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Comment by macco | Hacker News Reader

I would propose a different hypothesis: Rich people love endurance sports because it is easy to get better at them.

Let me explain: If I am 30 made a big exit and now need a new hobby it is pretty easy to make steady progress in marathon running. I will probably not become a world-class marathon runner, but top 100 of a big event is in my reach. Still hard but possible.

If start with basketball, soccer or track and field I will probably not be competitive on a local level. Every sport with difficult techniques will be very much harder to learn.

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endurance is also more trainable than short term power. So one will get more from being persistent for years at marathon running than they would at the 100 yard dash.

Also, you lose endurance ability slower as you age than short term power. So you can still be pretty good at marathon in your 50s, while you would be useless at the 100 yard dash or hitting home runs.

> endurance is also more trainable than short term power

Is that not something that varies per person? I've always been terrible at endurance but decent at short term power, and now that I'm training a bit, it seems I'm mostly getting more power, but not really more endurance. Not for horrible things like running, at least.

How are you training? many weight training exercises (especially low rep high weight) and short cardio exercises won't give you better endurance, they'll get you faster and stronger.

I started crossfit a couple of months ago. It's a wide variety of weight, cardio and other exercises. One time the warming up started with a 3 km run, and that's just pointless to even try for me. I'm better with the exercise bikes, but anything that involves running or jumping will wreck me before I get anywhere.

I've been bad with endurance my whole life until I did the Couch-to-5k training program. Doing a 1-mile run in school was always a nightmare for me. It's a fantastic 8 week training program that alternates between run days and rest days. It starts off with run 1min, walk 2min, run 1min, walk 2min until 30min. Then it progressively gets to longer running components. I was blown away by the human body's ability adapt to stresses of running. The first week I was dying just from running 1min, walk 2min. Then mid way through, running 10min, walking 1min became a piece of cake. I heartily recommend it if you're trying to get into cardio.

Sounds good. I think my wife may have done something like that a couple of years ago. Sadly, she quit. But before she quit, she definitely noticed significant progress.

I have been running for a long time, but it had always about 3 mile lengths, and never super long distances until 2 years ago. >6 miles was almost impossible. the key for me to run longer was to run my limit, hit the wall and keep going, and after a run a week for months, then I'm doing 8 mile runs, 10 mile runs, 20 mile runs. eventually, I hit a second wall: boredom. I don't think that super high endurance is very rewarding, at least not for me, and to get better at it requires a lot of pain, and even potential for injury (and then you can't train and you go back a few months). I also think the health rewards of runs reach an inflection point around 5km, especially after factoring risk of injury. if you can't do a 3km run, run 1, or 2. then wait ~48-72 hours, and run 2 again. eventually, you'll be able to run 3, I guarantee it. but what is a lot less certain is whether you'll enjoy it and feel rewarded. I've found the more endurance based an activity, the more mental it becomes, just as original comment was getting at. for some people, thats good because its the only way they can be competitive. for others who have more athletic talent, it may be frustrating because it takes more effort than most other exercise.

> eventually, I hit a second wall: boredom

I hit that wall right away. There are few exercises I find more boring than running. I did run with a couple of friends for a short period, because I felt I didn't see them nearly enough, and this was a nice way to see them more often and get some exercise at the same time. I hope that meeting my friends would make me more motivated. We still couldn't keep it up.

The only time when I can really run is when I think an emergency might be threatening my youngest kid. I think I could beat Usain Bolt in that situation. It's definitely mental.

On the topic of physiological differences between endurance and power sports, I hear endurance activities give you a natural dose of feel-good hormones. Does anyone have any comments on that?

Yes, there is definitely a runner's high from endorphin release, and the whole process is somewhat meditative in its physicality.

> So one will get more from being persistent for years at marathon running than they would at the 100 yard dash

Need a source on this.

> So you can still be pretty good at marathon in your 50s, while you would be useless at the 100 yard dash or hitting home runs.

But not relative to your peers, which is what everyone compares to unless you're top 3 overall in any given race.

I have a gut feeling, the next fitness trend will be running faster vs running farther.

Peak sprint performance is in one's twenties, peak marathon performance is on one's thirties. Source: Usain Bolt and Elioud Kipchoge. You can find tons of finish times with age for running events online to show how the degradation in performance falls slowly with age for marathon times. It's actually hard to find information on sprint times for older competitors because the participation rate is much lower. There is a significant body of research that indicates humans have significant advantages for endurance performance versus other mammals. Born to Run is the classic popular book about the subject and has references to the primary sources.

Off the top of my head from exercise and physiology 101 - everyone without a mitochondria disorder and other disabilities simply gets better at endurance sports to the limit of their ability, resistance to injury at the particular sport and time invested - which can take years. The limit on ability for short term power to weight (sprinting) is much easier to reach because most people do not have that much sprint ability, there's a component that can be attributed to genetics for any ability but the human body is generally made for endurance sports and getting better at it (the adaptations such as increased blood plasma, better ability to utilize O2, increased mitochondrial density, increased capillary density, heart stroke volume, etc) and only some of us are cut out to really excel for sprinting events (there are some adaptations for sprint that work against endurance and vice versa ala muscle adaptation, also the main energy pathway for sprinting is anaerobic which can be trained but it's much quicker to find your personal limits at a particular sport ).

I started table tennis at 32. I get whooped by 10 year olds regularly.

In running you compete against the yesterday's version of yourself and if you finish even 10 seconds faster you win. Feels good. In basketball you compete against players that are probably much better than you and you will rarely sniff a victory. Feels bad.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns6YSvCsVJM

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