health

Running is one of the most expensive free sports you can get involved in. Ask any runner and they’ll tell you that you need the right shoes to avoid injury, but first you need to be properly fitted at a store that analyzes your gait. Most non runners don’t even realize that the way you run requires different running shoes depending on a lot of random sounding things like “heel strike” and “pronation.”

These things sound made up, but they’re real and the wrong shoe can cause joint pain, shin splints, IT Band issues—just a whole host of pain in parts of your body that you didn’t even know existed. Proper shoes are likely the most expensive part of running, but many people get bit by the bug and start entering races which can end up being very costly to their physical health over time.

Unlike most competitive sports, people pick up running at all ages. It’s been found that most runners don’t actually peak until middle age. Elite runners peak closer to 35, but for the rest of us, there’s still plenty of time to find our stride if you’re thinking about just getting started. And it doesn't take much. A study by Harvard revealed that people running even just 50 minutes or less a week were less likely to die from cardiovascular disease or other causes compared to those that didn’t run at all. So maybe these runners are onto something.