Do running and walking make you nicer?
I wondered whether running and walking make you nicer after attending a 5K yesterday.
More than 100 people participated in this 5K walk/run to raise money for the family of a group-training coach who died recently. And the coach’s widow and other family members were there.
When the widow arrived yesterday morning at the 5K starting line to find all of us ready to race in honor of her deceased husband, she was overwhelmed with emotion. And to see that we had touched her brought tears to many racers’ eyes, including mine.
It was a beautiful morning for a 5K. Many runners and walkers stayed around after the 5K to bid on items donated in a silent auction to raise even more money for the coach’s widow and family.
This was the most recent of various events that made me wonder about running and walking making you nicer. Briefly, here are two others:
- My wife accidentally left her car key, gasoline-charge-card wand, and expensive sunglasses in a parking-shuttle bus that carried participants between a distant parking lot and the starting line of a 4-miler fund-raiser for a local park. But all of these items were turned in and recovered the same morning.
- I once saw a fellow trainee essentially sacrifice his entire run so that he could be sure that no other group-training members were endangered by exposed electrical wiring and a light pole that had been downed a week earlier by a hurricane.
So this becomes a chicken-or-the-egg question:
- Can running or walking in a group-training program make you nicer?
– OR – - Do group-training programs for runners and walkers tend to attract more nice people than not-nice people?
Here are three reasons why I tend to believe that there is more truth in the statement underlying question #1 than in the statement underlying question #2:
- Endorphins: Endurance runs and walks, around which many training programs’ group outings are organized, can trigger the release of endorphins, which make you feel better, which makes you tend to be nicer to others.
- Peer Pressure: This does not apply to runners and walkers who train in a strictly solo manner. But there is something to be said for the peer pressure of a training group to encourage niceness and discourage behavior that many members would see as not nice.
- Modeling: The members of any group will tend to model the behavior of the group’s authority figures. So nice coaches and assistant coaches will tend to cause a group-training program’s members to behave in nice ways, too.
What do you believe? Please leave a comment here. Thanks!
