14 things runners get told by people who do not run

By Sarah Lee · 2026-08-16

I have been collecting these. Not on purpose at first, it just kept happening: I would be reading a running forum and someone would mention the thing a colleague said to them at a desk, and forty people would reply with their own version.

So I started writing them down. Fourteen of them here, roughly in order of how often they turn up. For each one I went looking for whether there is anything behind it. A few have something. Most have nothing. Two are half right, which turns out to be the most annoying category, because the half that is right is what makes the rest of it stick.

One thing before the list. Almost none of this advice arrives as an argument. It arrives as a question that is not really a question, usually while you are holding food.

The ones about carbohydrate

1. "Have you considered cutting carbs?"

This one has a specific habitat: it is said to people in the middle of a marathon block. The joint position paper from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada and the American College of Sports Medicine sets carbohydrate targets that scale with training load, and the direction of travel is up with volume, not down.¹

There is a second finding that matters more here. In a review of post-exercise glycogen resynthesis, female subjects showed a substantial enhancement of muscle glycogen storage from increased carbohydrate intake only after total energy intake was also increased.² The carbohydrate on its own did not do it. So for women specifically, the version of this advice that trims total intake to make room for carbohydrate is working against the mechanism it is trying to use.

2. "You should not eat carbs at night."

I went looking for this one properly, because it comes up constantly and because I have seen the opposite claim made just as confidently, that carbohydrate at night helps you sleep.

I could not find a full text I would stand behind in either direction. That is not the same as saying it is settled or refuted. It means I do not have it, and this site does not run numbers read from an abstract. So the honest answer is that I do not know, and neither does the person telling you at dinner.

3. Whole grain is always the better choice.

Half right, and the useful half is the opposite of what people mean. The position paper's own Evidence Analysis Library graded this at Grade I, Good: when conditions were matched for carbohydrate and energy, neither glycemic index nor glycemic load affected endurance performance or metabolic responses.¹

Where fiber does show up is comfort. The same paper describes low-fat, low-fiber, low-to-moderate-protein food as the preferred choice for the pre-event meal, because it is less prone to cause gastrointestinal problems and promotes gastric emptying.¹ That is a comfort rationale, not a speed one, and it points the other way from the advice.

The ones about not eating

4. "Do not eat anything for 24 hours before a race."

I have seen this get sixty upvotes as an example of the worst advice someone had received, which tells you the room has already sorted it. The position paper describes a pre-event meal, and characterizes its composition.¹ Nothing in it describes a fast.

5. "You have plenty of fat to fuel your runs." (the fasted-running one)

This one deserves care, because the pushback it gets is often as overstated as the claim. I have seen it asserted that fasting has been proven bad for women. I do not have a full text that supports the strong version of that, and I am not going to repeat it.

What I can say is narrower and better sourced: the guidance describes a pre-event meal for reasons of comfort and gastric emptying, and the carbohydrate targets in the same paper scale with training load.¹ The advice is usually delivered as a weight-loss instruction wearing performance clothing, and that is the part worth noticing.

6. "Intermittent fasting, but for running."

Same shape as the one above, same gap in what I can cite. I am including it because it is common, not because I have an answer for it.

7. "Keto solves it."

I do not have a full-text pass on ketogenic diets and endurance performance and will not pretend otherwise. What I noticed reading the thread this came from is that the person recommending it was on their fifty-second attempt at the diet, which the person receiving the advice pointed out, and I have not been able to improve on that as a response.

The ones about drinking

8. "You are not hungry, you are thirsty."

Six words, and it is the only entry in this list that instructs someone to override a hunger signal. I have no study for you. I do not think one is required to notice what it does.

9. "You do not need electrolytes, those are overhyped."

Half right, and this is the good half-right. Four independent position statements agree that replacing sodium does not require a special product and that a normally varied diet generally covers it. The National Athletic Trainers' Association position statement is the strongest source in that set.³ So the person is correct that the industry has oversold it.

