What is up with all of these pro racers dying of heart attacks??

[shinomaster]

Michelle Zanoli, Jose Marie Jimenenez, and four others last year..all healthy young bucks cut down in their prime. What is really going on? Is pro racing that stressful on the body (yes I'm sure), or is it drugs ?? So, so, very sad.

[Kevin]

I would guess it is the drug usage. The life expectancy of a drug user, whether an athlete or otherwise, is much shorter. Also based on what I have read it is usually the heart that gives out. It is a real shame when someone chooses drugs and what they can give you in the short term over a long life.

Kevin

[Sandy]

Although these cyclists have phenomenal cardiovascular fitness, they simply push their hearts to a remarkably high and continual level, leaving no buffer zone or safety zone for any existing unknown cardiac weakness. Sudden deaths have occurred in superbly conditioned college basketball players which were directly related to previously non-detected inherent cardiac problems the player had. I am not talking about deaths that were in any way drug related.

My brother is a cardiologist and he always tells me that I should not allow my heart rate go too high since you should always leave a safety zone. I did a couple of spin classes a couple of days ago in which the room was quite warm and my heart rate was in the 150 plus range probably much too often and for too long. It hit 158, which is about 100 percent of my theoretical max, so I backed off until the heart rate dropped some. The pros don't back off much, I would guess.

Sandy

[Kevin]

Sandy,

100% of max!!! What are you trying to do, win the TDF. Keep it easy, we don't want to lose you. Keep it below 90% of max.

Kevin

[Bruce H.]

Kevin,
Before you bury Sandy, keep in mind he said his "theoretical max". Until he is tested it is hard to know exactly where his "real" max is.
I use an inexact test for my spinning classes. I tell them when they begin to feel uncomfortable and have a tough time breathing properly, they are reaching their anaerobic threshold. This is usually somewhere around 90-92% max. If Sandy was not at this point it is possible but unlikely he was truly at 100% max.
I am not a physician or physiologist but am simply throwing out some ideas for further discussion. Hopefully the physicians on the website can be more accurate than I have been,
Bruce H.

[Byron]

Abuse usually has its consequences. Cardiac abuse in professional training is the same. Drug use will enhance any detrimental effect. A few years ago, my wintertime fitness schedule included many times of pushing the limit on statinary cycles, spending too large a percentage of time in the 80% to !00% MHR zone. By spring I was in great shape, but I began to have periods of tachycardia (racing heart rate). The first time was pretty alarming. I had just finished a 40 mile hard ride and was on warm down when my heart just started racing. My MH monitor was still on and when the rate should have been under 100, it reached 167, and I was coasting. I shook me up. I rode down to the hospital emergency room, showed them my monitor, and they started to hook me up to theirs. Then it quit. Happened a couple times after that. Feels like a hammer in the chest. Been about three years now and haven't had any more. Wintertime fitness is toned down now and more in the 80% to 90% range fewer times. Most is 60% to 80%. When I was younger and ran alot, I never even thought about such things. I guess it' time to tune in.

[womancyclist]

I read some where that the average avid cyclist's (someone who rides about 100 miles or so a week) heart is physically bigger in size then your average
person. I am on the CTS program and every 2 months or so during the
season I do a field test. I'm sure most of you know what that is, right?
If not it's an all out test to find your max HR when pushed in to the red zone.
Basically a Time Trial test. Anyway I have pushed my HR to about 192.
And have been on very fast group rides and races where it's topped at that number as well. Sometime it concerns me but that is just the way my HR is.

Cycylist who race push themselves to the max all the time! Is that good?
I"m not sure.
My average HR during an endurance ride is about 152.
Knowing your body and your HR zones is something every cyclist should know. And also have the sense to ease back when it's getting too high.
The guys I usaually ride with go hard all the time! So during the winter
months I stay away from those hammer fest rides.

You also have to be careful in those spinning classes as well.
Riding indoors with no good ventalation and all that body heat bouncing
off all those sweaty bodies!! You can just about light the Empire State tower lights with all that energy!!!

Spring is sooner than you think!

