Runners Weigh In On What Running Does To Their Knees

Runners often hear the warning “Keep pounding the pavement and you’ll destroy your knees.” A new study found that runners were not more likely to develop hip or knee osteoarthritis the longer, faster and more frequently they ran.

Osteoarthritis, a condition marked by deteriorating cartilage where the bones meet, affects more than 32.5 million adults in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the cartilage cushioning the bones wears down, osteoarthritis can cause pain, stiffness and even disability. It’s the most common form of arthritis, especially among older adults, and there’s no known cure.

“Once it’s there, it’s there,” said Dr. Matthew Hartwell, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, and a lead author on the new study, which is scheduled to be presented Thursday during the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons’ annual meeting. “You can’t re-form the cartilage.”

The new research surveyed 3,804 recreational runners who participated in the Chicago Marathon in 2019 or 2021 with questions from how many years they’d been running and their average running paces to whether they had family histories of arthritis.

It’s widely believed, even among doctors, that using the joints more often, through a repetitive activity like running, makes the knee and hip cartilage deteriorate more quickly, upping osteoarthritis risk.

The Northwestern University researchers — including Hartwell, who was at Northwestern for the duration of the study, and a co-author, Dr. Vehniah Tjong, an orthopedic sports surgeon — found that wasn’t the case.

On average, runners who responded to the survey were just shy of 44 years old and ran 27.9 miles per week at 8 minutes and 52 seconds per mile. They’d typically been running for close to 15 years, although that number ranged from 1 to 67 years. Many respondents were running their first marathon while a select few had run dozens. Most fell somewhere in between.

Thanks to the broad nature of the group surveyed — a departure from historical research focused on elite-level Olympians — the Northwestern researchers could analyze how runners’ arthritis risk changed according to their running pace, intensity and cumulative running history.

Surprisingly, they found no association between an increased risk for knee or hip arthritis and the number of years someone had been running, the number of marathons completed, their weekly running mileage, nor their running pace.

Given the survey respondents’ wide range of weekly mileages, paces, ages and cumulative years spent running, the results could apply to average runners who never get close to marathon-level distance, the researchers said.