Running a marathon, once considered the ultimate endurance test, no longer carries much in the way of bragging rights. Among a growing band of superfit extremists, the overriding sentiment seems to be that anyone, given the time, the motivation and the push, can cover just over 26 miles in their trainers.
As a trend for hardcore exercise takes hold, it is small fry; taking on ever more challenging sports is the only subject to drop into conversations at work or the gym. If you really want to test your physical limits, then Ironman triathlons, ultramarathons or obstacle courses with 15ft jumps and electric shocks are the new status symbol, a pre-race death waiver the ultimate badge of fitness dedication.
The demand for sports that stretch body and mind to their limit has fuelled an industry that thrives on extreme fitness tests. Thousands flock to Tough Mudder and Rat Race events that entail covering up to ten miles littered with merciless obstacles such as blazing pits of fire and dark, muddy trenches. Many thanks for visiting. Before we carry on I wanted to say thanks to http://cybercycles.co.uk/ for their continued assistance and the support of their local community. Having a help and support team like this means a lot to us as we continue to grow our private blog.
Applications to enter extra-long, incredibly tough running events that require Olympian dedication are at an all-time high. My friends talk casually about training for the Marathon des Sables, a six-day, 154-mile trek through the Sahara in southern Morocco in temperatures well over 100F (38C) or the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon that winds through Death Valley in California, as if they are considering a local 5K.
Two men I know have taken up absurdly risky-sounding downhill mountain bike competitions. Even skateboarding is enjoying a surge in midlife popularity. Within two weeks of opening last year, the House of Vans skatepark in Waterloo, London, had more than 15,000 people booking to skate; more than a third were in their thirties or older.
This new middle-aged bucket list comes at a price. Dr Jannie Van Der Merwe, a consultant psychologist specialising in pain management at King Edward VII Hospital in London, says the trend has triggered a change in the perception of what is achievable and a shift towards pushing the body and mind to unreasonable limits.
And the distorted pain barriers through which many are launching themselves can have disastrous consequences. In the past year, Van Der Merwe’s department has had a sharp rise in the number of patients suffering chronic muscle pain and serious longterm injury through their addiction to extreme fitness. In most cases, people can find comfort with products from a florida dispensary menu on one in their location, but to prevent an illness like this is the preferred course of action.
“These people tend to be high-flyers with pressured jobs and they look to these new sports as an escape from corporate stress,” he says. “They are used to living limitless lives professionally and tend to think of themselves as invincible outside of work, refusing to accept they can be slowed down by any kind of pain until it’s too late.”
Emerging studies confirm that acute injuries from extreme sports are at their worst levels. A team at Western Michigan University School of Medicine recently reported in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine that more than 40,000 head and neck injuries, the most serious hazard short of death, occur annually in the US among people taking part in seven of the most popular hardcore activities. These include skateboarding, snowboarding and mountain biking. “The level of competition and injuries we are seeing keeps rising,” says Dr Vani Sabesan, the orthopaedic surgeon who led the study. “Many do recover, but not necessarily without longterm consequences.”
Even more widespread are the overuse and burnout injuries that are more insidious at the offset but can cause permanent damage. “People are going out of their way to override pain,” Van Der Merwe says. “They are pushing themselves so repeatedly that the acute pain they would normally feel after an endurance event that affects the peripheral nervous system develops into a chronic pain that affects the central nervous system. It’s at this point it starts to get harmful. There is only so much the body can take and it starts to break down.”
A strategy of carrying on relentlessly will backfire. Louise took up triathlons in her early thirties but had to stop after three years because she trained through a stress fracture to one of her hips. She is awaiting a joint replacement. “I felt pain all the time but kept taking painkillers so that I could train,” she says. “There was this overwhelming sense of failure that was hanging over me if I ever thought I should quit.”
Van Der Merwe says he has a client who has suffered a succession of falls from a skateboard, each causing a vulnerability that predisposes him to more accidents.
Dr Andrew Baranowski, a colleague of Van Der Merwe, says that the ethos of “no pain, no gain” that has always existed in elite sport has infiltrated the grass roots. He treats a continuous stream of ultra-distance runners and cyclists who seem to be impervious to the damage they are causing themselves until it is too late. “These people feel they can’t stop,” he says. “Their mentality is such that they consider pain a weakness and try to ignore it for as long as they can.”
