The key to becoming a better running might just be your friend squad. A study published in Nature Communications found evidence to suggest that friends who push themselves to run father and faster influenced other friends to do the same — just by being running buddies. Essentially, positive exercise behavior is contagious. The researchers looked at the habits of 1.1 million runners around the world over a period of five years. Knowing that its possible runners could be pairing up because of their comparable running habits, researchers wanted to rule out coincidence. Since bad weather can deter runners, they compared friend pairs in different regions of the world to see if weather made a difference. The found that friends of runners who typically run an extra 10 minutes, influenced friends to run an extra 3 minutes — even when the weather was bad. Also, the study found, when one friend goes…