I spent last weekend in Tallahassee, Florida, a trip that had absolutely nothing to do with Florida State not making the college football playoffs. I was there to run a master’s 10k cross country race, something I do about once a year. It’s become an annual tradition with a group of people I ran cross country with in college years and years ago, back when we were much faster and less achy than we are now. All of us still run, slower of course, but really we use the race as a way of everyone getting together.
The race we choose is the club national championships, which is for all the club teams across the country, most of whom take this race really seriously. Since my friends and I can’t form an official club because we live all over the country, we just make an unofficial one and run as individuals. Not that our team would be any threat in 50+ category. To get it out the way, we all ran pretty poorly, especially in a race that’s filled with people who run really fast for their age. I also made some fairly poor decisions, like wearing a brand new pair of spikes after not wearing spikes for like 30 years. And running the first mile at a pace that was clearly unsustainable for the following 5.2.
We aren’t unique in our pursuit of athletics into an age where sport is often something spoken of in the distant past tense. Like, I used to play this, or in high school I did that. There were several hundred who travelled to this race in pursuit of pain, glory, and little else. Sports like triathlon probably have more participants over the age of 40 than under it. And for every Publix you see in the state of Florida, you’ll see at least 100 pickleball courts. Yes, statically speaking, sports participation decreases with age, but not as much as it used to. That’s true for weekend warrior just as it is in elite competition, where Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers aren’t so unusual anymore – even if that second one was a bad example.
Why do we do it? That’s a bit of a mixed bag. I’m sure some of it’s tied to life expectancy and modern medicine. You can do a lot of things to fix a strained shoulder that you couldn’t do 50 years ago. Some of it is economic. The participatory sports industry is massive, and one of the easiest ways to grow is by extending the consumer base to those with a few grey hairs. It used to be adults spent money on their kids’ sporting needs. Now they’re buying soccer cleats for themselves at the same time. And I’m sure the proliferation of social media has accelerated the sports aging process. If nothing else, it’s normalized and organized adults doing things previously relegated to the younger crowd.
All that said, I think there’s more. When we lined up on Saturday morning in a grassy park in Tallahassee, we weren’t simply reliving our glory days or following a fad we saw on TikTok. We were allowing ourselves the opportunity to feel the full range of physical and emotional strain that comes from competitive sport. In the course of 6.2 miles, you find yourself both pushing past physical limits and managing waves of emotion that seem to come with the process. When I was a bit younger and every year did a brutally long and painful triathlon in the Hudson Valley called the SOS, I told people the primary reason I did it was because it was the one time every year I knew I was actually alive – because you could experience literally everything over the course of a few hours, more than you might over an entire calendar year. I’m sure the same is true for everyone who plays soccer, tennis – heck, anything where you keep score and might hurt yourself in the process. Which is part of the appeal. Sports, at is core, is perhaps the most pure form of joy some of us will ever know. And that’s not an affront to the rest of our lives. It’s simply a recognition of the power of participation.
Which is why I ended up in the Florida Panhandle last weekend running through waves of agony only to finish way further back than I expected. And why I can’t wait to do it again.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler
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