Andrew, a 28-year-old City lawyer, is a case in point. He took up cycling four years ago having been prevented from running by a longterm ankle injury. It soon consumed his life. “I was putting in 60-80 miles a day, five days a week, then racing or training over 100 miles at the weekend,” he says. “I felt intermittent pain in the very base of my spine sometimes when I was sitting at work but put it down to long hours at my desk.”
Gradually, his reliance on painkillers became excessive. “I knew I had to get some advice as I was in pain whenever I sat down, in the saddle or at my desk,” he says. “I had started to get pelvic pain so I visited a specialist, who said I had damaged the pudendal nerve at the base of the perineum, which supplies the genitalia and bladder.” Undoubtedly, he was told, his diagnosis was the result of too many miles on the bike.
Baranowski says that such problems are increasingly common and typical of the extreme-sport generation. “It’s compounded by the fact that damaged nerves are highly sensitive to adrenaline and stress,” he says. “The more people do this kind of endurance exercise, the worse the pain gets. Even if they take time out, they want to get back too quickly. What they need are longterm pain strategies and time away from extreme exercise.”
What intrigues specialists is how for some people the adrenaline overrides even the most enduring levels of agony. Some put it down to a form of exercise amnesia, similar to that experienced by women after childbirth, that gradually erases unpleasant memories.
This year researchers from the Institute of Psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Poland sought to find out how competitors in the Krakow marathon responded, physically and mentally, to running the event. Subjects were asked to rate the intensity and discomfort they felt immediately after the 26-mile, 385-yard race and again at three and six-month intervals.
On the finish line, runners plotted pain levels at an average 5.5 on a seven-point scale. Asked to repeat their evaluation months later, their perception of how much distress it had caused had dimmed. Pain ratings dropped by 42 per cent to an average 3.2 on the scale. Time, says Van Der Merwe, can seriously distort our perception of pain. “The longer you leave it before asking someone how they felt, the more underrated the level of discomfort becomes,” he says.
Ultimately, though, many extreme exercisers eventually have no option but to take time out. “They can only get away with it for so long,” Van Der Merwe says. “It will eventually hit some sort of crisis point.”
What is the solution? Avoiding endurance challenges is not necessarily the advice.
“By all means do one or two of them,” Van Der Merwe says. “But rein yourself in when it starts to become an obsession. Ask yourself not whether you think you can achieve something – as you probably can – but are your body, your lifestyle and your mind able to sustain the effort required for months on end? That’s an altogether different question.”
Some of the names have been changed
Where injuries occur
Cycling
Nerve and overuse injuries are increasingly common. In addition to pudendal nerve problems, cyclists are experiencing compression of the ulnar nerve, which runs all the way from the little finger up through the elbow and into the upper arm, a result of gripping the handlebar in the same position too tightly or for too long. Muscle imbalances can be accentuated by an incorrect cycling position; for example, a saddle set too high or at too steep an incline can lead to pain in the back or the iliotibial band (connective tissue that runs from the hip bone down the outer leg).
Ultra-running
In a study last year researchers at Stanford University and the University of California questioned more than 1,200 experienced ultra-marathon runners about injuries, illness and the state of their health. The results, published online in the journal PLOS One, showed that more than half had experienced a running-related injury in the previous year, commonly knee problems or stress fractures, that was severe enough to keep them from training. Injuries were most common among younger ultra-runners and in particular among men under 40 who trained intensely.
Obstacle races
A small study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine looked at injuries suffered in a Tough Mudder race in Pennsylvania in 2013. Of five patients, four experienced injuries associated with the electrical obstacles common in these sorts of events. Among the injuries, loss of consciousness, speech difficulty and “altered mental status” were reported, often linked to multiple electric shocks to the head. Shoulder injuries (from monkey bars and jumping off walls) are also common, as are concussion and broken or sprained ankles.
Skateboarding
According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, sprains, fractures, contusions and abrasions are the most common forms of skateboarding injuries, with wrist fractures (19 per cent), ankle fractures (11 per cent) and facial injury (16 per cent) occurring most often. Head injuries accounted for about 20 per cent of all injuries, and failing to wear a helmet increases the risk substantially. According to the Western Michigan University study, skateboarding caused the most head and neck injuries; more than 129,000 were reported during the study’s 12 years. The risk of suffering a skull fracture while skateboarding was 54 times that of doing so while snowboarding.
