Fewer people should run marathons

Today's the New York City Marathon: congratulations to everyone who runs it! The occasion reminded me of one of my strongly-held beliefs: fewer people should run marathons.

Before you get out the pitchforks, let me say that I'm a lifelong runner. I switched from soccer to track in middle school, ran cross-country, have run at least a few hundred miles every single year since then. I've run lots and lots of races. Running is good. Racing is great.

The thing is, the marathon, an arbitrary distance at the very top end of what even serious runners train for, has become the benchmark for runners. People are puzzled when they learn that I've been running for decades and have no plans to run a marathon.

People should run, and if they want to they should race, but I think that most people should aim for medium distances like the 5k or half marathon.

When most people talk about running a marathon they're mostly concerned with finishing the marathon, not hitting a particular time. The aim of just finishing a marathon puts the goal of speed in the background, which is bad in two ways.

1. First, training for pure endurance is incomplete. Running is a more complete and enjoyable activity if you occasionally train for both distance and speed. Anaerobic performance is cool! Just putting in mile after mile at slow paces is valid and useful exercise and will build your base, but it can get boring fast.
2. Second, if you don't train at speed and you end up training for a marathon at a much slower pace, the wear on your body is more. It's a high-impact activity, and literally just the longer you spend doing it, the more your joints are going to get pounded. Which is why slower runners are cautioned to limit the length of their longest runs. Running is good for your joints, but getting injured is bad for your everything. Overtraining is more likely and more dangerous than people expect.

Running's fixation on marathons is like the obsession with climbing Mount Everest: it's the most recognized accomplishment in the sport, and so everyone wants to do it. Everyone assumes that they should do it if they're serious. So it becomes more of a show, more expensive, a legible talking point at the water cooler. People are better off hiking their local mountains every couple months than flying to the Himalayas to check the box.

Of course, I think running is amazing and more people should do it. 5ks are so accessible: parkrun is a free series that exists in lots of cities. Here in Brooklyn we have the ultra-affordable, friendly, and easy Al Goldstein series in Prospect Park.

Training for a fast 5k instead of training to just finish a marathon seems like a straightforwardly good trade to me: the weekly mileage required is reasonable, and because shorter races are less brutal on your body, you can run a race every two weeks instead of once a year.

And at a shorter distance, you can worry less about whether you'll finish the race and start treating the race as a race: can you run it faster each time? Can you get to a higher ranking in your age group?

Now: some people are built to run marathons. Some people love it. If you're already locked in, don't let me dissuade you. When push comes to shove, you've got to do what you love, even if it's a bad idea. But if you're getting into running and you feel like you need a milestone goal, consider a fast 5k or half-marathon time before defaulting to the big name-brand distance.

Addendum: my suggestion that training for a marathon at a slow pace can put a lot of stress on the body was based on advice and what I'd heard, but now that I'm reading more about training plans I can back it up with a quote from the highly-regarded Daniel's Running Formula:

For someone who is going to spend 6 or 7 hours completing a marathon, this means a training run that lasts about 5 hours, and that sure seems like a little too much stress for a beginner. I doubt many elite marathon runners go for 40- or 50-mile training runs, which would take them about 5 hours, so it doesn’t make sense for not-so-accomplished runners to spend more time training than do the best.

When you consider that the top runners do go for 20-mile runs and longer, you must realize that they accomplish these runs in about 2 to 2.5 hours, and that is the main reason I think 2.5 hours is long enough, even if it gets a runner a total of only 15 miles (24 km). Get in the habit of using time rather than distance as the factor limiting types of training.