Today, May 4, 2020, I celebrate the 7th anniversary of the start of my running trials and tribulations. A good opportunity to revisit the cost of this supposedly cheap hobby. I wrote about this in a 2016 blog post already.
Here are the latest shoe stats that cover May 4, 2013 – May 3, 2020:
| Years of running: | 7 |
| Total miles: | 25,134 |
| Number of pairs of shoes purchased: | 79 |
| Total cost of shoes: | $10,439 |
So, after a bit of trigonometry and derivatives, that results in:
| Pairs of shoes per year: | 11.3 |
| One pair of shoes every: | 28 days |
| Miles per pair of shoes: | 318 |
| Shoe cost of one mile of running: | 42 cents |
And to make things worse, I downloaded my entire Amazon purchase history for May 4, 2013 – May 3, 2020 and extracted the data for all the energy gels purchased. This is what I found:
| Total number of energy gels purchased: | 3,672 |
| Total cost of energy gels: | $4,455 |
After some more confusing calculus, we obtain:
| Number of gels per day: | 1.44 |
| Miles per gel: | 6.84 |
| Gel cost of one mile of running: | 18 cents |
That means we’re already at 60 cents per mile just with the shoes and the gels.
For comparison: according to 2019 AAA data, the average cost per mile for driving 15,000 miles per year is 61.88 cents.
So, if I’d add the non-gel running food, the beer, the clothing, the watches, poles, Strava, SPOT, and magazine subscriptions, anti-chafing cream, KT tape, race fees, travel, etc., I’d be without any doubt more than doubling the 42 cents per mile of running. In my 2016 post, I got to a whopping $1.22 per mile by making a few simple estimates.
In conclusion, running isn’t cheap, it costs a lot more than you might actually think. A Runner’s World article came to the same conclusion: How much does running cost over a lifetime?
I was told running is cheap. Right!
It seems I eat a lot of gels.