For Weekend Athletes, Groups Can Be More Fun

Precisely how I feel of late.  Don't get me wrong, I still hold the "no excuses" attitude towards wanting something, so none of the lame "oh, I have no buddies to train with" type of excuse.  Train cos you want to, if you do it for any other reasons, e.g. social reasons, it is likely you won't last long.

However, for all my years of running alone, in most of 2012, I hardly ran alone.  Perhaps just at races, even so, I'm not alone going to the race.

Alone, it is all too easy to succumb to laziness/weakness and skip trainings.  But if there's a group of folks waiting for you, you will rise at 6am for that Sunday morning training run!

From the NY Times, 1 Feb 2013 :

For Weekend Athletes, Groups Can Be More Fun

HONG KONG—Groups can be more fun. That’s a growing consensus among amateur athletes around the world.

Rather than run that marathon all by one’s lonesome, many weekend warriors are participating in races that require a team of two or four to get through a course.

The advantages of training and racing with buddies, of course, include the camaraderie, as well as a healthy dose of peer pressure to stick with a training regimen. If your teammates are more experienced, you may glean tips on health and nutrition, and you can share any logistics or organizational workload.

Perhaps the greatest advantage to teaming up is that there’s safety in numbers. Running with others, for instance, can make entering the world of amateur racing easier and less intimidating.

My colleague and friend, Bettina Wassener, has biked throughout Germany and trekked in Nepal, but on Saturday she will participate in her first race: the Green Power Hike, a 50-kilometer, or about 30-mile, event through the hills of Hong Kong, as part of a three-person team. I can tell she’s caught the bug because she’s already talking about competing in December in the Angkor Wat International Half Marathon, which is a solo 21.1 kilometer race though the famed ancient temples in Cambodia.

The disadvantages of team training and events are less numerous, at least for someone like me who races just for fun. You may end up moving faster than you normally would, which can lead to injury, or slower, which can be underwhelming. Busy people may find training difficult to schedule. But that’s life.

I’ve done both team and solo events and like both equally. One evening this week as I ran (alone) along this scenic route up and down Hong Kong’s famous Victoria Peak, I got to thinking about Bettina and her team’s approach to Saturday’s race. They’re right on target. They trained frequently over the last few months and they got over the hurdle of early weekend wake-ups by rewarding themselves with a restaurant or pub visit at their destination.

During Saturday’s race, they planned to stick closely together along the route because scattering can be disheartening for straggling members. As a team, they banned the use of headphones. And they required themselves to show up with three jokes each to break up the monotony of a course they expect to last 12 hours. (My only qualm might be their intention to wear matching penguin hats on race day.)

And there are other incentives for making racing a team sport.

For the past 30 years, the charity Oxfam has sponsored 100-kilometer events throughout the world for teams of four. I’ve participated in Hong Kong several times, and am monitoring this calendar of 2013 races in the hopes of doing a similar event in Spain, India or Australia. Participants also help fight poverty. Oxfam says that in 2012 more than 22,000 people collectively walked over 2.2 million kilometers, “the same distance as walking around the world 55 times, becoming great ambassadors for Oxfam’s work and aiming to raise over $18 million.”

That just scratches the surface of such events. Are there any team races — or other team sporting endeavors — you can recommend for the usually solo practitioner?