Yesterday I ran my first race in Central Park, a 3.5 mile Chase Corporate Challenge that has become an annual event since 1977. I ran for Barnes & Noble where I’ve worked for quite a while. Any corporation in metropolitan New York can register to participate as long as it’s represented by a minimum of 4 employees. There’s no limit to the size of the team and ours was about 20 people. The purpose of the race? Corporate networking and bonding.

So-called “hospitality village” where each company has a banner and a table is set up throughout Central Park where teams can meet and talk before and after the race. I was surprised that the event attracting so many great companies does not have a more noble cause than networking under the trees. Imagine if each company donated as little as 5 dollars for each employee who ran the race and some other sponsor would match it with another $5. With estimated 30,000 participants during a 2-day race, this event could result in $300,000 of raised funds that could go to whatever cause: like tripling the amount of garbage cans in this city. I’ll run for that!

But yesterday I ran for purely personal reasons.

Two months ago, I started doing morning runs before work although I hated running with all my heart since the fourth grade. I registered for June 21st Chase Corporate Challenge at work two months ago thinking this would be a great goal to “run” toward each morning. With great enthusiasm, I started running every day of the week, then began skipping a day in between the runs, then trimmed my running routine to occasional runs twice a week, than once a week, and then I stopped. Oh, I had really good reasons: it gets hot even in the morning hours; I need to buy some cool-looking shorts and real running sneakers; I come home late and tired so extra 20 minutes of sleep in the morning really (no, REALLY) make a difference, and most importantly “I don’t think this is for me after all”. So, as the day of the race approached, I realized my participation in the Corporate Challenge now had a different purpose. Instead of being a crowing accomplishment of 2 months of self-training, I hoped it would become a motivation to resume running and remake my commitment to exercise and stay fit.   

And the run delivered what I was looking for. First, I got punished for my laziness with stiffness in my legs and lack of breath. But as I got into my second mile, I started appreciate what I am doing and got inspired by all kinds of people around me doing their best to keep running. Some experienced runners kept saying that “this aint’ a real thing” as the track was crowded and this race didn’t count toward anything but to me it was real: I had a number clipped to the front of my shirt, I had to report my time at the end of the race, I grabbed water cups from the stands with an attitude of an Olympic athlete running a 40 km marathon, and I had strangers cheering for me in Central Park. And besides, the whole corporate America was there. I had numerous opportunities to check  out the crowd: Credit Suisse, Meryl Lynch, Tiffani, Coach, Fresh Direct, Google, Stock Exchange, Associate Press, you name it and they were there.

You could quickly tell a rich company from a small start-up. Credit Suisse Group was represented by Danish-looking boys with lean bodies clad in expensive Nike shirts customized with company logo. A chick from Coach was as fashionable as the race track allowed her to be and Google was Google – people on their team were all tall for some reason and ran in big long strides. Most corporate shirts had simple bright logos on them but ours had to be “literary” of course, so we had a long quote printed on the back of our shirts. To read it, one would need to grab me by the shoulders and keep me still for 1 minute (at the pace I was going they could probably read it anyway).

The quote was from Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Inappropriate as it might have been for a race t-shirt, it reflected the spirit of the competition. It said, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

By the way, my time was 37 minutes for a 3.5 mile race and I have every intention to run “at least twice as fast” next year.