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A lot of cyclists enjoy cycling above Zone 3. One time I went on a ride with just one person and he was max zone 3 while I was flipping between zone 4 & 5. I’ve gone cycling with people slower than me and it’s literally so boring. You either go at your natural pace and wait at a lot of stoplights for them to catch up or you pedal way less.

Speed also changes where you can go. Where I’m at, Cyclists will often meet up at 5am or 5:30 am and go on a 60km ride together before going home and getting ready for work. 25km/h and 30km/hr results in a difference of almost half an hour, which many people can’t afford to wait.

I’ve gone on century rides with a friend where we did 60km ride to the base of the mountain, then 1km elevation over 10km, then back down, and then back home totaling around 150km.

In summary, speed literally changes how long the ride takes by hours and what routes are available. You love the feeling of the wind and the beautiful views, and the longer you go the more interesting routes you can go on. Most probably have a time constraint, so higher speed = more interesting routes and more fun.

There’s also groups of people (mostly 50 and above) who are past their prime but still in the community. It’s nice to join them on bike rides during your rest days where you’re doing active recovery.

Cycling, and other endurance sports, are great in that you can go on group rides with people at different skill levels by pairing your fast days with their slow days and vice versa until you finally are able to catch up to them on their fast days.

> I’ve gone cycling with people slower than me and it’s literally so boring. You either go at your natural pace and wait at a lot of stoplights for them to catch up or you pedal way less.

Depending on the route (and your interest), when you’re way ahead you could perhaps cycle back to them (i.e., ride in the opposite direction), go behind them some, and then turn again and race past them. You wouldn’t have to stop or slow down then.

That's two separate rides, not two people doing the same ride. At least as I understand it. "Riding together" implies to me some kind of interaction, such as drafting or conversation.

> Why do recreational distance runners care about speed so much?

Some of us to achieve our PB. Others to BQ:

https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify

Some of us also engage in longer distances to find our limits. If you want a mostly chill crowd of runners, start running ultras.

Speaking of finding limits, this past weekend the backyard ultra record was broken again. It now stands at an amazing 108 hours (that's 4.5 days of running) and 450 miles:

https://backyardultra.com/

Read Laz'[1] updates for the final 5 laps:

https://backyardultra.com/hours-103-108/

Everyone was sure Ihor was going to win. Watching the race it didn't seem possible Harvey could do it again. And then, just like that, Ihor broke and Harvey recovered. And he won himself another Backyard.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Lake

Great read for the last laps, love the format. It's great

PB = personal best

BQ = something qualify?

ultra = ultramarathons, races longer than 42.195 km / 26 mi

BQ = Boston Qualifying, I think. I.e. running better than the standard for men/women in the Boston Marathon

People gain a natural satisfaction out of seeing progress in pretty much allof their pursuits, leisure or otherwise. Catching a bigger fish, closing a bigger deal, growing bigger muscles, cooking a more elaborate meal, etc.

And to your point, many of them want some type of objective “score” they can use to measure that progress.

I think this is it. It is indeed satisfying to see and feel progress. For me, that progress was being in less misery with each subsequent run (and losing weight). I can see how time improvement would give others that same satisfaction. Thanks!

For the record, I hate running - at any distance, any speed - but I do a 1.5 mile Cooper Test 3 or 4 times a year just to get an honest assessment about my cardiorespiratory fitness level, and adjust my other exercises accordingly. Much to my dismay, there is no other exercise modality that quite stresses me the same way as plain running.

You would care if you ran faster to begin with. But if you're running mostly recreationally, especially if you took it up without a competitive racing background, then I can appreciate why you wouldn't care about pace.

I was a competitive runner in college and it's actually the reason I won't run a marathon now. I got so burned out from that career that now I just run without a watch for fun, to de-stress. If I were to run a marathon I'd want to "do it properly" and not just finish it, and that would be way too stressful for me. Even now, when I run an annual turkey trot 5k, I can't help but race the people around me and go as fast as I can despite being terribly out of shape...

I was competitive in a different sport in college and burned out. I couldn't bear to watch it on TV, Olympics etc. It took me nearly 10 years to start enjoying it again but now I love to practice with the muscle memory I still have when I get the chance.

I'm similar and have been struggling with this for a while. I ran a lot when I was younger and competed, recently got back into it and ran a marathon "properly", it went well but I got a bit fixated on the time and the whole experience was kinda stressful tbh.

