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I’m not a huge fan of studies about runners dropping dead—not because the topic is scary or uninteresting to me, but because it’s so hard to calibrate the message properly. When you write a man-bites-dog article, it doesn’t matter how many nuances and caveats you pack in there: some people are inevitably going to walk away with the impression that it’s just a matter of time before some crazy human bites their beagle.
So let me clarify, right off the top, that what follows is mostly a good-news story. In the British Journal of Sports Medicine, a big team of researchers in Britain led by Charles Pedlar of St. Mary’s University published an analysis of every medical encounter at Parkrun events in the United Kingdom between 2014 and 2019. More than two million people participated, racking up 29 million finishes, and 18 of them died. Each of those deaths is extremely sad, but the overall picture is nonetheless encouraging.
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