I always read Richard Lehmann's JournalWatch, hosted by the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine. It is always valuable, for the horticultural notes as well as for his witty analysis of the articles in the main medical journals. In the latest one he reports on a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine on the perils of marathon running. I love, though do not agree with, his conclusion, which I hope he will allow me to quote, ' If only the Persians had won: we might have a world free of marathons, Olympic games and unhelpful Greek medical terms like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (or such really exotic examples as paragonimiasis)'.
It seems if you're a young man, cardiac arrest will be caused by hypertrophic cardiomyopathy while if you're my age it will be the atherosclerotic coronary disease that does for you. Women don't seem to be prone to handing in the dinner pail mid-race. I have, I'm afraid to say, run in marathons when participants have died.
Kim JH, Malhotra R, Chiampas G, d'Hemecourt P, Troyanos C, Cianca J, Smith RN,Wang TJ, Roberts WO, Thompson PD, Baggish AL; Race Associated Cardiac Arrest Event Registry (RACER) Study Group.
Cardiac arrest during long-distance runningraces.
N Engl J Med. 2012 Jan 12;366(2):130-40.
Online at http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1106468
With that off my chest, let me tell you about this morning's run. Up at 6, I went out for four fast 800m runs, with mile warm-up and cool-down, and quarter-mile recoveries. At first my legs would;t work, but I think I managed the fast sections tolerably well, even the first one, which was on an unlit rutted lane.
