Huh -- usually I come in having not liked a story and find the thread full of raves for it. In this case, it's the reverse.
Partly this may be because I started "The Prize Beyond Gold" having bounced off "Boxed In" a few minutes earlier. I'm very hit-or-miss with dystopias, and I found myself very pleased that while aspects of this setting could be read as dystopian, that's left as a background flavor, rather than being in your face. Unlike many of the listeners here, I was sympathetic to Delroy; I've never been competitive on that level in any field, but I can easily imagine that sometimes you just burn out on the entire process. And that meant I actually read Yarah's arrival as being a deliberate ploy on Michito's part: he knew his athlete had fallen into apathy, and needed to give Delroy something to care about after the race, something Delroy would want enough to truly give his best. Delroy, of course, always knew he'd have a choice of what to do after he stopped running, but at the start of the story, that was abstract, and hard to get invested in. Yarah's pitch made it clear to Delroy that setting a new record would mean not only the chance to change, but also many subsidized options for how to do so, and the prospect of that much choice was the key. (Could this have backfired on Michito? Absolutely. But it was "go for broke" time; if he didn't give Delroy a reason to care, they might fail anyway.)
As for the ending . . . I was okay with that, too. For a little while there, I was afraid we would get "The Lady or the Tiger?" on a massive scale, not even finding out whether Delroy decided to throw the race or not. But we did at least get to hear that he gave it his best. I'm okay with not getting the result, because it would have gone one of two ways: Delroy fails to set the record (aw man, downer ending), or he succeeds and then it's a letdown because a) there's no way to narrate the race that would be exciting enough (hell, even one sentence of description might take longer than the race itself!) and b) the aftermath of that is really an entire different story. So instead we got the important thing, which was Delroy lifting himself up out of apathy for one last try. Since I assumed that was Michito's goal all along, I felt satisfied.
Maybe I was wrong about Michito deliberately letting Yarah through, or about his reason for doing so. But that was the story I listened to, so to speak, and I liked it.
Oh, and for the record, I am not and never have been a runner. :-) Bad knees, worse ankles, and no cardiovascular endurance to speak of. So I didn't bond with it over the subject matter, I promise.