Male marathoners death rate double that of female runners
Even though hundreds of thousands more people finished grueling 26.2 mile marathons in the United States in 2009 compared to a decade earlier, a runner’s risk of dying during or soon after the race has remained very low — about .75 per 100,000, new Johns Hopkins research suggests. Men, however, were twice as likely to die as women.
“It’s very dramatic when someone dies on the course, but it’s not common,” says Julius Cuong Pham, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of emergency medicine and anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and leader of the study published online in The American Journal of Sports Medicine. “There are clearly many health benefits associated with running. It doesn’t make you immune, but your risk of dying from running a marathon is very, very low.”