 We all love running races, right? But the question is, is it healthy? Is it healthy to go out and run a marathon, or race a marathon actually? Is it healthy to race for 24 hours, you know, these long ultra marathons? What about shorter distances like 5k, 3k, 1500 meters, the heart rate just maxing out? Is this healthy or unhealthy? Let's talk about it. So as runners, we train for a variety of reasons, and one way to sort of structure our year and sort of offer a little bit of motivation and something to work towards, we have all these different races, right? And some of us are not so ambitious, we just sort of want to participate in the race and have fun as a social event. Others yet are competing at the highest level in the world, and really, you know, these races are super-duper important to them. So there's a range there, but how healthy is it, though, to race? Because we all know that staying fit, staying active, training, running, cycling, whatever it is, physical activity is very healthy. And if you're not doing it, you'll be very unhealthy, okay? So we all need to be physically active, and running is a great way of being getting fit. But is there such a thing as too much? Well, of course, there's always such a thing as too much. But where is that limit? And specifically when it comes to intensity or over time, which then is what we're talking about when we're talking about racing, putting in everything you've got to race a specific distance as fast as you can, or as fast as humanly possible even, is that a healthy thing to do? I don't know, of course, I have to put out that disclaimer that I don't know. This is just my thoughts regarding the subject. I don't have anything like studies or anything to lean on with my reasoning, but I'm just sort of sharing my thoughts regarding the subject. And I don't have much experience either. I've only raced two half-marathons and a couple of shorter races. So I'm still learning about the topic. But my thoughts are pretty clear, regardless, based on my own experience, but mostly based on what I've read. And I've read a lot of running books and exercise physiology, literature, etc. To me, it seems generally speaking that longer distance racing is not healthy. I actually don't think it is healthy to race a marathon. It takes a lot of time to recover from it. It's generally known, generally agreed upon that if you race a marathon, and remember, racing is defined as all out for that distance. So you'll never really do that in training. If you're training for something, you might hit the right intensity for your race, but you'll do it in shorter segments. You're not going to race a marathon in order to prepare for a marathon. You save that for race day. Because when you really hit it hard on race day and give it everything you've got for the whole marathon distance, you are really draining your system to the absolute max degree. It's almost like a survival kind of thing for your body. So typically, people say recovering from a marathon takes certainly six months, possibly even as much as a year, to fully, fully recover from that effort. Of course, within a month, you'll be back to training and normally maybe even, but they're still residual fatigue. And it's also sort of generally agreed upon that you only have so many marathons in your body. So at a certain point, your performances are going to go down because you've sort of used up your marathon allowance. So that tells me that maybe it's not optimally healthy to race marathons. If you run marathons, though, at an easier intensity, that's not the same. That's great. I think that's fine. You might certainly run a marathon in training for a marathon, but you'll do it at an easy intensity. So that's something different. If you're trained for that, if you've done the training and if you fit for it, that is fine. But as a full-out race effort, I think it does take a toll on your health. But that doesn't matter if you love running like I do and like so many people do and like probably you do as well. So we sacrifice probably a little bit of health in order to race at the highest level. That's the marathon, though. If you go shorter than the marathon or longer than the marathon, strangely enough, I feel like it might be healthier. So a half marathon, for example, is fairly short in terms of time spent at the high intensity, but it's still probably not all that healthy. You're really draining your body when you're really going for that hard effort. So it's maybe in the same category more or less as a marathon, but it certainly takes half the time to recover from and it is half as damaging as the marathon. But as you go down to 10k, 5k, 3k, middle distances, like 1500 meters, I feel like that's certainly not unhealthy. It's not on health. If you're just racing 5k, even all out at the highest level, you can do that somewhat regularly. It will not drain you as much as a marathon will. There's just something about taking it all out for two to three hours. When you're out there pushing it so hard, very close to your lactate threshold, your heart working fairly close to its max, you're probably hovering around that 88% of max heart rate type of effort. That is a hard effort to sustain for so long. Whereas with a 5k, even though you're