Marathon runners have heart damage and we should all exercise less..

Anyone with facial hair like that (and a ponytail) has poor judgment at best.

I'll take my chances. Go to the grocery store or any public event and witness the amount of obese people in attendance. It's staggering, talk about bad for your heart. Ever see an old obese person? Me neither.

The article does a decent job at points directing to glaring holes in his logic (alcohol might lower your blood glucose levels in moderation, but cancer is bad mkay and he just ignores those findings…). Other things, like saying exercise isn’t the best way to lose weight (it isn’t!), or that people shouldn’t make themselves miserable by being constantly hungry, actually seemed to be backed up by data whilst simultaneously being valuably controversial positions that help change people’s frozen thinking on these matters.

I also don’t really disagree with the suggestion that fewer people should be doing marathons — if you’re going from a sedentary lifestyle to a potentially 4, 5 or 6 hour marathon within a year, there is no way your body can deal with that stress the way someone who has been running fit most of their life and completes the race in 3 hours can. The idea that people are constantly dying in big marathons is ridiculous though — I doubt the number of heart attacks during a marathon is statistically significant.

If people don’t actually enjoy running, they shouldn’t force themselves to do it. People should prioritise their well-being by finding sports that they truly enjoy and pursuing them to their hearts’ content. A lot of the data he references doesn’t address how healthy people are that 1. don’t diet but are a healthy weight 2. don’t force themselves to exercise but do so regularly because they like to. My guess is that that is usually the healthiest group.

Bro I ain't out here tryin to live til I'm 90. Sheesh.

100% Can't be trusted c

Not this garbage again. The people who put out the "running is bad for you" claims are morons and the research they cite is crap. "25-year-olds running 5Ks is bad" is setting new records in dumb ideas.

It might not be the best, but a lot of exercise is a good way to lose weight. I’m up to 45-50mpw, historically I’ve been a 30-35MPW guy. I lost weight with that bump without changing my diet.

That said, the lowest I’ve ever weighed was when I was injured and ate really clean for a month. It’s hard to sustain. I’d rather run/jog an hour per day.

I don’t know enough, but I’d like to see a more in-depth explanation of the “minor heart damage” point. Is it along the lines of damage with training that is routinely associated with supercompensation (even though the damage wouldn’t be exactly the same sort commonly associated with resistance training for muscle hypertrophy)?

Various factors will stress and potentially damage a muscle, organ, etc. it seems to me that the crux is: what occurs afterward as a result of that? Are there associated benefits? Or at the very least, does the cause of stress not overtake the body’s ability to recover/heal?

I don't know. When I stopped running competitively after college I still continued to exercise everyday. During that time, my vitals were all in the "healthy range" as measured at my annual physicals. However, when I started marathon training, my vitals significantly improved as described by my doctor. I'll take, and I'll keep running until my body/vitals suggest otherwise.

This is a valid point. I think there’s something about particularly active people that is self-selecting. Not everyone will respond the same to exercise stimulus. My mental and physical health takes a nosedive if I’m not training 5+ hours a week — I feel particularly good if it’s 8+. But I grew up running a lot and I suspect my body now demands that stimulus to run optimally! When they take random 25 year olds and have them run 5km hard, is that actually applicable to lifelong runners?

This is the same as lifting weights does muscle damage. That is why you get stronger. It is really only a problem if you don’t allow your body to recover and super compensate. The heart is a muscle.

But I am. Sheesh.

Isn't this just "one of those things," where we're all mortal and we're all going to die, so might as well do what makes us happy? I'm about to head to the funeral of a family member who took no care of himself whatsoever, ate and drank and smoked all he pleased, and died aged 57, weighing 350 pounds. He seemed like a happy guy until about two years ago, when his health crashed hard and he had a very difficult ending to his life. I am happy as a runner notwithstanding my minor heart damage. To each their own.

“Obesity expert”?

Whatever the message is (didn’t read the article), it seems to be in conflict with what this guy is saying, no?

Moderation in all things seems to work. Pushing anything to extremes has unhealthy consequences. People have known this for millennia. BTW, regardless of how well you live, your DNA already has your cause of natural death pre-programmed.

Remember that Ed Whitlock was still destroying age group world records right up until a few months before prostate cancer killed him quickly. Life offers no guarantees and death does not give a damn about how fit you are.

I read the article and then asked ChatGPT to provide an expanded outline of his book. Condensing his book down to one sentence, its message would be "All things in moderation." However, just restating Aristotle's famous quote wouldn't sell many books, so his marketing approach is...

1. Make a bunch of controversial statements.

2. Pick an outlier to defend your controversial point, ie, marathoning is bad for your health.

3. Ignore the fact that less than 1 in 270 adults ran a marathon last year. Ignore that even fewer of these marathoners train "hard." Ignore proven quality of life issues. Cherry pick data to support your controversial statement.

4. Make the marketing approach of your book appeal to your target market, ie, fat, non-exercisers.

5. In the book itself, cushion all your controversial points with the book's main premise... all things in moderation.

Sure, his marketing upsets us, be we aren't his target market.

Luckily I’m vaccinated so contracting viruses doesn’t damage my heart as much.

This is silly. Of course there's a space between morbid obesity of overexercising. It's not that binary. What I'm doing right now, running 100+mpw for several months preparing for a marathon is not in any way required for my overall health and wellness. Is it actually detrimental to my health and longevity? That's a complicated question and answer. But why is that type of training not sustainable after several years without health consequences for most people? Because the body has never evolved to handle that stress long-term as a general population.

So while I enjoy that volume and intensity of training now, it won't last forever. Nor should it. But for me to say "well, look at all these morbidly obese people so therefor my training is justified" is preposterous. There's tradeoffs to everything. Using other peoples bad choices to justify your actually makes you just as illogical and misguided as them.

This ☝️. Minong gets it…