Marathons take a heavy toll on the body, and even for peak athletes there’s been concern about stress on the heart after 26.2 miles. After all, the first marathoner dropped dead after finishing the course in Ancient Greece.
“For years there has been a recurring concern that training for a marathon is beneficial, but the marathon race itself might acutely stress the heart in potentially harmful ways,” Johannes Scherr, MD, a sports medicine specialist at Balgrist University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, told Medscape Medical News.
Now Scherr and his colleagues have found that, while the heart shows some evidence of impairment right after a race, it quickly heals. Read more in Medscape.