Marathon runners bring out our competitive streak

Perhaps it was the gorilla outfits? I have never liked the London marathon and will not be turning out on Sunday to cheer 37,000 runners. It brings back memories of being corralled by my father on an overcrowded pavement and made to wave as strangers sprinted, staggered and walked past.

My antipathy is not to running. It is free and fuss-free. Once you hit your stride there is a joyous nothingness going through your head. What makes me queasy, though, are the jostling egos involved in the hijacking and rebranding of this basic human activity. It has become a form of corporate one-upmanship and another way in which work has crept into our private lives. The rise of ostentatious online fundraising alongside marathons has added a new level of potentially career-enhancing (or career-wrecking) sponsorship opportunities.

"Fit body, fit mind" is the modern corporate mantra. Everyone has a Fitbit on their wrist and the "fat cats" have been banished. A friend moaned about the running one-upmanship in her new workplace. "Everyone runs - and has perfect teeth," she said. An email from a new colleague was signed off: "Do you run, by the way?"

In fact, my friend does love running; she likes to do it alone and preferably in the dark. "Why does everyone else have to make a thing of it?" she asks. I agree. The Japanese novelist and ultra-marathon runner Haruki Murakami sums up the sentiment: his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008) reflects on focusing on internal goals rather than on competition and validation: "Whether it's good for anything or not, cool or totally uncool, in the final analysis what's most important is what you can't see but can feel in your heart."

This idea of feeling is important. But even mindfulness, once a step on a spiritual path, has been harnessed by executives keen to focus their way to success.

And then there is the competitive giving. Few will have been spared the electronic nudge from colleagues, urging us to part with cash in the name of a good cause. This year, the bar has been set high by Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, who has attracted donations towards his London marathon run from the business world's great and good that total (at time of writing) more than £63,000. In terms of generosity, Dominic Barton, McKinsey's global managing director, is leading the pack with £2,500. Ross McEwan, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland (£100), and Paul Polman, Unilever chief executive (£100), lag behind.

Many people on online giving sites are happy to make their donations public. But many of us feel a bit queasy about public displays from both runners and sponsors. William Hanson, an etiquette consultant, confirms the trend feeds into our tendency to "overshare". We can broadcast the number of steps, walked and skipped on Facebook, courtesy of Fitbit tracking. It is no different to sharing photos of adorable children and home-baked cakes on the app known to those of us with less-than-perfect lives as "Instasham".

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Mr Carney is uber-boss of Britain's financial markets. His sponsors' altruism is likely to have been shot through with pragmatism. And who can resist the boss's request?

Yet for all the careerist strategising, conscious or otherwise, that goes into decisions over how much to give to a co-worker's good cause, there may also be something far more basic playing out: do you fancy the runner - or not?

Research published last week in Current Biology analysed behaviour based on fundraising pages from the 2014 London marathon. It found male donors gave more generously when donating to an attractive female fundraiser, particularly when another male donor had given a large sum. (Women, it should be noted, did not return the favour). The researchers called this "competitive helping".

I confess to having become quite retro about sponsorship requests. Unless they are solicited by chubby-cheeked children brandishing paper forms, I am not interested. Sorry.

The writer is an FT features writer

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