Micah True, aka “Caballo Blanco” was an ultra-distance runner who was the subject of a book about him and the races he set up in Mexico with the Tarahumara tribe. He was found dead in the Gila wilderness in New Mexico, where he had gone out on a run, March 31, 2012.
Has anyone heard of a cause of death yet?
Autopsy results are still not in. Probably in a week or two.
It’s been a month. Usually it’s quicker than this.
Ultra-long distance is done at a slower pace than sprints.
That would depend on what they’re checking for.
Autopsy here: http://naturalrunningcenter.com/2012/05/10/autopsy-report-micah-trues-death-due-cardiomyopathy/
Anyone understand it better than me? The article concludes he died of chronic over training, but the actual autopsy sounds more vague.
Well, the “Doc” comenting doesn’t seem to be clear on what “natural causes” means (it means there was no undue human intervention, either intentional or accidental, nor animal attacks or accidental poisoning), so I’d take his comments with a huge chunk of salt.
The coroner found no evidence of accident, attack, poisoning or drug use. He found that True had an enlarged heart, normal in athletes (there are tests to determine whether the enlargement is adequate or patological, but they require the heart’s owner to be alive). Giving CoD as “natural causes” is equivalent to “cardiorespiratory arrest”, it means “he died of dying”; they can and did list anything unusual found within the body (the enlarged heart), but they also give a list of things which were investigated and found to be normal.
There are other cases of athletes dead unexpectedly of heart attacks; the article mentions one, there have been several footballers (including the one to whom Iniesta dedicated his goal in the South Africa final), there is a footballer in the Premier who survived one a few weeks back. The exact causes are unknown, it’s a bit like “crib death” for “athletic guy whose multiple health checks had found nothing wrong”.
Sudden death without warning from cardiomyopathy is something that can occur to anyone, fit or unfit. It is rare but not unheard of. From a medical examiner POV that is a “natural” cause of death. (About cardiomyopathy.) OTOH the medical examiner may be jumping to a conclusion. The findings described on the autopsy are abnormal for a member of the general population, but are pretty much what you’d expect to find in any serious endurance athlete. The examiner states clearly this was not hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. There is no suggestion in the literature at least that the physiologic heart adaptations to chronic endurance training that make up “athletic heart” represent any risk of dysrhythmia at all. So he seemed to have “athletic heart” and died of no identified cause.