Everyone Gets A Medal, but Should They?

Last week, Los Angeles Marathon organizers did something unsettling.

With temperature forecasts climbing, race organizers offered runners an official option: stop at mile 18, take a shuttle to the finish line, and collect the same finisher medal as everyone who ran all 26.2 miles. It was going to be hot. And nobody should die for a race.

But a marathon is not a suggestion. It’s not a goal range or a general direction. It is a specific, ancient, non-negotiable agreement with yourself and with reality: 26.2 miles. Not 18. Not “most of it.” Not “I gave it a real shot and things got hard.” All of it. The distance is the contract, and the contract is the whole point.

I’ve run 15 marathons. I began competing in my mid-40’s, ran through two cancer diagnoses, and toed the line on days when every rational argument said stay the hell home. I know what it feels like at mile 18. I know exactly what your brain starts doing to you — the bargaining, your burning calves, the very convincing case it makes that you’ve already proven something and there’s no shame in stopping here.

I also know this: mile 18 is not the finish line. It’s the doorway.

Everything that happens between mile 18 and mile 26 — the negotiation with your own mind, the moment you decide to keep moving anyway, the physical and psychological reckoning that comes when there is no comfortable option left — that’s not the hard part of the marathon. That is the marathon. The first 18 miles are the warm-up. The entry fee. The cost of admission to the only part that actually changes you.

When you hand someone a shiny 26.2 finisher medal for running 18 miles, you’re not protecting them from failure. You’re robbing them of the magic that makes finishing mean something.

Not to sound like an old guy, but we live in a culture that has become deeply uncomfortable with the idea that some things should be hard and that not finishing is a legitimate outcome. Over the past decade, endurance racing has drifted steadily toward spectacle — the expensive photos, the finisher gear and the medals that get gaudier every year.

The medal has become the point. The finish line photo you can post on social media has become the point. The transformation that happens in the last eight miles — the one you can’t photograph and can’t buy and can’t shortcut — that’s seemingly become optional.

This matters beyond running. It matters because the lesson of the marathon — the actual lesson, not the oval bumper sticker version — is that you are capable of more than you think you are, but only if you go to the place where that gets hashed out.

You can’t hop on a comfy shuttle to get to that place. You have to push through the miles where everything in you says to stop, but you keep going anyway, and arrive on the other side as someone who now knows, with certainty, that you can accomplish what seemed impossible just a few hours before.

You don’t get that at mile 18.

Mind you, I’m not criticizing anyone who took the shuttle. Hard days happen, and running in dangerous heat is its own kind of courage. But what are we telling people when we hand them the same medal regardless? We’re telling them the distance doesn’t matter. That the hard part is optional.

If organizers felt that everyone needed a prize, they should have given shortened course runners a different medal. Give them a “I ran 18 miles in dangerous heat and made a smart call” medal, because that’s legit. But don’t give them the official 26.2-mile medal.

The marathon has always been a metaphor. You cross that finish line having done the thing — all of it, including the part where you didn’t want to — and something in you shifts. That shift is the life-changing part.

Everything else is just running.

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