[Sandy]

woman cyclist,

It was quite warm in the room when my heart rate hit 158, and, although I was not really feeling at all like my breathing was labored, I dropped back in the effort, as I realized that my pulse was simply much too high. I find that when it is warm in the room and all 25 bikes are being used, the room stays quite warm, and my pulse is usually 10-15 beats higher than when it is cooler. The next day I did a couple of classes and my heart rate was much lower, but the room was cooler. I also notice that if I have not exercised for 3 or 4 days, my heart rate is higher than normal during exercise, whether it is outside riding or doing spin classes. Intense efforts tend to make my breathing much more labored than even a gradual increased effort, in which the heart rate may be higher, but without such a higher intensity shorter term effort.

Searching for oxygen, Still Serotta Sandy

[mavic1010]

What confuses me is the # of deaths in basketball and cycling, but yet none in marathon running, football, soccer etc...

I can't imagine basketball and cycling being more strenous on the heart than some other sports.

[Sandy]

mavic 1010.

There have been some sudden deaths in basketball relating to the heart which occurred due to the size (height) of the players, which gave them a much higher incidence of certain heart abnormalities. This occurred several times in the last few years. Football players have succumbed to sudden death from the heat in an almost yearly occurrence, but I guess in those situations, it is an overall body effect as opposed to a single item, like the heart and the cardiovascular system. I do think that the elite level of cyclists really push their bodies to the max for long periods of time.

Sandy

[JohnS]

You also have to take into account that there are many times more the athletes competing in these other sports at a high level. I read several years ago (I don't remember where) that many ex-pro cyclists die before their 60th birthday.

[dohearne]

"but yet none in marathon running"

Jim Fixx proved 20 years ago that one could be a long distance runner and die from heart failure. I think genetics and diet were both contributing factors in his case, as I remember.

[mavic1010]

Sandy:

I think deaths due to heat exhaustion for the football players is a different animal compared cyclists dying of heart attacks.

Was Jim Fixx the one that claimed that it didn't matter what you ate as long as you burned it off and then died of a heart attack in his 40's?

I would think triathletes push their bodies harder during competition than cyclists...I mean cyclists aren't going 85-100% of their max in road races...unless it's your local crit. I know someone will bring up that telekom rider that did the Ironman and said that it was not as hard as the TDF, but I do believe he stated that for a single day it was harder than the TDF.

It could be that cyclists doing 3 week long competitions are pushing their cardiovascular limits beyond the red zone...

In addition, the comment of more athletes in other sports makes the heart attacks in cycling more disturbing...not many cyclists (in the scope of all professional athletes), but yet incidence of sudden heart attacks appear to be higher. Now, take this comment with a grain of salt...I read somewhere that approximately 1/2 the cyclists have asthma?! Still trying to figure that one out....

[Dr. Doofus]

EPO, NESP, HGH, insulin abuse....

Pro racers have been frying themselves for years, but they haven't been having heart attacks in their 20s and 30s until the last 17. Yes, there has always been doping -- but Roger Riviere's opiates, Tommy Simpson's attempt to use brandy and bennies to get over the Ventoux, and the crud I saw being passed around French amatuer races, although toxic and definitely harmful, don't alter your basic body chemistry and internal organ function the way that modern "boosters" do. Bert Oosterbosch forgets to take his aspirin to thin his out overly-oxegenated blood ...Zanette goes from a fringe domestique to the Flanders podium...the French kid this summer comes out of nowhere to be a hot prospect...please...if you don't think these deaths are drug related, have another cup of kool aid, and tell yourself that Postal wasn't using hemoglobin boosters...yeah...all those bags were for one mechanic...and they needed to dispose of them at odd hours, away from the Tour village, because even though the mechanic had medical documentation for his condition, disposing of the mess near the hotel would have just been too hard to explain, harder than explaining why you did the whole "secret agent" thing to get rid of it the way you did....

Many pros have clauses in their contracts regarding long-term health damage after retirement...figure that one out. As for 1/2 of the peloton having salbutanol scripts, well, they found doctors who were willing to sign off on diagnoses, so that the athlete could fall back on a powerful bronchial dialator when they needed it during a race. Asthmatic my ass....


Oh yeah, and look at Pantani -- it hasn't been "stress" from "false accusations" that have aged his face and body ten years in the last five...more like the effects of whatever he took to go from losing five minutes in a time trial to Zulle in 1994 to beating him by two minutes in 1998....


