A 27-year-old man died on Sunday in the Toronto Marathon. A 35-year-old man died in the Chicago Marathon on Oct. 9. A 32-year-old man died in the Montreal Marathon on Sept. 25. Three high-profile deaths by cardiac arrest in seemingly healthy men during mass-participation events in less than a month.
How long will it before there are calls to ban marathons or demands that participants undergo mandatory medical testing before they can run?
As tragic as these deaths are, a knee-jerk response to restrict these type of events would be a mistake. The solution, while counterintuitive, is to encourage a lot more people to lace ’em up and hit the streets. The benefits far outweigh the risks – regardless of the impression you may get from the newspaper headlines.
Those who think that marathons are deadly dangerous are grossly misinformed: They don’t understand statistics and science – or, at the very least, choose to not do so to reinforce their prejudices.
About 50,000 Canadians suffer heart attacks each year. Almost 40 per cent of them are fatal, meaning 20,000 deaths. On average, two marathoners a year die during races. Yet they garner more media attention that the other 20,000 or so deaths combined.
Put it down to the man-bites-dog syndrome: The media have a penchant for the unusual, particularly when it occurs in a public venue.
Nobody is counting or cataloguing the La-Z-Boy deaths – the thousands of people who die while watching TV or another sedentary activity. The science is unequivocal: The sedentary – the 50 per cent plus of Canadians who barely move each day – are at greatest risk.
Being active – including running – dramatically decreases your risk of death, particularly from heart disease (which has just been edged out by cancer as the country’s No. 1 killer). People who are fit have 50 per cent fewer heart attacks than those who are sedentary. They also have a lower risk of stroke, diabetes, cancer and dementia.
Being fit does not require feats of super-athleticism. It means upping your heart rate – maybe even working up a sweat – for 30 to 60 minutes a day. That’s the equivalent of running (or jogging slowly) about five kilometres for most people.
You don’t have to run a marathon to be fit. And you don’t have to be Kenyan-marathoner-thin to run either. More than 61 per cent of Canadians are overweight or obese and spectators at any big city race know that there are marathoners in those ranks.
But running – and more important training for a marathon – can make you fitter. It can even offset the risks of being overweight to a large extent. The research shows that more activity is better for your health. Those whose activity levels surpass the minimum recommended norms tend to have a healthier body weight, lower blood pressure and better cholesterol readings and, over all, they tend to eat better. (Never mind that many marathoners have a voracious appetite and a sweet tooth to boot.) Yes, runners get injured, but their bones are actually stronger and their injuries pale in comparison with those suffered by the obese and the frail.
There are intangibles as well. Marathon and half-marathon participation has exploded in recent years because running is the social activity of choice for many. It is no coincidence that the new runners are predominantly in their 30s and 40s – when the fat starts to accumulate around the middle and the prospect of hanging out in bars to make friends becomes overly depressing. Running is not about vanity, it is about being part of a community and being good to oneself.
