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I spent last weekend in Chicago. While I was running along the lake front I was amazed that, in a city where most months of the year the weather is uncomfortable, so many people were training for the upcoming Chicago Marathon. The number of runners wearing t-shirts advertising their participation in marathon training programs like Team In Training or the AIDS Marathon Training Program was really remarkable.

Knowing that these programs appeal mostly to first-time marathoners, it was easy for me to play the "guess who's going to finish game." You know the one, you run by someone and think "she's definitely going to finish" or "he's going to have a tough time at mile 20," "or I bet she'll qualify for Boston." It's a totally unscientific and inaccurate game but irresistible at times, especially on long runs. And it got me thinking: Is there a way to predict who will make it to the finish line of his or her first marathon and who wont?

Sure enough, the September 2007 issue of the Journal of Sport Behavior includes an article by Jack Havenar and Marc Lochbaum examining the differences in motives between first-time marathon finishers and those who drop out. And while the authors do not provide a method for determining in advance who will finish their first marathon, they do have some ideas about who wont.

Before I go on let me acknowledge that I love marathon training programs that raise money for charity as well as provide coaching, encouragement, and support to first-time marathoners. In fact, I provide sports psych services to my local Team In Training. So the results of Havenar and Lochbaum's study are in no way intended to discourage anyone from joining these programs. If someone is thinking about joining them I would highly recommend it.

Havenar and Lochbaum followed 106 first time marathon runners over the course of their twenty week training program. They looked at the runners' reasons for participating in the programs using the Motivations of Marathoners Scales, a 56-item questionnaire.

The authors' first hypothesis was that a majority of those who started the program would discontinue training before the race occurred.

This was in fact what they observed; 70% of their sample dropped out prior to completion of the six month training program. Interestingly, these results are very much in keeping with established patterns about people's participation in any type of sport/exercise program. Research by the United States Department of Health and Human Services in 2000 found that at least 50 - 70% of individuals discontinue an exercise program within the first six months.

What did surprise the authors were differences between the drop-out group and the finisher-group with respect to motivation. Dropouts were more motivated to begin training for a marathon by weight-loss and social recognition and affiliation than those who finished.

How can we understand these results? First, weight-loss is not, generally, a good motivator for adherence to a workout program. There are many reasons for this: weight-loss is not something that happens immediately so results are not always easily seen, once a target-weight is reached the incentive to continue with the program is reduced, many other factors can negatively affect weight-loss that are unrelated to exercise. It may be that those runners who joined a marathon training program hoping to trim down reached their desired weight prior to running the marathon and therefore had no need to continue running. Or -- and probably more likely -- perhaps they did not lose the weight the hoped to lose and became discouraged.

With respect to the beginning marathon runners' need for social recognition, the researchers propose that the participants may have received the amount of recognition they needed during the fund raising portion of the program and that actually completing the training and running the marathon may not have provided any more recognition. The researchers also speculate that perhaps the social affiliation goals of dropouts may simply not have been met. Training for a marathon is, after all, something that one spends a lot of time doing alone.

Obviously there are limitations to a study like this. Foremost is the fact that all of these programs require participants to fund raise. It is likely that issues related to fundraising were responsible for some participants dropping out.

None the less, it is interesting to consider that the best way to "sell" someone on training for a marathon may not be to tell him or her how much weight he or she will lose or how many friends he or she will make while training or how impressed others will be by his or her accomplishment.

As with many sports, the best motivators of all are those that are internally focused. Approaching finishing a marathon as a physical, emotional (and for some, even spiritual) challenge is most likely to keep us motivated over the long-run.

References:
Havenar, J. & Lochbaum, M. (2007). Differences in participation motives of first-time marathon finishers and pre-race dropouts. Journal of Sport Behavior, 30 (3), 270 - 279.



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