Marathons bad for you?
4 watchers
Dec 2011
8:21am, 7 Dec 2011
5,071 posts
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♣BelleVueRacer♣of Beartown
It's certainly food for thought. bbc.co.uk |
Dec 2011
8:26am, 7 Dec 2011
8,291 posts
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Pootle
I'm sure Frobester will be along shortly, he has a mini stroke a few days after he ran his first marathon. That said, I watched that Alice Roberts thing recently and she said the whole reason we look like we do and sweat rather that pant like most animals is because we are designed for endurance running in the heat??? |
Dec 2011
8:33am, 7 Dec 2011
4,457 posts
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LouLou
My word of caution would be don't believe everything you read.... I have to say the critical appraisal of journal articles by the popular media e.g. BBC, morning television etc. is usually with the aim of achieving a sensational headline. I'll read the journal article if I can access it then make my own judgement. for one, its a small study, I don't think they screened for comorbidty pre-study and also its a very short time frame with no long term follow-up. |
Dec 2011
8:40am, 7 Dec 2011
17,657 posts
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A Frobester in a Pear Tree
My marathon exacerbated a pre-existing condition I'd had since birth, which neither I nor any doctors knew about.
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Dec 2011
9:03am, 7 Dec 2011
3,043 posts
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Badger
This is the abstract for the article: eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org I should be able to take a look at the whole thing later. Key line perhaps is: "Although short-term recovery appears complete, chronic structural changes and reduced RV function are evident in *some of the most practiced athletes*, the long-term clinical significance of which warrants further study. " It doesn't say how much training the 'most practiced athletes' are doing, though it does say that the event durations are 3-11 hours, which sounds like reasonably fast marathons out to Ironman. The beginning of this editorial eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org on the same article suggests they're talking about people training several hours a day. That's a lot of training other than for a professional. |
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Dec 2011
9:15am, 7 Dec 2011
First-time poster!!
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Peterpants
This is all very interesting I would add a few points, few of us realistically take part in events that last 3-11 hours, I will have run 3 marathons and one 20 mile xc this year that fitted that category, nothing else was that long. The health benefits of the training I do through the year to achieve this far outweigh the damage that may be (in a relatively small percentage) caused over long term exposure to such events. I think the problem with all these studies is that they appear to find fault with exercise, fault with no exercise, fault with everything somewhere. We have all heard about the fabled knees we are destroying, the ankles that will never work again, the arthritis we will get etc, to be honest though I would rather slope off the planet with bad knees and a dodgy right ventricle having lived relatively healthily than slope off through lack of fitness in earlier life.
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Dec 2011
9:21am, 7 Dec 2011
37,972 posts
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plodding hippo
Its not bad for a media report, actually.Interesting that its the right ventricle getting the attention for once I regularly take part in events that last 3-11 hours Im bloody slow, thats why! |
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Dec 2011
10:46am, 7 Dec 2011
2 posts
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Peterpants
This item by Dr Mark Porter in the Times puts it into perspective I think; The relationship between exercise and health has long been known to vary with degree. Do the right amount and you are likely to reap significant rewards; do too little or too much and your health can suffer. But just what constitutes too much? Far more than most of us will ever do. To run into the sort of problems highlighted by this study, you need to be competing at the highest level and pushing yourself beyond boundaries that most of us would regard as sensible. These may be worrying findings for Tour de France cyclists and elite long-distance runners but they don’t apply to the rest of us. Training for endurance events is not without hazard but the myriad benefits to health (such as protection against stroke, heart attack and even some types of cancer) far outweigh the risks. The dangers of overdoing it are always emphasised to people entering events such as the London Marathon, and rightly so, but many more of their sedentary peers will die as a result of underdoing it. |
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Dec 2011
10:50am, 7 Dec 2011
492 posts
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Ian M
Peterpants, precisely. Too much of anything is bad. We all know about over training don't we? What annoys me about it though is now loads of the "better off doing nothing" brigade will jump on this as lending weight to their argument. "You see, I knew I was better off laying on the sofa eating crisps!" |
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Dec 2011
12:05pm, 7 Dec 2011
7,002 posts
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James1982a
mmmm crisps
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