[ak217]

What's your weekly mileage? Are you doing something extreme to your shoes? Most runners don't spend, nor could they afford to spend $250 per pair of shoes that wear out in 6 weeks. Try $100 every 6 months instead. Events do add up but for most runners it comes out to roughly the same as the shoes or less. Running is popular because it's affordable. You might be projecting your rarefied well funded lifestyle onto the rest of the market

[AmericanChopper]

About 60 miles (and I weigh about 180lb). I probably do 4 or 5 marathons a year, and a couple of ultras. My mileage isn’t excessive for people who complete marathons around the same pace as I do, or better (of which there are many, many people), and every time I look around the field at an event, it’s full of $200-$300 energy return running shoes.

Perhaps most of them don’t train in their race shoes, but that’s honestly a bad practice.

Endurance sports is a pretty boujee hobby. Running is the cheapest one, but it’s not that cheap if you really get into it.

[nindalf]

If you had to guess, what percentile of the general population are you in when it comes to fitness?

[AmericanChopper]

I’d probably rank quite well amongst the general population. But I’m talking about fitness enthusiasts here, specifically the subgroup of long distance runners. Within that group I’d probably be “not bad”…

[ohgodplsno]

You run 4-5 marathons a year. That is more than many professional runners, who usually limit themselves to 4 a year max, because of the sheer amount of stress a marathon puts your body through. Add in the ultras, and you are running more than pretty much anyone being paid to do so.

You do not rank "quite well". You rank in the 0.1%, and even amongst fitness enthusiasts, you also rank easily amongst the top 10%. Not necessarily in terms of speed, but in raw distance done.

[AmericanChopper]

That’s not a very good way of looking at things. Professional marathon runners have a completely different set of priorities to me, and perform at a massively different level. Eliud Kipchoge has only run 2 marathons so far this year, I have run 3. That doesn’t make me 1.5x fitter than Kipchoge, or say anything at all really about the relative level of fitness between him and I.

I run a lot because I love to run. But I don’t set a competitive pace in any of the events I attend. I would claim to have rather strong knees, but that doesn’t translate into pace or fitness, just into mileage and a certain level of resistance to knee injuries.