording as runner when I managed to run a total of 2,300 miles one year. It was a milestone for me and there are some runners that manage to run many more miles.
My purpose for this article is to add a method of recording the distance a runner has accomplished to add to the confusion in a language. Instead of recording the number of miles you ran you put down how many minutes or hours you ran. In races runners don’t necessarily put down the miles of a 5K race but what their time was. Why not do this same thing with all your runs?
