Endurance running can be bad for you—not just for your physical health, but also for your mental health. Training for extreme events like a 26.2-mile marathon is inherently unhealthy on many levels—marathons are pretty much torture to your body, and your mind, and the training can often become overly stressful. Furthermore, the cardiovascular benefits you obtain from devoted endurance training can be maximized in a fraction of the time, without all the sacrifice, suffering and risk of burnout and injury. The extreme endurance exercise hypothesis contends that you can get full benefits for disease prevention and general health with a couple-few hours per week of comfortably paced cardio (Check Dr. James O’Keefe TED talk for more details.) Going beyond that sensible level of cardio is mostly for performance goals, and if the intensity is slightly to significantly too stressful, you can actually accelerate aging and increase disease risk.
Yes, there is some potential for great personal satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment and self-worth for completing a daunting challenge like a marathon, but if this is so…maybe we should ask why? Earning a finisher medal is surely better on many levels than earning a couch potato award, but the extreme goals that we worship today in the endurance scene might be considered distorted or even perverse. You don’t have to complete a 26-mile event in 4:48, or 3:47 to feel good about yourself. You can complete a 10k (6.2 mi, less than a quarter of the marathon distance), not feel physically destroyed and mentally drained at the finish line, and have these athletic pursuits support general health and longevity rather than compromise them.
After all, who are we modeling when we pursue such goals? Pheidippides? He was the legendary Greek hemerodromus (foot messenger) who, legend has it, ran 26 miles from the city of Marathon to Athens, reported the news to assembled leaders of victory in battle (“Nike! Nike! Nenekiam!”, aka “rejoice, we conquer”) then dropped dead from the effort. It was this legend that inspired the modern-day marathon distance. The problem is, it never happened; the story was fabricated in an 1879 poem by Robert Browning. Pheidippides actually ran 153 miles in 36 hours to request the Spartans help in battle, then ran back to Athens to tell the military to wait for the vacationing Spartans. If we want to honor Pheidippides, the modern day marathon should be 153 miles, or perhaps 306 miles. If tomorrow the running community agreed to call 13.1 miles a “marathon,” we would all be better off.
Sure, elite racers can train for and compete at marathon distance much faster and with less destruction than the average enthusiasts, but why are we toeing the same starting line as superhuman athletes like Sifan Hassan or Eliud Kipchoge? We don’t get in the ring with yokozunas (top ranked sumo wrestlers) for hobby, nor don helmets and pads for recreational weekend football games. My new book with Mark Sisson, Born to Walk, provides a detailed account about how endurance running is too stressful and injurious for most people, and how walking extensively every day is a central element of human health.
Take it from me as a lifelong endurance athlete: Once I escaped from the “matrix” of the endurance scene, where my extreme general competitive intensity was directed at pushing my body to go hard and go long, an awakening occurred on many levels. First, straight ahead endurance running is not that much fun in comparison to virtually any other sport requiring more disparate, complex and interesting skills. I am happy to do an endurance run while playing Speedgolf, but running from point A to point B (or completing a loop) is not inherently interesting, nor challenging to the brain. Mark Sisson describes his entire career as an elite endurance athlete (2:18 marathon, 5th in USA nationals, and 4th at Hawaii Ironman world championship) as an “exercise in pain management.” That’s all it really is. It’s not staying focused in the 4th quarter for a come from behind victory, being aggressive on the 18th hole to stick it close to the pin, nor appreciating nature and challenging your body appropriately by hiking to the tallest peak in your area.
Second, the endurance training template of repeatedly pushing oneself to exhaustion, staying “hard”, preserving through chronic and sustained discomfort switches from super cool and badass to perverse, self-destructive, and perhaps even self-loathing and avoidant of real life issues you are reluctant to face. Yes, modern life for most of us is convenient, comfortable, predictable, safe, and mundane in many ways, and extreme endurance training offers a counterbalance to that. But only to a point. What if you did a challenging long-distance run at an ambitious pace once or twice a month, instead of as a routine component of your daily life? Would your race performance suffer? Maybe, but I’d bet not in most cases. This is especially true for triathletes who habitually overtrain and live overly stressful lives.
Born to Walk is not about putting a damper on your athletic passions and ambitious pursuit of peak performance limits—it’s about slowing down to reflect on the big picture, approaching daunting endurance goals in a sensible manner, and remembering that walking is the quintessential human form of locomotion and the foundation of a healthful, active lifestyle. Quoting the book, “Walking helps boost digestion and the assimilation of nutrients; it is directly associated with improved sleep quality; it helps trigger parasympathetic nervous system activity and thus improves stress management; it improves glucose regulation; it helps boost the production of anabolic hormones such as testosterone, human growth hormone, sex hormone–binding globulin, insulin-like growth factor 1, and DHEA; and it generally promotes homeostasis. Walking makes you feel alert and energized instead of fatigued, hungry, and depleted. It helps regulate mood, appetite, and alertness all day long—no crash-and-burn effects, as there are in the hours after strenuous workouts. Walking hones metabolic flexibility, so you can lose excess body fat the right way and keep it off forever.”
Speaking of walking, did you know about the connection between foot health and lifespan? Researchers in Japan have discovered that it is possible to accurately predict how well people have looked after themselves merely by examining their feet—specifically, their toe flexor strength. The data they gathered from the study allowed them to accurately predict not just the participants of the study’s ages, but their exercise, drinking and sleeping habits as well.
Foot health can be a pretty neglected area of wellness, especially when you consider the fact that most people have lived their lives in conventional, supportive shoes, since people only started to become aware of the benefits of wearing minimalist footwear little more than a decade ago. This doesn’t mean never wearing any other kind of shoe again, though. Specialized footwear will always be a part of my life—especially when it comes to designated activities I enjoy doing, I love to wear a pair of shoes equipped with high jump spikes or track spikes. But, I also love slipping into my Peluvas for the rest of the day – particularly after high intensity sessions, I think it’s good to make an effort to be more active (instead of less) for the rest of the day.
Because our feet provide the foundation for everything that we do, having strong feet is essential for overall wellness and healthy aging. This is especially true as we get older, since nothing is as important for longevity as preserving functional muscle strength throughout life. But if you don’t have a strong foundation, how can you tackle this ultra important objective? Interestingly, research about the effects of wearing minimalist shoes shows that they are just as effective at increasing foot muscle size and strength as performing foot strengthening exercises. If you haven’t tried wearing minimalist shoes yet, I urge you to try some right away. If you’re someone who has tried barefoot shoes before but experienced discomfort, or if you want to take your foot strength to the next level, or if you’re currently wearing shoes with a narrow toe box, try a pair of Peluvas—they are the most comfortable minimalist shoes ever made.
Conclusion
Walking is the quintessential human form of locomotion and the foundation of a healthful, active lifestyle, delivering comprehensive health and longevity benefits without the risks of injury and burnout that come with running. Running and (even slow-paced jogging) is too physically, metabolically, and hormonally stressful for most people to confer true health benefits. Foot health and strength are an important part of wellness and have been linked to one’s lifespan, and research on the effects of wearing minimalist shoes shows that they are just as effective at increasing foot muscle size and strength as performing foot strengthening exercises.