going up to your max heart rate almost, it only lasts for 15 minutes if you're really fit or even way less than that if you're like world-class. And if you're less fit and you're running a 5k in say 30 minutes, that's more like a 10k effort for a more fit person because it's really the time spent racing that's the important factor. And so that's a race that is slightly lower intensity for slightly longer. So I think you can overrace certainly at any distance, even 5k. You need to sort of take care of yourself after a race. You need to recover and you need to realize that a race is a very tough effort for your body. It's not the same as what you do in training. There's a reason why we do interval training. We run at these really hard efforts like maybe at VO2 max, max heart rate for like three, four, five minutes. Then we take a recovery period of a couple of minutes, maybe three or four minutes even. And then we hit it hard again. That's interval training. And the reason we do that is because that intensity is so tough on the body. And if you work to sustain that for like 10 minutes, every once a week, you'll just burn out. So you need to have the recovery in between for your body to be able to tolerate it. In a race though, you're throwing all that aside and you're going for the, you're trying to run as fast as you possibly can for that distance. And you're taking it all out. You're using up all your reserves and you're just going, you're putting it all out there. That's a race. Okay. So certainly to me, it doesn't seem healthy to do that too often, but we love it. And that's why we do it. Now, interestingly, if you go up to ultra marathons, I kind of look at it as almost a healthier option. And the reason for that is that if you're, if you're dealing with a really long ultra marathon and you're going to be out there for like 10 hours, 20 hours, 30 hours, even more for some people and some races, you're running at a very easy intensity actually, even at the highest level, if you're running Western States, right? 100 miler. What was it? Jim Walsley, he did like, I can't remember now, did he go sub 14 hours? Sub 15 hours, I don't know, something like that. And so that pace is a fairly manageable pace. Sure. I mean, you couldn't run as your lactate threshold for 14 hours. That's just not physiologically possible. So you're going to take the effort down and you're going to be running as something like 70, 75% of your max heart rate. Sure, you'll approach that higher, that lactate threshold sometimes, maybe, but then you'll recover from it within the race. So overall, it's almost like an ultra marathon is to some respect, in some respects, easier on the body because it's easier intensity. But then again, there's a different type of stress in an ultra marathon. And that is your structural system. You will really tax your bones and your tendons and your muscles. You'll tax your digestive system and your metabolic system. You'll tax your body a lot, okay? So an ultra marathon is certainly tough. And again, you need a lot of time to recover from an ultra marathon. But is it unhealthy to run that long? Hmm, I don't know. It's difficult for me to sort of say, maybe you have some ideas, you can put them in the comments down below if you have some thoughts regarding the subject. It's really across all the races, it depends, you know, your approach is what matters. If you approach it as a training run or as a social event or just taking it easy, just going the distance, whether that be a 5k or 100k, that's certainly manageable as long as you've done the training for it. But if you're trying to race it at your absolute max capacity, there's just something about that that you'll take it all out. And unless that's really short racing, I think it's probably unhealthy. I don't know. That's my kind of feel. I feel like it is unhealthy running marathons, running half marathons often at max out effort. It's probably not that healthy for your body. And that's unfortunate because I would love to race a lot. But I think as long as you take precautions, precautions, as long as you are careful to do the training to build up in the right way, taper, recover before the race, so you're ready on race day and your body is ready to handle the load, then you do the race and then afterwards you recover. You sleep enough, you eat enough, you rest enough and you allow your body to bounce back. As long as you do that, I think you can still get away with it being pretty healthy. And you've got to argue as well that if you didn't do any training and if you're just a sedentary person, you'll probably be worse off than an elite athlete, right? Being inactive and sedentary is very, very unhealthy for you. So at a top level, if you're running and racing a lot, you'll probably still be healthier than the average person. But you've got to take care not to overdo it. That's the key. Anyway, that's my thoughts regarding the subjects, not really that conclusive or specific in that sense, but just some thoughts. Just sharing some thoughts. And I would love to hear your thoughts as well. Thanks for watching. Subscribe and click the little bell button next to subscribe button so you get notified whenever I upload a video. Alrighty, thanks for watching. Bye.