The Cost or Benefit of Extreme Exercise

It wasn’t a scientific study, but I remember news stories about 20 years ago, as there were a cluster of world-class marathons (including an Olympic win) that were won by people who’d only run one or even zero competitive marathons in the past (they were all superbly trained middle-distance runners, though).  Beginner’s luck?  The new-at-the-time paradigm in training for a marathon which aims to double your mileage multiple times as you build up to the big event, but does not call for running 26.2 miles prior to the marathon itself?  Or does running multiple fast marathons take something out of you – enough so that a virgin marathoner (otherwise well-trained), has an advantage over the veteran marathoner?

Ryan Hall retires – chronic fatigue

Ryan Hall on doing too much too soon.

Interesting stuff.  I wonder how the case of Ryan Hall retiring due to chronic fatigue fits into the discussion.

@Greg – Seems like the two papers are discussing slightly different things. (Chronic exhaustion/stress vs acute change in behavior.

Regarding the “Has anyone found similar data for non-heart-attack folks?”

Yeah there’s been a good surge in the past 10 years of scientific data measuring blood hormone levels, neuro-electric stimuli in muscles, etc. Some of it can be kind of misleading though so the concluding theories have to be logic tested. Some good stuff I’d point you too though that’s interesting is collegiate and professional cyclers and skiers have been making good headway in heart rate training.

My understanding is they’re a lot more complex than just zones… the cyclers are measuring the watts of power they’re producing on the crankshaft (rather than their traveling speed/distance) and they’re weighing the Heart rate needed to produce it. They work out for as long as they can before their performance starts to decline past a critical point. At some point(?) when they’re heart rate is going crazy but they’re producing very little power wattage they stop and recover. On days they can’t perform well, they figure they need a rest day completely. But usually even very experienced athletes use independent trainers to interpret the results to avoid “tired bias”. The “how much” still seems very subjective and different per person. It also requires constant tweaking as people’s hormone levels change.

Without knowing folk’s relative fitness that might read this, I’d caution most people in the US (including myself) fall into the “needs more exercise” camp.

@David Thompson – 20 years ago you say? When did performance enhancing drugs start start to rise? hehe