[hsitz]

>> If you go back to the beginning of the discussion, the person I was replying to was citing these studies to claim that running is perfectly safe.

I'm mystified at why you'd say he was trying to "claim that running is perfectly safe" when his first sentence was, "Like all repetitive activities, runners are prone to overuse injuries and the most common is to the knee." Maybe you should go back and get a grip on precisely what point he was trying to make. It was _not_ that running is perfectly safe.

People who run are prone to overuse injuries, no doubt about it. People who are long-term runners tend to learn how to manage injuries and keep them minor. Some people never learn.

I've discussed with running friends that in a way it seems odd that medical insurance covers treatment for our running injuries, when they are injuries that are in a sense "chosen"; we could certainly have avoided them if we didn't run at all. Yet, still, a runner's visits to physical therapist, orthopedist, or sports medicine doctor are covered. The answer we come up with, and it seems correct to me, is that covering runners for their "chosen", "elective" injuries is over the long term still much cheaper than covering non-runners for the much more expensive health problems they will have over the course of their life.