Preparing For the New York City Marathon

Leading up to Sunday’s New York City Marathon the Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog had a nice interview with Lewis Maharam, the marathon’s medical director.

Dr. Maharam’s biggest worry is that one of the runners will have a heart attack. As he described it “running the race could be their stress test that they don’t pass.” Internationally, about 1 in 70,000 marathon runners dies during a race.

Marathon directors have been especially anxious since the Chicago marathon was halted last month due to sweltering heat. One runner died of cardiac arrest and roughly 50 others were hospitalized due to the extraordinarily high temperatures.

– Lakshmi Gandhi