Where they lose it is the group. Endurance runners in long or hot sessions are one of the populations for whom it does matter, and the same statement notes that after a long or hot session, water with sodium alongside it is retained better than water alone.³

10. "More water is always better."

This is the one I would most like people to stop saying. The NATA statement makes it a graded recommendation at SORT level A: individuals should not gain body mass during exercise, and hyperhydration confers no physiological or performance advantages.³ The joint position paper adds that women generally have smaller body size and lower sweat rates and appear to be at greater risk of over-drinking.¹

There is no universal number of cups. There is not one for you either, because sweat sodium concentration varies enormously between people. In a review covering roughly five hundred athletes including about a hundred women, local sweat sodium spanned roughly 10 to 90 millimoles per liter, and sex did not significantly explain the variation.⁴ Your own rate is fairly stable day to day. It is other people's rate that has nothing to do with you.

The ones that are not really about nutrition

The last four are not claims. They are comments, and no citation answers a comment.

11. "Candy? Aren't you a runner?"

Usually at a desk, usually mid-afternoon, usually while you are eating the thing you are eating specifically because you are running later.

12. The trail mix.

Arrives at Christmas. Arrives every Christmas. Nobody asked whether you like raisins.

13. "You will get fat if you eat all that."

I want to note something about where this one gets admitted. In a long thread of people venting about being policed, one commenter mentioned in a parenthesis, inside a complaint about someone else, that she struggles to get enough calories sometimes. It was not the headline. It never is.

14. "Eat back your calories? What is the point of running then?"

This is the only one on the list that states the underlying assumption out loud. It assumes running is a method of subtraction. Once you have heard it that plainly, you can hear it underneath most of the other thirteen.

Why I bothered writing this down

Not because the advice is dangerous on its own. Any single one of these is survivable and most people ignore them.

It is the accumulation. Every one of these arrives with an implied theory of what you are doing and why, and the theory is almost always weight rather than fuel. Hearing it fifty times from fifty people who have never trained for anything is how a person ends up quietly unsure about a thing she was doing correctly.

There is a lot I could not answer here. Four of the fourteen have no full text behind them that I would put my name to, and I would rather tell you which four than fill the gaps with confident-sounding filler. That is the entire difference between this and the advice.

Sources

Thomas DT, Erdman KA, Burke LM. Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada, and the American College of Sports Medicine: Nutrition and Athletic Performance. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics 2016;116(3):501-528. Joint position paper and evidence review; population is athletes broadly. Pre-event menu composition quoted verbatim; the glycemic index finding carries its Evidence Analysis Library grading of I (Good). Read in full text. DOI: 10.1016/j.jand.2015.12.006
Burke LM, van Loon LJC, Hawley JA. Postexercise muscle glycogen resynthesis in humans. Journal of Applied Physiology 2017;122(5):1055-1067. Narrative review. Female-specific finding cited here: substantial enhancement of muscle glycogen storage with increased carbohydrate intake occurred only after total energy intake was also increased. Read in full text. PMID 27789774. DOI: 10.1152/japplphysiol.00860.2016
McDermott BP, Anderson SA, Armstrong LE, et al. National Athletic Trainers' Association Position Statement: Fluid Replacement for the Physically Active. Journal of Athletic Training 2017;52(9):877-895. Position statement with graded recommendations; the no-mass-gain and no-hyperhydration-advantage recommendation is Recommendation 6 at SORT evidence grade A. Read in full text. DOI: 10.4085/1062-6050-52.9.02
Baker LB. Sweating Rate and Sweat Sodium Concentration in Athletes: A Review of Methodology and Intra/Interindividual Variability. Sports Medicine 2017;47(Suppl 1):111-128. Review; approximately 500 athletes pooled, including approximately 100 women. Local sweat sodium concentration ranged roughly 10-90 mmol/L; sex did not significantly explain the variation; day-to-day whole-body variation within an individual approximately 5-7%. Regional patch and whole-body washdown are different instruments and are not interchangeable. Read in full text. PMC5371639. DOI: 10.1007/s40279-017-0691-5