Blatant Discrimination, North Carolina USA

eNow I'm not one to really complain about things, or to blather on about my accomplishments, but something really irked me this weekend and I've already complained about it to everyone I know, so why not share it with the whole world now?

I ran a 10k on Saturday. It was only my second 10k ever and my first race in a long time so I was a little nervous for it. The race was down in Raleigh on the NC State University campus put on by the ROTC, so everything seemed pretty kosher. When I registered online it said the winner of the 10k would get $300. Now, not a lot of 10ks have cash prizes. Most of them are trying to raise money themselves so they don't give out any cash. So when a race has a cash prize it's kind of a big deal. I noticed the website did not say that the winner of the men and women would each receive money though so I pointed it out to Ben and he optimistically said, "Of course they'll each get the money. It wouldn't be fair if they didn't." I had my doubts, but I went along with it.

Along comes race day. I'm nervous but I run a decent race (43:05) and I know I cross the finish line as the first woman, though there were a few guys in front of me. Ben gets all excited and thinks I've just won us $300, I'm still not so sure, so he goes up and asks the race director if the women's winner gets $300 too and he tells Ben that the prize money is just for the "overall" winner, in other words, just the men. Disappointing and unfair, but not wholly unexpected. Ben does insist on us staying around for the awards ceremony since he wants to see me get at least something for winning. This means us waiting around for an extra hour waiting for everyone else to finish while our 2 girls start melting down as we gradually run out of snacks and drinks in the heat. Not our finest hour. And then, in the awards ceremony they break the prizes into age groups but again it's just overall age group winners, which is of course all guys again!

I don't want to go all Title IX* on everybody, but it doesn't seem quite fair to me that I didn't get a single thing for winning. Now, I don't run because I expect medals and prizes to be showered on me whenever I race. I run because I like it and I like to see myself improve from all my hard work. But if a guy is going to get $300 for winning a race and I'm not going to get a single thing for winning the same race, I think something's wrong with that. The best thing for them to do is at least split the money in half, or if they still want to be sexist about it, I'd even take a 60-40 split. I'm not greedy, I just want to be treated fairly here. Every single race I have been to always splits up the men and women and awards each accordingly. And last time I checked, the Olympics gave out gold medals to BOTH men and women (though they didn't even make the women's marathon an Olympic sport until 1984).

So, that's it. I'm still somewhat bitter a few days later but I'll get over it. There are more races to run and more important things to expend my energy on. Like my giant pile of laundry.

*A special thanks to my brother Josh for showing me it's ok to use nouns as verbs and that footnotes in blog entries can be cool.