As I turned the corner and entered the underpass around mile three of the Wilmington Marathon, the road became dark and wet, and a runner behind me shouted, trying to be witty, “beware of the needles.” But as you can imagine, this came off as tone deaf at best. This was a particular form of discomfort that had nothing to do with the lactic acid build up in my legs.
Around this mile, the course takes runners away from the riverfront and into more residential areas of Wilmington, DE. At this stage, you see fewer volunteers around and more vacant storefronts, more people sitting or sleeping near the course, and the inevitable thought clouded my head: What are the ethics of this race, or any race for that matter?
The Delaware Running Festival markets itself, in the language that can be found on the website, as a tour of the “best of Wilmington”: Brandywine Park, the riverfront, the historic — and very affluent — neighborhoods, and the downtown part of town that Corrigan Sports Enterprises, the Maryland-based company that owns the events, describes as “the financial center of the United States.” In parts of the course, runners are enthralled by the physical beauty of antique mansions dotting the street or greenery at every corner. The course also moves through a predominantly Black, majority-working class city that a for-profit events company has framed as a backdrop, and sitting with that designed distinction is worth being uncomfortable with long after the medal is placed over your head.
Wilmington, DE, is more than 52% Black, with a poverty rate sitting just above 21-26%, around double the national average of 10.6%. Furthermore, around 27% of Black families earn below the federal poverty line, more than twice the rate for white families in the same city. Lots of this structural racism stems from the 1950s and ’60s, where Wilmington was subject to deliberate policies that created the racial injustices: redlining that denied Black families access to homeownership and wealth-building, white flight in the ’50s and ’60s that gutted the city’s tax base, urban renewal projects that demolished affordable housing, and school desegregation battles that stretched deep, even into the 1990s. Thus, Wilmington is not a struggling city by accident but by design; it was created in this manner and therefore exists as a microcosm of larger national issues, racism, classism, and sexism.
So when a few thousand runners from the country — registered from 47 states and seven countries, not even from Wilmington, and mostly white — pay their large entry fees of hundreds of dollars to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon morning running past those neighborhoods, a reasonable question is: what money flows back? Are my few hundred dollars being spent wisely?
From what little I can grasp of a paper trail, the answer to the first question seems to be: not much, at least not directly. The race is organized by Corrigan Sports Enterprises and is connected to some charitable components, but these seem to be narrow. There seem to be components of the run that are for various charities — not a bad thing, but also not a form of community investment. Many race organizations follow the motto that events like these drive spending at local restaurants and businesses, which is something. However, economic spillover from race-weekend tourism is very different from race revenue going to the city or its residents that literally live a few feet from the actual race course in a more permanent manner.
However, I do think that this argument can soon lead to thinking that all road races through metropolitan cities should not exist, which is not (? Is it?) my point, or that running through neighborhoods is inherently extractive, or that only residents should be permitted to move through public spaces near homes. I do not believe these things, but I do think that there is a meaningful difference between a race that is actually woven into the community, employing local vendors or organizations and directing a substantial share of proceeds to the very real people that live along the course, and a race that uses a city as a means towards an end. It seems that the Delaware Running Festival, in its current iteration, feels closer to the latter. The finish line party at Tubman-Garret Riverfront Park was lively and stocked well with Michelob Ultra, various fruits, and chips, but at mile four the neighborhoods were quiet.
However, I do want to be careful because I paid the entry fee and I ran the race. I would be lying if I said the discomfort I felt at mile four was purely civic as well. Some of this discomfort was that of being in a new city and of just running for a long period of time, and some of that discomfort came from not really understanding why I was running or what the point of it even was.
As I sat in the discomfort physically around me, shown through the blatant fact of a seemingly still racially segregated Wilmington, my attention turned to the act of running itself: how this movement has become controlled, commodified, and perilously augmented to fit societal ascetics and race courses are a microcosm of this. Throughout all of my many races run, there is a conscious effort on the event-planning side to control the courses, to keep them in pristine condition, to show only what you want outsiders to see. However, as I ran through Wilmington runners were shown a more racially but, also, geographically diversified course and thus I found myself uncomfortable viewing a more whole city. Thus, the act of running is a commodity that can be, and is, being controlled in certain manners as a tool, whether for public-facing opinions of cities or as a tool for controlling what a “fit body looks like.”
I played Division I and III soccer, and I know what it is to treat your body as an instrument of performance, and I know what it is when that relationship curdles into something toxic — dangerous. I still have to do the unglamorous work of figuring out how to move my body in a way that feels my own: not through punishing it, not in a purely ascetic manner, not in a response to some metric of how I should look at this stage in my life or how I am “supposed” to be training as a lifelong athlete — a term I have given myself at this point. This is serious, ongoing work. It is the kind of work that a plethora of women and people from different walks of life who run are doing quietly, even as the cultural conversation around women’s running gets louder and stranger and to me, more troubling.
It seems to me, especially when I open Strava, that something has become distorted about running. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that something has happened to the way running is portrayed.
If you scroll through various social media platforms, Strava included, you will inevitably encounter a genre of content that has little to do with what running really feels like: the control of your own breath, the boredom, the internal fights, the specific satisfactions. Instead, what you might find are a post-run mirror check or a before and after that makes a 10k seem like a body transformation project. Running as body morphing, running as rigid discipline, running as the kind of thing you do so you look like the kind of person who runs.
Scientists studying “fitspiration,” an aim to inspire people to exercise and have healthy habits that end up having very negative effects on the body, have interpreted that this content seems to be somewhat negative on the whole. Engaging with this material from “what I eat in a day” videos or glamorized workout routines is associated with increased compulsion and the internalization of certain athletic appearance ideals. The fit ideal, as noted in the above article, cultivates body dissatisfaction and self-objectification just as reliably as the thin ideal it claims to have replaced. It just uses different vocabulary, a more coded rhetoric.
However, I want to be clear that I am not arguing against women or other groups of people running. I am not making an argument that any individual person who runs is doing it for unhealthy reasons or that motivation is ever singular. My own motivations on any given run are a complicated milieu of factors, including wanting to feel in shape and strong, wanting to enjoy the outdoors, wanting to be alone with music, waiting to feel like I still have that fire inside of me from high-level soccer, and wanting something that is not about wanting anything at all. I do hold all of these things at once and I imagine most runners and active people do.
But I think the “looksmaxxing”-ification of running, the transformation of a fundamentally interior experience into an exterior marker of performance is distorting something real into something harmful for many young women and others alike. When running becomes a tool for optimizing it stops being the thing that can actually just be enjoyable or save you from your crappy paper you’re writing. It stops being the thing you can do that is just yours.
So, as you can guess, I did in fact finish the half marathon in a time that does not really matter. I crossed the finish line at Tubman-Garret Park, named in honor of abolitionist Harriet Tubman and the Delaware stationmaster on the Underground Railroad, Thomas Garrett: two people who understood something about freedom of movement. Thus, I did feel and still feel a mixture of things that one usually feels at the end of something hard and strenuous: relief, empowerment, deflation. I also did feel and continue to feel unresolved questions about those two-ish hours. What does it mean to move freely through a city that its own residents have not always been allowed to move freely through? What does it mean to run for the physiological feeling of partaking in the movement or “runners high” when so much of the culture around you insists that running is for an ascetic? These are questions I really have no answers for but I think asking them, in print, is at least a start.
The course was beautiful, it was nuanced. It was brutal and scenic and strange. When turning the corner at around mile four, quiet ensued, and the people who lived there did not watch or, likely, care. This is a discomfort that will linger longer than that of the soreness.