I can't seem to just enjoy activities for what they are in the moment. I quickly start setting goals and being competitive. I'm also into bouldering, been doing that years but when I go to the gym I often find myself competing with others in my head (perhaps sub-consciously seeing them as a threat), I do my best not to show it but it's quite frustrating.

FWIW, this kind of comparison can become even more discouraging as you age. At 58, I'm pretty sure most of my PRs are behind me. The amount of training I'd have to do to get back down to my peak numbers is way more than I'm actually willing to do, and there's a high likelihood that such a high work rate would end in injury instead of success. Instead, I track how each run stacks up against others within some time period - a year, two years, five. A "two-year PR" feels pretty good. A "five-year PR" would be awesome, even if it's short of my all-time PR. I wish Garmin or Strava or whatever would support this kind of thing better.

Currently trying to get my 10km time down running 40 mpw and here's my perspective:

general performance: I love the idea that if I pick up a random sport to play with friends or am in some emergency situation I know I can move faster

personal achievement: it feels great to break a new personal best

time constraints: I can hit my distance goals with less time spent during training if I'm moving faster, I only have about an hour to run on week days and getting more miles into that time is helpful

Makes a ton of sense - thanks for the thoughtful answer!

For me, time (and therefore speed) is a measure of fitness. I don’t care about beating others. I like to see that I am getting more fit than I previously was.

The notion of “could I run 26 miles?” is the same to me as “could I run 26 miles in 4 hours?”

That makes a ton of sense. My measure of improvement has always been "how much pain am I feeling" ;) but that does correlate to speed I suppose.

That’s exactly the thing to me, the fastest runners always seem to be feeling the best. I see plenty of people who sign up for ultras and basically struggle through it by willingness to suffer instead of fitness; I see no value in that. I’d rather run a 10k or half really fast and feel amazing than drag myself through an ultra and be miserable, so that’s my training goal.

Theoretically, if you know how to race, you’ll always be hitting the same relative level of pain, just for different amounts of time.

Easy runs should be easy though, and hard training runs should very, very rarely cause pain.

Watching my running time get lower was probably 25% of the fun for me. Knowing the measurement and having a concrete goal, and surpassing it, is a joyous process.

To be clear, it wasn't much about beating other people except where I knew I was within reach of beating them. The ultimate goal was continuously getting my personal best.

> Why do recreational distance runners care about speed so much?

Qualifying times and cutoffs are a thing, so that's it for some people. For others, it's about having goals, or even just measuring progress. You might find the running "satisfying" and "rewarding" in itself, but for many that's not the case. For them, the satisfaction is not in running but in having run, and part of that is in the numbers. Times go down, heart rates go down, weights go down, whatever. Without goals and metrics, there's nothing but the grind.

And yeah, some people are just competitive. But there's nothing wrong with that either. People are just motivated different ways.

Running fast and with high intensity is fun. But getting faster over a same distance is a lot harder than just improving endurance to run longer distances, hence why most amateurs progress toward longer distances rather than better 5 or 10k PRs.

edit: missing word

Years and years ago I saw a TV show about the Boston Marathon.

One of the people they interviewed was the last runner to finish. A physician, I would guess around 45 to 50. It was already dark out! So he was not fast, maybe not much more than a walking pace, but he seemed happy so nothing to complain about.

The original book on Aerobics, the author emphasized you can get all the aerobic exercise you need at an ordinary walking pace if you take enough time. Especially important for older people and the overweight.

The obsession with "20 minutes of vigorous exercise" may well do more harm than good.

The faster you run, the less time you have to spend running

Unless you cross the Rubicon like one of my friends and then go into ultra marathons.

Why did you care about your distance? What's so special about going farther and farther every time until you hit some arbitrary goal like 26.2 miles? Beating your last time is fine and rewarding, and you can choose your next goal to be whatever you want.

This was my thought too. It's just a matter of picking an arbitrary metric and shooting for it, given constraints that probably don't matter.

I like hiking, and enjoy challenging myself. Sometimes I shoot for my longest distance ever, sometimes I shoot for more technicality, sometimes it's just raw elevation gain over a shorter distance, sometimes it's all of them. I rarely shoot for time, my constraint at that level is typically getting the thing done without having to camp out for the night, but I could just as well do that. I often shoot for time over elevation and distance with road cycling though.

It’s not just a number. It is also a park, a metro stop, another town over. You learn to know where you live with your feet.

