[tassl]

I guess this is going to be controversial, but shoes are not preventing running injuries because most people ran farther and with worst technique than they should.

Farther because running injuries increase with the distance run, specially when distance is added too fast [1]. This is important, because there are mostly 2 main factors that most people change when running: distance and pace. Pace is more difficult to change so people tend to increase distance, which increases injuries, specially stress-related injuries [2].

And worst technique because people rarely train technique: people go out and run, stepping multiple times in that wrong position that might not hurt immediately but will cause some compensation issues later on. Or the knee to hurt because of overuse [2].

The question that I would ask to people, because I don't fully understand it, is: why is the tendency to increase the distance? Why people have as a goal running a marathon, for example?

In my view, running faster makes sense from the health perspective. Running more distance doesn't. Running intervals makes way more sense that running continuously for X hours. Here I am not trying to be empathetic, but I believe that people should be told that, in some cases, they should not run X distance, that it is bad for them and that running X is not something to be praised or proud. I didn't said it (strongly) in cases where,I should have; too late now after a couple of hip and knee surgeries.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25155475 [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3497945/

[larve]

I like to run long distances because I love being in nature, using my body, listening to books or just enjoying the sights. Running is more fulfilling than hiking for some reason to me.

[notacoward]

> why is the tendency to increase the distance

Up to a point, because most of the sought-after benefits do scale with duration (for which distance is a proxy). But that point is pretty quickly reached. A few 5km runs a week at moderate pace is plenty. I run a bit more than that, and I do notice a difference, but I'm well aware that the returns are diminishing. Beyond that, I think it's largely about pride of accomplishment, or about ego, or maybe those are just two sides of the same coin.

Either way, it's important that motivation matters. To many people it matters far more than improving performance. Increasing pace by even a few percent is really hard. Running 10% further is pretty straightforward, as is training for something even longer. Those are easy goals to set an measure against. If that keeps people going then it's a good thing, even if it's also true that they should try to minimize the negative impacts (heh).