Cycling To Extremes - VeloNews Article

August 2015 edition of The Velo News has a very interesting article concerning Endurance Athletes and the damages we might be doing to our hearts.

Full Digital Article HERE

Cycling is an endurance sport like no other. Long rides can be a standard component of the diet, something that devotees look forward to all week. In any case, as a cyclist, you likely love the weekend rampage, the six-hour tour of the mountains, or the endless training sessions that are the only way to develop fitness for races that last as long as a workday. But fit for racing doesn’t necessarily equal healthy.

Stories abound that undermine the notion that elite athletes are healthy. From the running world, marathoner Alberto Salazar, at the age of 48, suffered a heart attack and lay dead for 14 minutes before a cardiologist placed a stent in a blocked artery, saving his life. Micah True, the ultra-marathoner and protagonist of the bestselling book Born to Run, went for a 12-mile run in the New Mexico wilderness and was later found dead.

Of course, these tragic tales are preceded by the origin story of an endurance athlete running himself, literally, to death. An enlarged, thickened heart with patchy scar tissue is common in long-term endurance athletes and is dubbed “Pheidippides cardiomyopathy” after the 40-year-old running messenger (and prototypical masters endurance athlete) who died after bringing the news of Greek victory at the battle of Marathon to Athens. Pheidippides was a hemerodrome, (an all-day running courier in Ancient Greece), and he had run 240km over two days to request help from Sparta against the Persians at Marathon, before expiring after running the additional 42km (26.2 miles) back from the battlefield. We celebrate his death by running marathons.

I am no medically trained beginner or expert by any means, but I just wanted to put this information out there for others to read and make their own determination.  Leave some feedback if you have had any experience with this or know of someone that has!

We are back from California and the 2015 Specialized Retailer Release and learned a lot about the 2016 Model Year line from Specialized so keep an eye out on the blog for more information on our favorite bikes!

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