In this episode I review the
abstract of a study released last March by Dr. Depina Kardara and his team at
the Athens Medical School,Hippokration Hospital titled “Marathon Runners
Have Increased Aortic Stiffness”.

It is important to note that
my skepticism with this study is related to the implied suggestion that
training for and running a marathon is considered extreme exercise.  Maybe
it is, or maybe after having run 21 of them…the last not much more than a
controlled crawl, I see the marathon as an endurance event that homo sapiens
have evolved to run as a means of hunting and gathering; chasing down our prey
with persistence. 

As we listen to the results of
this research, we need to understand the severity of the impact, and consider
other factors which might invalidate the results; remember: 25,000 runners just
finished the Boston Marathon a few weeks ago, not to mention the hundreds of
thousands who will run such a distance this year; and yet the sample size for
the test group in this study was only 49. 

This isn’t to say that those
49 aren’t representative of the entire human population of marathon runners;
nor does it necessarily trivialize the results of this study; but it does put
this study into perspective against the media interpretation that marathon’s
can kill you.

Show Links:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=aIOu08KfQ3LQ

http://health.msn.com/fitness/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100255768

http://www.healthscout.com/news/1/637000/main.html

http://www.examiner.com/x-25448-Boulder-Running-Examiner~y2010m3d15-Marathons-may-be-hazardous-to-your-health

http://content.onlinejacc.org/cgi/reprint/55/10_MeetingAbstracts/A80.E751.pdf

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The song “Think For Yourself”
was by George Hrab at http://www.geologicrecords.net