[email hidden] (KingsXman) wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...
Quoted message said:Have any/most of you encountered a surprising number genuine runner haters? I have met so many
people (even my friends) who just hate me because I run and if i try to talk to get anyone to try
running or EVEN try TALKING about it, i get shot down.
These people are not runner-haters. They are haters of boring people who have no social skills!
If you want to talk about nothing but running, then you have to find people who are interested:
either people who run, or who are otherwise very keen on getting into it. In the case of the latter,
it helps if you are knowledgeable, so you can tell them just a small amount of the right information
they need to get started or to solve some problem; they probably don't want to hear about your
latest and greatest personal record on some favorite course. 😉
As a rule, if you want people to be interested in talking, you have to talk about *them* and *their*
interests.
Quoted message said:When i first started running, only about a year ago, i was irritated that i had wasted 19 years of
my life (mostly depressed) and was a little [censored] at the few runners that i knew that didn't
share the secret to happiness.
One little problem is if you depend on running for happiness, you will have a miserable time when
you have to overcome injuries that take you out of the running circuit entirely for weeks at a time,
or seriously reduce your mileage.
Quoted message said:now i'm starting to wonder if runners are taught at an early age to keep their mouth shut about
health, because, in fact, we are a minority in this country (11% of americans are in shape,
right?).
Non-runners can already see the tangible benefits of running without *you* telling them anything.
You're not the first runner they have ever seen. People already know that sports make people fit,
and that serious athletes have great bodies and all that.
On the other hand, it's next to impossible to explain the intangible benefits to nonrunners. They
just see it as an excruciatingly painful activity that they can't stand for more than a few minutes,
so that people who *can* do it must be naturally different in some way. They are physically built
differently, or are just crazy or are jocks that were just born possessing ``the right stuff''.
There is no point in trying to convince people that they can do it. This has to come from within.
You can inspire people when they see you go from a fat couch potato to accomplished runner. That's
what helps motivate people: when they see someone familiar go through a transformation from ``one of
us'' to ``one of them''.
If some non-runner you have only met recently only knows you as ``one of them'', there is no point
in talking to them about running. You are disconnected. I could carry an old picture of me to show
people, but they probably won't believe that's me. Not long ago, a woman at work actually re-
introduced herself to me in the lunch room, thinking I was new here! We both have been working here
for well over a year, and have exchanged a few words here and there. That was a strange moment, but
I just went along with it.
If you want to evangelize running to non-runners, you have to become very knowledgeable, and
organize your knowledge into a structure that you can reveal to newbies without overwhelming them---
or worse, scaring them. In particular, you have to have ready-made, factual answers to all the
common objections and misconceptions. As example of someone who is good at evangelizing running to
ordinary people, consider John ``The Penguin'' Bingham. Unfi people identify with Bingham, because
he was one of them, and he still sucks! In his enthusiasm, he emphasizes nothing but the intangible
benefits of running: sense of achievent, well-being and so on, as opposed to years of gut-busting
training in search of a sub-40-minute 10K.
Not every runner has the confidence and knowledge to lecture about it, so that is one reason for the
apparent ``code of silence''. Some people run, and even get good at it, without having much of a
clue. They might not be able to tell a motion control shoe from a stability one, and give you a
blank stare if you mention lactate threshold or VO2Max. So of course they aren't going to talk to
you; they don't want to look stupid when after all that time they have been running, they can't
confidently help you pick shoes or give you useful training hints.