I love to watch pro racing, but I'd be surprised if more than 5% of the peloton is clean -- with "dirty" including shady asthma prescriptions, etc.. Its a buisness, they know the risks, and in a sport where a Tour stage win keeps you on a team for the next two or three years, and gets you a fat raise, and where the dope controls are a joke, I don't blame 'em...you do what you have to. Its just that you can't do that, as a TDF official once said, on salad and fizzy water. They have their time in the sun, then they drop like flies -- I'm sure it adds to the existential bull**** romance of it all...race fast, die young, leave a trail of speculation in your wake.


Speaking of drugs, I need my Belgian chocolate and coffee fix now....


Robert

[Sandy]

Dr. Doofus is no doofus! Your posts are great- Great delivery and great content.


Very content to read Dr.D's content,


Sandy

[oracle]

Cycling over-represented in heart fatalities
Dear Cyclingnews,

Zanette, Jimenez, Zanoli: European professionals and all dead this year whilst young men from apparent heart attacks. These are just the ones I've kept track of; are there any more?

It seems apparent to me that current and former European professional cyclists in their early to mid 30's are over-represented in fatalities attributed to heart problems, congenital and otherwise.

What could be going on? Does cycling attract, due to a mysterious or subconscious factor, those of us who suffer from a predisposition to heart problems? Certainly, many world-class swimmers are asthmatic, but they began swimming on the advice of their doctors. The messrs named above, I assume, received no such coaxing to become cyclists. I also suffer from predisposition to heart problems and I was drawn to the sport as if to a magnet.

Who can forget the tragic figure of Rudy Dhaenens? A nearly man who won the world title in 1990 amid much surprise, suffered the dreaded (and perhaps clichéd) 'rainbow curse' the next (or did he? He was, after all, the classic 'nearly man'), and was then forced to quit cycling upon the revelation that he suffered a congenital heart defect that excluded hard physical exertion. That Dhaenens was eventually killed in a car accident travelling to his commentary job on the Tour of Flanders makes him a worthy subject for a ballad. I can also remember a Polish rider whose name I cannot recall that won the amateur World road title in the early nineties that was forced to quit for a similar heart ailment.

Greg Lemond's words to a British documentary in 1990 seem incisive: "Who knows, maybe this sport isn't really healthy". Lemond was alluding to the Tour, of course, and not to cycling in general. If it wasn't for his superb fitness and talent, Lemond would probably have suffered complications from his hunting accident far earlier than he eventually did.

But Lemond's point is a salient one: are the demands of professional cycling so high and violent to the body that they produce fatal health problems relatively early in life; a hastening of the things that were to kill us later in life? Some medical literature a few years ago suggested that the human heart has a preset number of beats it can perform before failing. Do the physical demands of professional cycling use up that number early?

My speculations in this letter have been at best whimsical, and at worst guilty of fallacious argument. However, my desire has been to avoid the cynical assumption that professional cyclists are dying from EPO misuse. Unfortunately, time may tell that this was really the case after all.

Kyle Macak
Sydney, Australia
Saturday, January 3, 2004

:beer: :beer: beer is the cure

oracle

[Tom]

Many people think nothing of training their legs to the point of breaking down and then say aw, shucks, I should have backed off when I had the signs. Generally one's heart doesn't hurt until it's too late to do anything about it. Thickening your blood to the consistency of Jell-O whether by honest chronic dehydration or dishonest chemical additives can't be healthy, especially when you go out and red line six hours a day.

[davids]

In case you didn't see this Sunday's NY Times Magazine:
The Lab Animal (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/magazine/18SPORTS.html)

[JohnS]

The NY Times article was very interesting, to say the least.

[CJV]

In March of 1997, after spreading a truck-load of gravel in the fall and shoveling 8 feet of snow in January/ February, I had gas pains in my chest. A visit to an internist resulted in a prescription for acid reflux and a demand I visit the local cardiologists. After a failed stress test, my trip to Aurora, CO, resulted in two stents being installed during angioplasty. No lectures from the cardiologist--what can you say to someone who rode 5200 miles in 1996, is a vegetarian, doesn't smoke, and drinks moderately? Now I take a statin, a 325-mg aspirin, and Prilosec (OTC). And ride as if my life depends upon it.

[Climb01742]

CJV, your story is haunting. we believe our fate is in our hands. and in many ways it is. but it is also in the hands of our genetics. we can choose how to live. if only we could choose our parents. good luck. may you be riding at 90. may we all be riding at 90.