I don't disagree distance is a cool metric and carries many other benefits. I'm just drawing a parallel for parent poster.

One of the other side benefits of training for speed is that there is just no feeling like finding yourself getting faster with less and less effort. My favorite runners highs have come from taking on a hill that used to be hard, and running it both faster and with less perceived effort than previously.

Why did you care about the distance so much?

I should probably clarify -- I don't really care about distance that much. I care about the experience, the joy of being outside, and the benefits of getting cardio exercise. In general, I find that decent distance at a reasonable pace is a great way to spend a few hours. I just don't care about how long it takes or doing it faster.

It could largely be sampling bias.

The people who care about speed talk about going faster, while the people who don't care about speed don't talk about it, rather than talking about not caring about it.

(Edit: typo)

That would not be out of place in a Monty Python sketch. Forums full of people endlessly debating the latest gadgets and techniques for not getting faster.

Why run if you don’t care about the speed? If I don’t care about the speed and just want to cover a certain distance to enjoy myself outdoors, I’ll walk.

I have been sitting on this for a couple of days because I didn't want to react too quickly.

One word: Craft.

People like their craft. People wish to hone and refine. Become better. Find themselves with some level of mastery.

Speed is inherently a part of the craft of running over any distance. It's the sign you're doing it well. Your diet is working. Your stride and gait are optimal.

(Almost) anyone can run. Our ancestors were selected for it. The amount of time you do it in is the only reasonable discriminant of performance when the distance is fixed.

Why learn to paint a painting? Why learn to play a musical instrument in time, in tune, and in key? Why learn to write formal mathematical proofs? Why learn to tell a joke?

People who run faster are better at running. Why not want to be as good at running as you can be?

You can only increase distance so much before something breaks. I think it's weird that you have such a strong opinion about this. Clearly you care about distance more but speed is another performance measure that is just as important.

Also if we are purely talking about health, doing 26 mile runs regularly is not healthy.

I don't know that I have a strong opinion on this. I'm just curious why such a large majority of people are so focused on speed. I don't generally care about increasing distance either -- I'm just focused on general health and the enjoyment of the experience more than how fast I do the thing. A long bike ride with friends at a fast-enough-to-get-exercise pace is delightful. I never care about how long it takes us to do it.

> general health

> enjoyment of the experience

These are subjective measurements. You decide, maybe subconsciously, whether you are feeling healthy or have enjoyed your experience.

Speed and distance are objective. An 8 minute mile is faster than a 9 minute mile. 30 miles is farther than 20 (lets keep elevation constant).

When it comes to sports, some of us are driven by those objective measurements. Sometime to beat the "other guy", sometimes just to beat ourselves.

I don't know that I can fully explain that drive to someone that lacks it. Have you ever felt driven to perform your best by some objective measurement in a non-sporting aspect of your life? School, work, video games?

I don't care about speed, I don't even use a clock. What I do is push when I feel I can't run anymore, I get a lot of satisfaction from that.

A lot of people enjoy competition. It's fine if you don't!

Absolutely nothing beats the feeling of being in a sprint race and reeling someone in and then overtaking.

I used to do a lot of 200m and the second leg of the 4x100 relay as a late teenager and I still get goosebumps decades later thinking back to some overtakes. Being faster than someone when you are both going at full clip is absolutely exhilarating. I genuinely have goose bumps now just writing this - your body doing what it was supposed to do, no thinking just doing something physically primal, the drama of the race itself, and then just blasting past someone and putting clear air between you and them. What a buzz. Watching the video in the article brought a lot of that feeling back.

These days I don't do much sprinting but it is still fun to overtake people when out on a casual 5 or 10k, even if the other person doesn't know you are racing them! :)

Distance makes little sense to me as a challenge, at least not without also a speed requirement. Once you get beyond a certain point of fitness running a marathon is trivial unless you care about your pace. To challenge myself in distance I would need to run more hours than I think is fun (12+ hours), and honestly that is more of a time challenge than a distance challenge.

So the reason I go for speed is that it is a good way to challenge myself. Plus running fast is fun.

> Why do recreational distance runners care about speed so much?

People want to know their health and measure its improvement.

Speed is a proxy measurement for fitness. If there is another way to measure the health improvements of exercise directly comparable among groups, I'm not aware of it. Once a runner accomplishes the feat of running a certain distance, and doing it repeatably, the runner can either go longer distance or faster over the same distance.

