Inflation Crisis

Short get off my lawn post. My wife bought a display rack to hang all our old race finisher medals.  My task was to mount it near the laundry room.  For a few years we tried turning old race medals into Christmas ornaments, but each season the branches drooped more and more.  Today we had all our medals laid out on the table.  A cursory inspection of a decade of finisher medals shows an unsustainable trend of medal inflation.

Here is a photo of the 2020 Austin 3M Half Marathon medal compared to the medal for the same race in 2009.  In a decade this medal went from a tastefully modest accoutrement to something that looks like Flava Flav’s clock.

Half-Marathon medals from the current era dwarf marathon medals from a few years ago.  On the right is the 2009 Austin Marathon finisher medal.  On the left is the 2019 medal from the Decker Half Marathon in Austin.      

Its not just Half Marathons.  Here is a comparison of the rapid inflation of the Houston Marathon medal between 2011 and 2018.

Even obscure races are not immune.  Here are two of my wife’s medals from two small Texas marathons, the 2013 Marathon 2 Marathon and the 2017 South Padre Marathon.

What has been driving this trend?  Do runners demand gigantic finisher medals?  By giving out metal dinner plates is the race …. compensating for something?

I think this is an opportunity for the best races to separate themselves by returning to normal size medals.   If you have the real goods, you don’t need to brag.  But I suspect that the trend of ever-increasing size for race medals will track the ever-increasing size of everything else in American life.  That will leave us with a bunch of medals that are too big to do anything with, other than hang on a rack by the laundry room.