Marathon, Trail Running, and Beyond: The Bib Race and the Revival of Purpose

Running is no longer perceived today as a strange, harmless, even marginal thing! Nor as a passing fashion. But on the contrary as a mass practice that has settled in the daily life of an ever -increasing number of ordinary women and men, of all ages, around the world. Running has changed image, it has become for many followers the most important thing of secondary things. As a privileged and symbolic space-time of self-valuation, it promotes multiple forms of identity constructions and thus allows everyone to trace their way of existence.

[Article issu de The Conversation, écrit par Olivier Bessy, Professeur émérite, chercheur au laboratoire TREE-UMR-CNRS 6031, Université de Pau et des pays de l’Adour (UPPA)]

Simple maintenance jogging in training sessions, or even through participation in ordinary neighborhood races, playful (obstacle races, etc.) or solidarity (Odysséa …), or even a half-marathon, a marathon, a 100 km, not to mention trails and ultra-trails, running is reconfigured in multiple versions and hybridizations that allow followers to withdraw symbolic profits from existential matters.

Tension on inscriptions: the madness of the bib!

In this context, a new phenomenon has attracted attention for some time, because it takes an unequaled proportion so far. Never so many runners have sought to get a bib. The meters panic, the registration times are shrinking, the places are becoming more and more expensive.

The year 2025 promises to be that of all records. Never of an organizer memory, such a craze to obtain a bib, opening right to participate in a race, has been observed. If, yesterday, the best known events already knew long waiting lists, the phenomenon today concerns almost all of the races. The tension on the inscriptions has expanded and amplified.

An evolution of the consumption modes of runners

We are witnessing today, within the huge pool of ordinary runners, with a contagious desire to hang a bib. Of the 15 million riders estimated in France, there are five million in this case, that is a third of runners, which represents a considerable figure ever reached so far. Even if the race supply developed in parallel with the increase in demand (8,500 races organized in 2024 in France, more than half of which are trails, or 4,500), the ever -increasing proportion of runners wishing to acquire a bib causes a generalized bottleneck.

In addition, we can highlight two phenomena that help to amplify the problem. The first refers to the growing number of races carried out by the same person during a year and the second is observed in the gradual decrease in the time put by a jogger to register for a race. But then how to explain this behavior change of many runners who, yesterday, did not dream of taking a bib and who today pass the course?

Convening sociology to understand this frenzy

This frenzy of demand to participate in different types of organized races can only be understood by convening the sociology of leisure which provides relevant light on the consumption methods of our contemporaries, in consistency with the hypermodernity that governs us today. This societal model is based on unlimited performance on the intensification of its mode of existence and the spectacle of oneself.

So many values ​​that irrigate the behaviors of individuals today and generate new relationships with self, others and the environment that find in organized races, a particularly significant field of expression in organized races.

A new relationship to oneself

By participating in an event, whatever it is, the runner seeks to intensify his life by living an original experience and seeking performance.

It is part of “the appearance of the intense subject which is symptomatic of the desire for a found power and the affirmation of a presence in the world, supposed to escape the count. It results in a quest for intensification and spur of life ”, as Tristan Garcia writes.

The more extreme the test (marathon, 100 km, ultra-trail) and requires a significant commitment of the person in the preparation as in the realization, the more it allows the runner to challenge himself, to live a moment of exceptional intensity and to value themselves at the height of the achievement. This logic is even more present in the emblematic events which are now akin to real myths. Participate and finish the Paris marathon, the diagonal of the madmen or the ultra-trail of Mont-Blanc (UTMB) allows the runners concerned to withdraw even more important symbolic profits.

In addition, running in an organized event, offers everyone an unrivaled scene in terms of visibility of their very relative performance and therefore a privileged space-time of spectacle. Each runner becomes a hero even by participating in a Sunday or neighborhood race. It is all the more true that the event is theatrical on the entire route and, in particular, at the start and on arrival, but also strongly publicized by registering in the local and national landscape.

A new relationship with others

Even if they are individual tests, you never run alone, we don't run against it, we run with it. New sociability with variable geometry is established. Participating in a race is also similar to an enchanted parenthesis where everyone plays their own score while sharing it with others.

There is, first of all, this solemn communion and emotionally intense at the start, made of accomplice looks, applause and reciprocal admirations. Everyone reads respect to be there in the other's gaze and to be part of an elite, but also the anxiety of the challenge to be achieved. This anxiety is put in spectacle during the most famous events, with speakers, music, Bengal lights, shot and the crowd.

And then the magic continues during the race where interactions with other runners, but also with volunteers and spectators are multiple and variable depending on the atmospheres specific to each event. Without forgetting the arrival which always constitutes a deliverance, but also a personal outcome hailed by the whole present community. To finish a race, a fortiori a marathon or an ultra-trail, makes it possible to go from anonymous to hero and participates in the production of a collective identity of recognition insofar as the finisher has the feeling of being valued by others, at the height of the feat it has just accomplished.

Finally, these races are an opportunity to make narrative about your participation and its exploits on social networks. The latter play a very important role in the construction of imaginations.

A new relationship to the environment

Participate in an organized race, whatever it is, also modifies the relationship to the environment of each participant who goes from an environment chosen, not marked and uncompromising specific to his training places, in an imposed, marked and domesticated environment. This increasingly frequent transfer is part of our paradoxical time when giving meaning to its existence also materializes by investing an organization.

Getting into such an ordeal can be assimilated to a form of voluntary servitude where we decide on the yoke that we impose because it is a provider of immeasurable symbolic profits for the best, but also for all those who finish.

Far from the assignments inflexible to uniform behaviors

Are all these runners who are jostling at the gate of races organized to obtain a bib, are they only animated by a double concern to perform and appear? Because having to constantly make proof of its own existence is both the engine and the fragility of the hypermodern individual, fascinated by belief in infinite progress and in the modern version of the myth of Sisyphus, which embodies the permanent injunction to surpassing oneself.

“While modern man was a principle, the hypermodern man would be a fiction imposed on individuals by dint of slogans and images,” said Nicole Auber.

Faced with this hypermodern fiction, can we consider that these modes of engagement and supervision increasingly sought after by the runners also obey in search of a new meaning irrigated by the emergence transmodernity. To avoid schematic interpretations means considering that runners are not all driven only by disembodied performance and unlimited self-performance, subject to a permanent logic of acceleration, but that they are also attracted by an interior quest for strong intimate, social and environmental resonance, in a deceleration space.

In other words, taking a bib, a fortiori in the context of festive races, in solidarity and with great environmental vigilance, can be considered differently, by favoring a more reflexive commitment, a more committed sociability and a more protective relationship to the environment. The lived experience also contributes to a form of re -entertainment of its existence.

And if, in any case, these runners in search of bibs were playing nothing less than their survival, in a society imbued with paradoxes and in the grip of gloom?