Comment by jb1991
3 days ago
Ask anyone in the army how all those years of running drills have affected them as they got older. It’s not so rosy. Lots of knee problems in that group. Above average practice of running throughout life also increases likelihood of requiring pacemakers later in life.
This is a gross simplification on both accounts.
US Army veterans do have a higher rate of arthritis but their days are quite different from the "run 3-5 days a week" that most people think of when talking about recreational runners.
And the pacemaker comment stood out so I did a bit of digging and found a study [1] you might be referring to. Again, the effects were strong only in the heavy-duty-exercisers/pro/semi-pro cross-country skiier group. Additionally, this didn't offset the gains to cardiovascular or mortality risk - that group was still "healthier."
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39101218/
People in the army are also regularly carrying an extra 50 pound ruck, 25 pounds of body armor, and enough other various and sundry items to add up to about 100+ lbs of total kit. That's probably what's destroying people's knees more than the running by itself
Coupled with weeks if not more of regularly scheduled sleep deprivation so you never actually recover from any of those hard days.
It's more that the military's goal isn't to produce adults that are indefinitely healthy, but rather a robust geopolitical deterrent that only requires its employees to be physical capable for about twenty years, after which their service life is over. Running is not the issue. Even a car designed for driving can be driven irresponsibly.
I can’t be sure, but my impression is that army drills (1) push uniformly (rather than let you improve at your own pace) and (2) often involve carrying your kit, which is 20-40lbs. Neither of these is similar to the kind of running GP describes, namely unburdened, at a comfortable speed, over ~arbitrary distances.
Army personnel in general is unnaturally beefy and I'm sure these running drills often are done carrying load, no?
Humans are evolved to run, but not to have heavy frames and not carrying material for fighting wars.
I was going to say, I don't believe that sitting on a chair for 40 hours a week is great but I've also never seen so many wounded and disabled people than with people heavily into sports.
It's possible to do too much of anything.
Too much but also sometimes in a wrong way or with bad luck.
Hm, I'm skeptical. I think the data might be a little equivocal on that one.
I'm also part of the barefoot running army and tend to think that the braking forces from shoes have a role to play in knee problems (I personally stopped having them when I started running barefoot so that's where my bias comes from.)
I guess there are a lot of confounding variables in there, having taken up running a few years ago my resting heart rate is very low, and I'm far more aware of it than a non-runner. I suppose folks with a family history of heart problems may take up exercise to try and get ahead of it too.
To be fair, it was the weight not the distance that destroyed my knees and ankles. But still, I've aged a lot better than many of my friends and family who were more sedentary, so who knows.
Older soccer players, and other professional sport players have physical issues BUT they train at extremes.
Just because our ancestors did something doesn't mean it's automatically good for your health. After all, prehistoric men weren't known for their long life expectancy.
"After all, prehistoric men weren't known for their long life expectancy."
After surviving early years, people still used to get old. Infant mortality was just way higher bringing the average down. (And that those metrics often compare to poor peasants and our paleo ancestors were not peasants)
What data are you basing this on? My understanding is that historical life expectancy is only as low as it is because of the immense infant mortality rates. People who survived through childhood tended to live long.
Pretty much. Here's an in-depth look at mortality patterns in pre-modern societies: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an...
> One quirk to these model tables I want to note, because it sometimes confuses folks, is that they express ‘life expectancy’ not as a total expected age, but as average years of life expectancy from a given age, so a 25-year-old with 26.6 years of life expectancy is expecting to life to age 51, not just a year and a half.
> What we see in these models is that life expectancy (female:male) at birth is very low, 25:22.8, but after the first year rises dramatically to 34.9:34.1 (note the gender gap narrowing) and by age 5 to 40.1:39.0 (remember to add the five years they’ve already lived). So life expectancy goes up quite a lot over the first several years of life, which is not, intuitively, the pattern we expect: we normally assume the more you’ve lived, the less years you have left.
Longer than is generally thought, but not as long as we do today either.
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