I don’t understand marathons. They’re not healthy. The issue isn’t that exercise isn’t healthy, but rather that running 26 miles isn’t healthy.
From a recent New York Times article about why people don’t finish marathons:
Tim Gerspacher, a 40-year-old New Yorker with two marathons under his belt, could see the finish line for the New York City Marathon last November and was elated.
“It was the best race I had ever run in my life,” he said.
Then he collapsed.
Gerspacher tried to collect himself and attempt a few more steps but passed out. He woke up minutes later in a medical tent.
. . .
A day after ending up in the medical tent, he was hospitalized with severe kidney failure. Gerspacher said doctors told him that if he had delayed going to the hospital for another day, he probably would have died.
After reading the article, the question I wanted answered was not why people don’t finish marathons, but why do they start them in the first place?
Doing some more Googling on the subject, I came across an Ascribe Newswire article:
Dr. Arthur Siegel, director of Internal Medicine at McLean, and his collaborators analyzed the blood of marathoners less than 24 hours after finishing a race and found abnormally high levels of inflammatory and clotting factors of the kind that are known to set the stage for heart attack.
"My concern is for people who exercise thinking 'more is better,' and that marathon running will provide ultimate protection against heart disease," Siegel said. "In fact, it can set off a cascade of events that may transiently increase the risk for acute cardiac events."
So we see that marathons can cause kidney failure, and instead of making the heart healthier, as people think exercise does, they actually cause damage to the heart.
Marathon deaths are, unfortunately, all too common. At last year’s New York City marathon, two runners died. Earlier this year, a 46-year-old man died from a heart attack after completing the Rome marathon.
Besides being unhealthy, running 26 miles seems more like a punishment than something I would want to do for fun. Yet so many people love marathons. It seems as if half the people who live in Manhattan are training to run a marathon.
I’m sure a lot of people who find this blog post are in the category of people who run, or aspire to run, marathons. So the question I ask you is, why?
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