Nope. I’m not one of those folks. Sorry to disappoint you. I’m healthy as a horse, don’t drink, don’t smoke, get lots of exercise and I’m not fat (nice try, though). I’m just not retarded enough to run 26 miles in a sauna. Marathon running is not natural or healthy exercise. The human body is not designed for it. It’s not like the only two choices in life are to run marathons or be a couch potato. I didn’t say that people shouldn’t exercise or live healthy lifestyles, so don’t put words in my mouth.
Under normal circumstances, this is a non-issue. There are usually several ambulances on site for races and marathons. These are pay-duty events. Which means that the regular emergency vehicles are still doing their thing and responding to calls normally, and ambulances that would normally just be sitting parked in the parking lot are brought out for the events and staffed by EMTs who are getting paid overtime.
You’ll see ambulances at all sorts of sporting events, from martial arts tournaments to fund raising “walks”. These ambulances are not on duty to respond to emergencies, they are brought in (paid for by event organizers) for the event.
A friend of mine does a lot of pay-duty events, and they are rather coveted, because they pay so well and you all will usually have to do is put a band-aid on a scraped knee or ice a twisted ankle.
That said, with the Chicago marathon, the sheer number of people succumbing to heat, the ambulances probably were on EMS rotation and responded accordingly. There are porbably a lot of runners who had been training in the hot summer months and weren’t expecting it to be the way it was.
I tried a 10k run on Sunday, and although the heat was not too bad (hey, I’d been running all summer when it was hotter), the air quality really took me by surprise. I quit after 5k. It felt like bad news to continue.
There is feeling tired in a run and just pushing through it, and then there is knowing your body well enough to know when it’s saying “This feels very wrong. Stop now.” Pushing past minor discomfort will get you past a lactic acid burn and your run will probably feel a lot better a little further down the road. You’ll feel a bit crappy, then you’ll feel much better.
But you do NOT ignore the “feels very wrong” message.
My wife has run the Chicago marathon, and has volunteered at the medical tents for the same (she’s a physical therapist; didn’t volunteer this year).
She was not at all surprised number of injuries, and chalks a lot of it up to the “runner mentality” that encourages people to run through pain. She has to constantly tell athletes who come through her med center (she works at Rush) that if you are in pain and it feels unusual (not the normal “burn”), stop running; your body is trying to tell you there’s a problem. She notices that she has to tell runners this much more frequently than other athletes.
One other point: The elite runners and the one-time marathoners are rarely the ones who run into problems at the event. It’s rather the middle group who have run long events and even marathons before. My wife attributes this to the fact that men who finish the Chicago marathon in under 3 hours are automatically qualified for the Boston Marathon, the premier limited-field US event, and most serious runners have running in this event a primary life goal.
yes, calling people you’ve never seen fat because they disagree with you is the height of brilliance.
Cite? 
(This is coming from someone who used to live in Chicago, albeit for work…)
It’s far more beautiful than your OP, which was callous and disgusting.
I must admit more than a little irritation at the notion that every adjective applied to a noun can be seized upon by a group and turned into the definition of that adjective with the group using the combination now “owning” the term. It just pisses me off. I used the word “extreme” in post 94 with a small e and it was clear that I was using it as an ordinary descriptor to distinguish moderate and marathon-type exercise regimens. Sheesh.
There is not a shred of evidence that this “That said, the more you train, the more efficient a machine your body tends to become” is true past a point of diminishing returns, and applying a too-strenuous training regimen to many bodies will break them down, injure them and eventually kill them. The human body is not some sort of equally-endowed blank upon which external training regimens have equivalent effects. Moreover, it ages, at different rates for different individuals. A training regimen may improve a body at 18 but kill a body that is 68. Indeed, a training regimen that improves one body–at least for some parameters–may kill a different body even if the ages are the same.
Just like calling people with a goal to complete a marathon is equally brilliant. Just because you don’t think it’s a good idea or worthy goal, doesn’t mean that it’s stupid.
I would be very interested in seeing any reliable studies attesting to the health benefits of training for and running marathons, compared to a more moderate level of exercise.
I’m no expert in exercise physiology, but I have been trying with little success for some time to find credible info regarding the health benefits of training at different levels. Heck, even tho many people accept as gospel the “maximum heart rate” aspect of training, I’ve been able to uncover very little hard science to back that up.
Don’t get me wrong - I am a strong advocate of fitness and regular exercise. But if someone is regularly getting aerobic exercise, I’m not sure that more is necessarily better.
In my example, I have 2 groups of guys I could run with 3-4 times a week. One runs slightly further and faster than I am comfortable with (5-7 miles at 8.5-9 min pace), and the other slightly shorter and slower than I prefer (3-4 miles at 9-10 min pace). I think, however, that the slower group would provide me sufficient exercise for purposes of general fitness. I’m not sure that putting forth the effort to run with the faster group would confer any significant added health benefit. And I know for a fact that trying to stick with them beats me up, making me exhausted and my legs, knees, and feet sore.
I guess if you are the type of person who needs to achieve certain goals for mental/emotional purposes, a marathon might provide some health benefits. But I’d like to see the hard evidence that training for and running marathons provides a muscular, cardiorespiratory benefit over, say, running/biking/swimming at a moderate pase for 30-40 minutes 3-5 times a week.
I could tell, which is why I tried to clarify my argument based on the common usage of the terms. Lack of capitalization remains the proper treatment for a common noun, like extreme running or track & field. I’m sorry those terms annoy you but I suggest you take that up with someone else.
