It doesn't happen often, but when it does it feels too often.
I'm talking about hearing the words: "Runner down."
There are many reasons you may hear those words at a run, but it all comes down to one thing... A runner went down. A runner fell and could not get back up and continue.
What you do as runner in this situation says more about you than in anything in any other situation... It separates the runners and racers. A racer is so worried about their finish that they will run past this situation. A runner stops and helps a fellow runner in anyway possible, pace and PR be damned.
Runners don't run against each other. They run WITH each other. Fast, slow, elite or recreational, runners are pack animals.
Racers are lone wolves. And they eat their own.
The reason I'm waxing poetic regarding this topic is that a member of my pack, a local runner, a mainstay at many of our local events went down at a recent event. He went down, and never got back up.
Cardiac arrest I was told.
I was sick and did not attend, but I know he was much faster than I. And I also know I would have come up right in the thick of things should I have participated.
I may not have been able to provide much in terms help, but I know I would have stopped. Reading the results of run in the paper, there was no mention of this incident other than next to one runner's time where it read: DNF (did not finish) stopped to assist down runner.
ONE solitary runner stopped to assist?
I hope it's just a case of our traditionally faulty newspaper reporting in our area, because otherwise that just's plain shitty.
I choose to run. I do not choose to race.
If you have to ask why they didn't stop and run in the opposite direction, you wouldn't understand the answer anyway.