Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The Cost of Running $$

I made the mistake the other day to consider how much that particular run was costing me, as in how much per mile (I sometimes like to do math while I’m running… I know, crazy…)

Ok, it’s not a ton of money, but it turns out that it is not insignificant either.   If I include the broad assortment of running related goodies, from shoes to gu, it costs me about $0.80 per mile…  More on how I’ve arrived at that in a sec.  

When I first started to run 5 years ago I literally went out with my day-to-day sneakers, a pair of shorts and a cotton tee shirt.  After all, running is commonly known as the most inexpensive form of exercise – no equipment needed and the roads, sidewalks, and trails are free.  The only thing required is one’s effort.

Well, I’m sure you know the story…   To start with my shoes sucked (they were my non-work shoes that I played with my kids with, mowed the lawn, walked around downtown with, etc..), so I got into more appropriate shoes dedicated to running. That was the first cha-ching.  And course, special socks became the next mandatory item since my cotton/polyester sox didn’t do my feet any favors. Another cha-ching.  And so it goes – you know the drill.

So let’s just start with the shoes and sox…  For example, I recently bought a new pair of Saucony Triumph’s for $140 and some new sox for $10.  I’m hoping to get 400 miles out of the shoes, so that comes to $0.35 per mile.  I’ll get maybe double the miles out of the sox, so let’s say that comes to $0.01 per mile. For my feet alone, every mile that I run every day is costing me $0.36. So for a 30 mile week, that totals out to $10.80 a week.  I’ve spent more for a gym membership that I never went to…. So I'm totally cool with that; a pretty cheap solution to better physical and mental health.

But guess what? It doesn’t end with just the investment in my footwear! Here is a list of the crap that I’ve wound up buying to support my running habit:
  •  More sox
  • Non-cotton t-shirts
  • Running shorts
  •  Winter running pants and shirts
  • A rain shell (for those drizzly or ice-spitting mornings)
  • Headgear, i.e. hats and skullcaps
  • Sunglasses (ok… I might have bought them regardless, but interestingly enough, I only wear them when I’m running…)
  • Nutrition (like gu, shotbocks, Gatorade,  etc.)
  • First-aid junk (band-aids, ace-bandages, wraps, creams, Epson salts, etc)
  • Running app for my phone (vs buying a GPS watch)
  • Ear buds for music (they break, get lost, etc.)
  • A waist-pack to carry all of my crap in
  • Camelback and a water belt

And now I’m pushing $0.80 per mile. This calculation is the result of putting all of the above items into a spreadsheet, establishing a cost and then dividing by how many miles I might get out of them.  And that $0.80 may even be low, but nevertheless it is still way better than paying for a gym membership that I never went to.

But wait ! There’s more !   How about running a race, or four, every year? And here is where the real money comes in. Event costs vary, and I’ve paid anywhere from $25 for a 5K to $140 for a marathon. My annual costs for event entry fee’s is around $300, and this does not take into account any costs associated with me getting to the event or lodging, etc.  I probably dropped between $700 & $1,000 to run the Chicago Marathon in 2011, between lodging, transportation to Chicago, cabs, food, etc.

So the net-net here is that running isn’t free… it has costs and they are not necessarily negligible.  Shoes are expensive. Sweat-wicking shirts and shorts are expensive. Events are expensive. No wonder that running is a multi-billion dollar industry!

But at the end of the day, running is arguably still the cheapest form of cardio-vascular exercise available that has the added value of providing awesome mental refreshment.