You can have serious acute injuries from running via physical accidents or mismanagement of hydration. You can also die driving to the market to buy toilet paper, but the risks in both cases are extremely manageable.
Life threatening or debilitating chronic health problems from running high volume are rare, and far outweighed by the overall health benefits of regular exercise. Most of the ideas that persist out there, like running being bad for your joints, are complete myths. https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/will-continuing-to...
The only thing to get screened for if you want to run marathons or more is a family history of heart defects, to avoid the very small possibility of sudden cardiac death, which is a risk with basically all intense exercise, including things like shoveling snow or other manual labor. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6070620/
You could at least make a good faith attempt and meet people at least halfway though, right?
FWIW I've read studies saying the same thing- my critique is just with your approach here. You wouldn't believe someone who just waltzed in with a statement and refused to post any references, would you?
This is, in fact, exactly how you convince people.
So will 20 lbs of lower muscle mass which I can gain through...you guessed it, running.
At what point did running really far become the thing to aspire too when getting fit?
What about strength? Speed? Flexibility? Agility? Regardless of the evidence, most people are better served doing a good mix of activities and being generalists.
The only reason to run more than 10km is if you like running. Otherwise 5-10km at a decent pace is just a good cheap way to get effective cardio. You should probably stop there and lift something heavy.
For example, a recent study found that two thirds of pro cyclists have markedly low bone density: https://www.velonews.com/news/dutch-study-two-thirds-of-pro-....
I don't know if we know how to detect when such damage is initially occurring, but that would be an excellent field of research.
They won’t go all the way, they’ll go part of the way.