Dave McGillivray, the race director for the Boston Marathon and the Beach to Beacon, recently shared his thoughts on headphone use. He gave his arguments about why he enforces the USATF rule about headphone use, which boil down to 3 points.
- He’s technically required to.
- Safety reasons.
- Insurance reasons.
Personally, I question that in ALL cases wearing a headphone / iPods in a road race with a closed course is truly unsafe or dangerous but I can see where they can be unsafe in certain circumstances which is enough to prohibit them.
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However, this is now a USATF rule and to be compliant with the USATF position and rule, we need to discourage and ban the use of headphones in all our sanctioned events. Runners are usually very cooperative when informed of the rule…which is the key…making them aware of the rule before they even register for the race.
When he went out running in Boston’s back bay a month and a half ago, he counted the number of people out running with mp3 players. A staggering 90% of the over 60 people that he passed had their ears stuffed with headphones. Even a kid in a stroller had their head buried.
Hearing something like that makes me wonder whether what the percentage of my generation that goes deaf at a young age is going to be. Personally, I do not wear headphones when I am running. Apart from actually enjoying the act of running and taking in my surroundings, I am too paranoid about getting hit by a car again to provide the cars any more of an advantage over me than I have to.
I am also too competitive to want to wear them; I like to hear people coming up on me when I’m not chatting with them. It does not really bother me when other people wear headphones, as long as they don’t bother me because they are wearing them. As an adult, you have the right to ascertain whether a risk is worth taking or not.
Source: Cool Running
Thanks to frequent commenter DPeach for the heads up!
You may also be interested in reading about the advantages and disadvantages of running with headphones, or a more in depth look into how I feel about headphones on runners.
I love my iPod, but have yet to run with it. Like being aware of my surroundings too much while running. But to each their own.
My first high school cross country coach confiscated headphones if anyone brought them to practice. His reasoning was simple if you’re running on the road you can’t hear traffic coming and thats the difference between getting out of the way and getting hit by a car.
Now I race pretty frequntly in NYRR events in Central Park and there are always a ton of people with iPods. The people with iPods are generally oblivious to those around them, which is not a good thing to be when you have 2,000-5,000 people starting a race on a narrow and confined stretch Central Park Drive.
During these races the road is not closed to bikers or other runners, so you have enven more people on the road in addition to runners. Plenty of iPod wearing runners drift into the bike lane unable to hear bikers and racing officials warning them to stay out of the designated bike lane. Recreational runners with their headphones who aren’t participating in the race wander onto the race course and often freeze like a dear in headlights when a pack of runners surrounds them.
I wish the NYRR would ban headphones in their races. People might bitch and moan but actually paying attention to their surrounding and chatting up their fellow runners might do them a world of good.
I have been told that many races put in their literature that headphones are not allowed, but people still wear them.
I have never raced in the US, and therefore have no experience as to how true that is. Here in Mexico most of the people who run races are very serious. It is rare to see more than just a small handful of people with headphones on.
Around here, most races ban them, few races enforce the ban, and any time that one actually tries to the bloggers get all up in arms and threaten to boycott.
I see a lot of people that wear them during races, but I can’t really sympathize since I never do it. As long as you don’t bother me with it, though, then I don’t really care. John’s story about headphones in central park falls under the “it would bother me” category.
I wrote about this topic awhile back and found that generally most age group runners around here don’t wear headphones. I wear them whenever I’m not running with someone else or running at our local state park. I’ve sen people with their headphones attached to their phone’s MP3 player.. yikes! I never used to wear them and mostly listen to podcasts, not music.
I live in an area that is generaly warm to hot, and even if it is winter I cannot stand the feel of sweaty ear plugs as i am training. Duhh..! does this mean that been I am having an efficiant training sesssion as opposed to trash Mileage.
Just thought I would throw that in 🙂
Good point; just another reason why I don’t wear headphones, I suppose.
I had no use for the iPod or any music device while training. I then rationalized using one when I found that some of the miltary running ditties I used in the Navy were available for download. I put them on my iPod and ran with them for about a month with the goal being to develop a steady, faster running cadence.
It didn’t do much good because once the earbuds came out, I slowed down. Better to just do it the hard way and listen to my breath.
hak