Yes, you can go get a VO2 max test, RMR analysis, or body comp assessment, but those are specialty services costing money and requiring professional evaluation. Not something most people can have done every weekend.

As a recreational runner I suppose my primary goals are to maximize health benefits and minimize injury and long term wear-and-tare. My absolute pace doesn't really matter, I just want to see it improve over time.

I know I have terrible running form, but I kind of view it as not owning a fancy road bike. Sure, I'm slower on my old mtn bike, but I'm burning more calories. Now I'm wondering if that's a bad philosophy for running, after watching videos of good runners I'm amazed how smooth they are. All my bouncing up and down has got to be hard on my suspension, and new struts are expensive.

Well, some people are competitive about distance and some people are competitive about speed. Also there are theories about slow-twitch and fast-twitch muscle fibers that lead some people to do better with endurance sports and some to do better with sprinting, so there may be a natural bias involved.

However, as an ex-competitive swimmer who specialized in the sprint events, going fast is just fun, and training so you can go faster increases the fun. This can be a little dangerous on a bicycle however, caution is advised, especially as one grows older and injuries take longer to heal.

> I just don't really fully comprehend why so many people care so much about the clock, beating other people, etc.

If the only reason for progression you can think of is to beat other people, and you have no desire to beat other people, how did you progress to running marathon distances while other people haven't? Presumably the was a time when you couldn't run a complete marathon, no?

For hikers and trail runners, going faster means getting to see more stuff, and being able to take longer breaks to enjoy the scenery

Running uphill is also an incredibly high fitness demand. If you’re a 10:30 pace on flat ground, you aren’t running up a trail.

I’m currently running 25mpw, and have maxed out my free time available per week (3 children). The only way I can do more distance And experience more woods is by running faster :)

If I weren’t time constrained I’d def be happy continuing to jog, I feel like slower speeds are less injury prone for myself

Why do recreational distance runners care about speed so much?

I’m a so-so runner - I can place in AG at local races, but will never be an elite runner. But the challenge of placing, going faster than friends, or faster than previous times, is part of the fun.

As people have said, once you know that you can run the distance, why not see whether you can run it faster? Having said that, I never timed the runs I did by myself or with friends.

Such a silly question. Why do people care about improving in anything?

It's well debatable whether it's an improvement per se but merely a choice of competing on an arbitrary metric. It's fine if that's what you want but it's also very much fine to question that.

There's nothing inherent in being faster than others (or your earlier self) that would dictate speed being the obvious primary metric. Sure, it's an easy choice to measure and thus popular but on the other hand if you do want to care about speed it's mostly a losing proposition: there are always people faster than you (so you'll keep losing to them over and over or you'll learn not to care) and you can only ever get up to a certain speed that's physiologically possible with your body.

Speed can be a useful indicator of your fitness, though, much like fuel consumption is a useful indicator for whether your car is mechanically fit. But focusing heavily or primarily on speed is a choice which begs the question "why".

Exceedingly well-said. Thanks!

I love having an honest measure of performance. Of course I'm slowly declining, but seeing it in hard numbers is somehow reassuring. In every other part of life, success is bound up in stories and memories and political measures of position. On the track, I know exactly where I stand. It's also a lot of fun. There's a tactical element to middle-distance running and it's very fulfilling to pull of a (relatively) good race. And always an incredibly friendly sport that brings together people from all walks of life. Millionaires racing high school kids, lawyers vs labourers - none of the usual markers of status matter on the track. I'm sure other sports are similar but this is the one I do.

Other than track (where times are very important), I absolutely love cross country. Not sure about elsewhere, but in the UK it's still a big deal. The leagues are 100% amateur, no flashy medals or goody bags, just pure competitive running. Running is usually an individual sport but cross-country is very much a team thing. The time doesn't matter, the distance doesn't matter (it's usually not more than about 10k), but it's incredibly competitive and the camaraderie is great. The fact that it takes an enormous effort and is generally cold, wet and uncomfortable makes it all the more satisfying.

Cos I like beating people like you

We all compare ourselves upwards. Related, you might wonder why a strong cyclist bothers buying a $10k bike. After all, they'd be faster than most people on even the cheapest bike! But they start riding with others, and their peers are faster than them. Their peers have nicer bikes which they come to appreciate / desire. They spend lots of time USING the bicycle, so the "investment" makes more sense. And so on.