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A Crucial Opening Thought

There are no junk miles. You may have heard otherwise from well-meaning people. Junk miles, they’ll tell you, are miles that you do just to do, maybe to reach a more impressive weekly mileage figure, maybe just because you’ve noticed that good runners tend to run a lot and you’ve therefore concluded that more is better. Junk miles, they’ll say, are wasted time, because they don’t help you reach your running goals.

Don’t believe them. Allow me to repeat: There are no junk miles. If you’re not injured so badly that you’re altering your form, or so sick that you feel much worse after running, then it’s all good.

Brian Metzler

People who warn of junk miles often point out the law of diminishing returns. “After x number of miles per week,” they’ll say, “the benefit from any one run really starts to decline.” And they’re right. But diminishing returns are still returns. If you’re motivated enough to run a little extra in search of a little more fitness, have at it.

Even if you think a run doesn’t advance your fitness, it has other benefits—promoting blood flow, clearing your mind, getting you away from the computer, burning calories, getting you out in nature, helping you spend time with friends, giving you muchneeded time by yourself, maintaining the rhythm of good training, and infinitely so on. These aspects of running that have little to do with peak performance are usually ignored by people warning of junk miles. There a million reasons to go for a run today that have nothing to do with running faster next weekend. The more of them that appeal to you, the less reason there is to believe in junk miles.