I didn’t say it was.
But there is more than a shred of evidence that
Feel free to tack on another condition so that you can disprove it again.
I’m don’t disagree. But I’m also not going to claim that healthier people aren’t healthier merely because their level of activity might injure a less healthy person.
Are you kidding? It’s loads of fun - not only are there runners, but there are people everywhere along the course, cheering you on, dangling from overpasses. And there are several stages set up with live music (not that you get to enjoy that until the end of the race). Then at the end of the race, they have this tower of beer waiting for all the runners and a ton of food. I haven’t partaken of the beer myself - it seems a little dangerous to knock one back after running 26 miles, but I guess it works for some people.
Anyway, it’s like an enormous street party. And lots of different types of people run and walk marathons - not just the ultra-skinny, 0% body-fat types who use it as training for an ultra.
I also really enjoy the training for a marathon. Since I used to do it with friends, it was the ultimate opportunity for uninterrupted chatting, something I almost never get to do now.
And I’m convinced I was healthier when I was marathoning, but only because I had to work out a lot more to prevent injuries during the actual race. I agree that there probably aren’t a ton of health benefits over and above vigorous exercise for an hour 5 days a week, but it was worth it to me for the time I got to spend with my friends, meeting and breaking personal records and the sheer exhilaration I felt just finishing.
However, I will add that I don’t agree with running through the pain. Yes, there is some pain associated with running for a long time, but if the pain you’re feeling is more than just the expected, regular pain as noted above (and you can really tell the difference) and it doesn’t go away when you stop, or if you’re feeling faint, you should walk or stop if you need to.
Well, for those interested, the October 30th Nova is apparantly all about what happens to the body during marathon training and during the marathon.
It follows six men and six women and documents all of the awesome physical benefits that it had for their bodies.
Ooh, that looks good. I’ll have to watch it. Hey, you referenced San Diego - is that where you are? How did I not know this?
Actually, we may be. Certainly the vast majority of us aren’t conditioned for it, and it may be damaging long-term, but there are some scientists who definitely think we have evolved for very long distance running.
“Persistence hunting is a type of hunting where the predator uses a combination of running and tracking to pursue the prey to exhaustion. Nowadays it is very rare among humans hunting animals, but it is seen in a few Kalahari bushmen. It has been thought to be one of the earliest forms of human hunting.”
Persistence hunting
There’s an article about a lecture the researcher above gave here.
The last episode of the David Attenborough BBC series “Life of Mammals” shows a group of hunters in Africa that run down a kudu over the course of a day. Pretty fascinating stuff. 26 miles was nothing.
Too bad our knees don’t hold up. Every long distance runner I’ve known has had some kind of problem with knees, ankles or back. We aren’t built to take the pounding on the joints.
Do a lot of hunting on the Sub-Saharan asphault and concrete?
I’m forty years old. I hurt my left knee and had it scoped when I was seventeen. I’ve bee n running between 40 and 60 miles a week for nearly seven years without problems. I know hardly any runners with serious knee problems. I know guys in their 70s and 80s with healthy knees. The people that I do know who have knee or joint problems to a man have them as a result of injuries unrelated to running.
“Runners’s knee” is a tendon issue that is normally a result of overtraining or bad form. The fact of matter is that you can injure yourself and your knees very badly running. This is because a person proves much faster cardiovasculary then they do from a musculature/skeletal standpoint. What happens is you have the energy and the strength and endurance and wind to run a long distance, but your skeleton and tendons and joints which adapt much slower lag behind and get injured as a result of people wanting to do too much too soon.
Your body is adapted specifically to run long distances barefoot. Shoes allow you to be sloppy with your form and impact your heels. If you were to run barefoot in the woods you would stop landing on your heels the first time you came down on a small pebble. You would learn to place the outside balls of your feet softly and roll to the inside. Try it, and you’ll find yourself doing it this way within a couple of hundred yards. If you become a long distance runner you will also grow to run this way as it is the most efficent stride. Watch a kenyan. The heels lmost don’t touch the ground.
A main reason why people get injured running is because of atrophy. While you are adapted to run, if you don’t do it and then suddenly get into it you are straining atrophied muscles and joints and will likely HRT yourself if you are not careful.
Interestingly, I was having nagging IT band issues from overpronating (essentially , as you said, “bad form”). To relieve the pressure I changed my stride to that very “ball-of-foot” style that I use when barefoot doing martial arts. I really does give you a nice gliding motion and you have some nice kick. It felt like it had the kinetic economy on a horses leg. Very neat.
If you are conservative when it comes to adding mileage, you shouldn’t have joint problems. Most people feel like they can keep running because they aren’t tired (heart, lungs, and muscles are good to keep going), they don’t take into account the joints because those don’t hurt until later. My fiancee overtrained this way, when she started running with me. Her cardio is awesome from cycling, so she wanted to keep going and going, and overtrained until she got an achilles heel issue.
Yup. I used to run pretty exclusively on the balls of my feet. Provided excellent padding for my knees and back, plus lots of springiness for my stride. Added bonus: monstrously defined calves. 
Just ran 5 w/ my buddy who ran Sunday in about 6 hours. He said some stations were out of water, but every single station he passed had Gatorade.
(He ran the 1st 1/2 in 2, got sick at mile 15, and walked/trotted the final 11).