Running May be Unhealthy

I hope I don’t tick off all the runners out there!

I grew up in the 1980’s. Back in that decade running was booming. More women were running than ever before. Title IX pushed women into sports and there was the first woman’s marathon in 1984.

Grete Waltz, a Norwegian runner won the silver medal in the 1984 Olympics, finished as the first woman in the New York City Marathon nine times in the eighties and 90’s. She was the first woman to break the 2:30 marathon time.

A fitness guru named Jim Fixx wrote The Complete Book of Running in 1977 that ushered in this running revolution.

You’d think these two people were incredibly healthy. Everyone was inspired, attached their Sony Walkman’s to their waist, and headed out to run and get in shape.

The trouble was that these fitness guru’s may have not actually been that healthy. Greta Waltz passed away in 2011 from cancer. She was 57.

Jim Fixx dropped dead from a heart attack. While running. He was 52.

People could say that they were unlucky. Bad genes. Yet many people seem to overcome health conditions with better diets. Or some other lifestyle change.

Could it be just those two people who were unlucky? I googled ‘marathon deaths’ and found a Wikipedia page with a list of people who died running a marathon.

The list is long.

Yes a marathon is a grueling, long-distance race. However, the people who run marathons train hard for them. Participants don’t just suddenly decide the day before the race that they will ‘try one’.

They are usually the most dedicated runners in any population.

There are some things to be concerned about with running other than top runners dying young. When you do cardio your body releases a lot of cortisol.

Cortisol is a hormone released from the adrenal glands to help your body deal with stress.

Your body also releases cortisol when you climb out of bed in the morning, eat a meal or do any form of exercise such as resistance training.

For those other activities, the body releases only small amounts of cortisol that go away quickly. During extended cardio sessions such as running 30 minutes or more, your body releases a lot of cortisol. And it sticks around for a while.

Cortisol does some good things for your body like regulates blood sugar and suppresses inflammation. It also helps to break down your muscle and preserve body fat so you have energy in stressful times.

Over time you may be losing weight. However, the weight you’re losing very well could be muscle if you’re running to lose weight. That’s why if you compare a marathoner and sprinter the marathoner the sprinters seem to be healthier.

For elderly people who lose muscle naturally through a process called Sarcopenia, the last thing they need to do is exercise that helps the process along.

Instead we all may want to look more towards lifting weights in the gym and some form of short burst high intensity interval training (HIIT) workout. HIIT just means you do something very hard for a short period (20-30 seconds) that makes you out of breath. Like swimming, cycling, sprinting or even walking quickly if it takes your breath away.

Or what about just walking a lot? There are lots of benefits of walking without all the problems of running.