ha ha no wrote:
Not news. First, go back and read the article. It says that health benefits plateau, not that health risks increase. It doesn't talk about health risks of intense training until the second half of the article, which talks about marathon and ultra-marathon training - and cites James O'Keefe, a monomaniac who has been harping on this point with bad science for years. Do a little googling, you'll find the answer.
Monomaniac is being kind. The guy is either downright dishonest or incompetent or both.
There was a study a few years back that showed that the health benefits of running could be well accounted for by standard risk factors like cholesterol level, BP, etc. James O'Keefe tried to use this as evidence that running was bad for you since once normalized for all of those risk factors, being a runner correlated with poor outcomes. But this is a very misleading use of statistics. I can't imagine how it got published. What happens is that running makes you healthier by lowering cholesterol, bp, etc so in correcting for those factors one is removing all of the known ways running improves health. So basically if you have two patients with the same lab results but find out one has to run more to stay fit, the it says that person is less healthy. But that in no way suggests that runner didn't get a health benefit from his training. On the contrary, he wouldn't have had the same cholesterol as the other guy if he hadn't.