Hacker News Reader

Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

I cannot consistently qualify for majors, I have never been paid to run, and I’ve never entered a race that I had the intention of winning, and I have a normal job and social life. Perhaps you could qualify it by saying I’m a casual _endurance_ runner. But I am very much a casual. My lifestyle might be vastly different from a sedentary lifestyle, but it’s not so different from that of all the other casual marathon runners out there.

View on HN

You’re definitely no beer league athlete. I think “amateur athlete” used to be the right term here, before it gained the negative connotation.

As for the target market, I’m torn whether Apple is seriously going after athletes or whether it’s actually mostly marketing, as with their “pro” laptops.

Yeah, I get that. I think just a terminology thing. It seems like you're using "casual" to describe your mindset whereas I'm understanding "casual" to be offhand, or without significant investment. Forgetting about the absolutely massive time investment, spending > 2000$/year on running shoes alone is a distinctly not-casual thing to do.

> it’s not so different from that of all the other casual marathon runners out there

Maybe this is the disconnect? People who have ever run a marathon at all are < 1%, and people who continually run marathons casually are a niche within that niche. If the audience is "people who run more than 50km per week" then I think "casual" probably gets the right idea across, that's just a teeny tiny audience.

You're an amateur runner but you're not a casual runner. I run about 35KM a week and I am in the 99% percentile of Garmin users (with a connected watch I guess) for running distance. Most are doing sub-10.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com