Marathons Don’t Kill People, Bad Hearts Do.

There has has been some speculation–especially in Chicago, where two runners died after last year’s marathon–about whether training for and running 26-mile events is a killer for our hearts. Now some doctors at the world’s most famous hospital say it is not, and it’s OK for those of us whose hearts are healthy to go for it. The researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital figured this out by doing the math. As Healthday reports, they learned that in the last decade, one of every 259,000 runners in a U.S. marathon or half-marathon died, and most most of the dead had heart disease. The researchers found that of almost 11 million runners, 59 had a cardiac arrest, (their heart suddenly stopped beating. Of those 59, the researchers were able to track down medical records of 31. They found that 15 had suffered from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, basically an overgrown heart muscle, and the most common cause of death in young athletes. Healthday reports that the docs found that one runner died of heat stroke and another of hyponatremia, which can happen when people drink too much fluid and don’t take in enough sodium. Two were presumed to have died of arrhythmia, an abnormal heart rhythm. Study co-author William Roberts, a professor of family medicine at the University of Minnesota and medical director of the Twin Cities Marathon, says that with proper conditioning, distance running “is safe if you listen to your body, if you don’t try to push through chest pain or shortness of breath, or if you don’t ignore factors like very high cholesterol.” Read more from Healthday.