Marathon training causes heart damage?

“Training for marathons can cause heart damage in healthy people: study” is the title of a NYDailyNews.com article dated March 18, 2010.

If you read the article, though, then you see that the forty-nine marathoners studied trained ten to nineteen hours per week over periods ranging from two to twenty years.

I am not an elite marathoner, which might explain why training ten to nineteen hours per week surprised me.

Even my busiest week in a marathon training season with Houston FIT has me training no more than seven hours.

A study a few years ago at University of Maryland Medical Center found that a physician and marathoner who had exercised vigorously every day for thirty years had an unusually troublesome calcium-screening scan of his heart.

Are these people working out too much?

What’s your weekly maximum? Please leave a comment here. Thanks!