THE BENEFITS FOR YOUR HEART: MARATHONS AND HALF-MARATHONS

Some of Dr. Kavanagh’s patients suggested that they try a marathon—marathons being popular at the time. He was doubtful at first, but then encouraged them. After careful training, all seven of his first group of patients finished the twenty-six-mile journey with no ill effects. They then presented him with a trophy inscribed “Supercoach, the World’s Sickest Track Club”!

Of course, marathons are for a very select group of people, and no one with angina should attempt one unless he or she has first had the full treatment to minimize any possible harmful effect. And the enthusiasm for the general public to enter marathons has died away in the 1990s—rightly so, because too many untrained amateurs were being put at serious health risk.

However, half-marathons are still popular. I ran in the Great Scottish Run in August 1995, and thought I had put up a creditable performance, finishing in about one hour fifty-five minutes on an amazingly hot day for Scotland. The temperature was in the nineties (Fahrenheit) for the last hour of the race, so I found the last mile and a half wearing, to say the least. I was amazed to find that one of my patients had finished twenty minutes before me, feeling fit and comfortable. A year before he had had a triple bypass operation for severe angina!

Of course, he could never have achieved his run without the new coronary circulation. Nor could he have done it without the determination to get well again. He used exercise to do it. I do not suggest that half-marathon running is the choice for more than a very few people, but there is always some exercise that you can do to improve things, and it is much better than sitting around worrying about the future! That is often the alternative.

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