RnbwSktles
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2013
I don't feel a sense of pride because I'm part of an exclusive club: "the finishers". No one who congratulates me immediately whispers "well, it wasn't that great because people who didn't finish have that medal, too" as I walk away.
People wouldn't say that because most assume that if you have a medal then you finished. No one is going to say "Hey, congratulations on participating in the race. Did you finish?" They are seeing your medal and thinking "wow, that person completed X race, what an accomplishment!"
P.S. Sure enough, my wife has the exact opposite view as me. She strongly feels that the medal (and even the race shirt!) is solely for finishers.
Well it seems like your wife and I would get a long great! I feel similarly about race shirts, but not from a finisher perspective. I hate when the shirt does not necessarily reflect the event you did. I have a shirt from the NJ Marathon weekend, but I only did the 1/2. Everyone got the same shirt and it says NJ Marathon in big letters across the front, and somewhere in small print mentions the half. If I walked past you, you would think "Hey, that person ran the marathon!" Nope.
Anyone else feeling the same way can respond, but I'm curious how you view other people receiving medals as lessening your accomplishment?
Because, unlike the person above, I do feel that it should be an exclusive club, even if that club includes tens of thousands of people. As awful as this sounds, I don't think people should be rewarded for failure. Failure in this case is not crossing the finish line. It doesn't mean you're a failure as a person, or that you didn't try your hardest, it just means you didn't complete the task. If you want to reward people for their effort, where do you draw the line? Completing 75% of the race? 50%? Starting? The only reason races give DNFs a medal is because they don't want the bad press or to risk someone actually trying to sue because "they paid money for the medal." As someone else mentioned, if they weren't meant to be "finisher" medals, they would be handed out with the tshirts.