Grueling four-day race becomes Stanford lab for cardiac e...( p>Prior to the race the researchers ra...),Health

p>Prior to the race, the researchers ran electrocardiograms, conducted ultrasounds and took blood samples of 86 or so race entrants but only about half of the original entrants ever finished the race. Dubbed one of the toughest athletic events in the world, race hazards such as injuries, trench foot and hallucinations due to lack of sleep took their toll.

"A common statistic is one hour of sleep per 24 hours of racing," said Gary Tompsett, an adventure racer from Scotland who helped organize the Adrenalin Rush. "As for the effects on my heart, I would never know. The legs always give up first!"

Still, the scientists determined that the hearts of the athletes who finished the competition pumped 10 percent less blood at the end of the race compared with the amount pumped at the beginning.

Ashley and his colleagues chose to study this group of endurance racers, who hailed from all over the world, because they wanted to test the phenomenon of cardiac fatigue under extreme circumstances. The few earlier studies to look at the phenomenon were conducted on shorter athletic endeavors and found no evidence that the heart muscle actually tires until race lengths stretched to at least 10 hours.

But no researchers had ever tested heart fatigue in a race that stretched over more than four days.

"This is the most extreme event in which cardiac fatigue has been assessed," said Ashley who labeled the race "ultra endurance lunacy in the Highlands of Scotland."

The Adrenalin Rush is an "adventure race," a new style of sport which puts multiple adventure sports - mountain biking, sea kayaking, climbing, hiking and navigation and even horse-riding - back to back into a race format. It's a bit like a four-day, off-road triathlon that uses wilderness as an essential part of its course. Most of the entrants are exceedingly fit with body-fat percentages half that of the normal population. Some are just "a little crazy," Ashley sai
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Contact: Tracie White
traciew@stanford.edu
650-723-7628
Stanford University Medical Center
25-Jul-2006

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