Unlikely Lot Come Up With Marathon Effort

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday August 2, 2008

PHILIP DERRIMAN

AN INTERESTING fact to emerge from Marathon Challenge, a documentary on SBS tomorrownight, is that in warm weather humans can outrun virtually all other animals over long distances, dogs and horses included.

Our trick, it seems, is keeping cool. With bare skin and millions of sweat glands, we can lose heat more quickly than, say, a hair-covered dog can lose by panting, which has led some scientists to conclude that our ancestors caught their prey by running them into a state of heat exhaustion.

In other words, humans evolved into endurance runners so they could hunt animals that were much faster than them over short distances. If this is true - if our bodies are specially adapted to long-distance running - you'd think we'd all be able to run a marathon if we put our minds to it.

This is the theory the documentary sets out to test. It follows a motley group of 13 American adults, ranging up to age 60, who have volunteered to run in the Boston marathon.

All previously have had sedentary lifestyles and most are overweight and unfit. One man has been HIV positive for 14 years. Another had a heart attack in the 1990s.

They start training 40 weeks before the marathon. Each week they do numerous short runs on their own and one distance run together, which gets longer by the week. After five weeks, they are running about 16 kilometres. All the while, doctors monitor their health and fitness.

The documentary is one of the Nova series of science programs, which have acquired a big following in the US. The producers did run a risk of having one of the group drop dead with a heart attack, although it seems the risk is slight. The chances of dying during exercise, we are told, are one in 50,000.

The surprise is that the group members do not shed heaps of weight when they start running. At the end of the 40 weeks training, most are still overweight. The most obese of them all, a woman named Betsy, does lose 20 kilograms, but since she was about 30kg overweight to begin with, she still has quite a way to go. Betsy, though, proves to be the fastest female runner in the group.

The explanation offered in the program is that running and jogging do not burn up as many calories as is generally believed.

So how many of the 13 complete the Boston Marathon? Well, one does not start in the race: she was forced out earlier by injury. Of the 12 who do start, though, all make it to the finishing line, which is quite an achievement . . . especially for Steve DeOssie, a former American football pro and now a TV commentator in his mid-40s, who has to carry about 140kg of body weight around the course.

The documentary is in every respect a classy production. Listen in particular to the narrator, Liev Schreiber, a movie actor. The name may not be familiar, although most people would recognise a photo of him.

He's made a separate career for himself as a TV documentary narrator, a role in which he excels.

His voice is measured and restrained but, as in this case, capable of engaging the viewers' emotions.

Marathon Challenge will screen for an hour from 8.30pm, to be followed by Stranded: The Andes Plane Crash Survivors, a documentary about former Uruguayan rugby players who return to the site of the 1972 Andes plane crash, where, to avoid starvation, the 16 survivors ate the flesh of some of the 29 passengers who perished.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home