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Urge
Episode 5: Executive quickie
He's twice her age but she still knows how to make him feel young.
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[07/26/99]

Sexpert Opinion
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Urge
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[07/22/99]

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When he recovered, Nickles churned through the last 2.5 miles of his 6.2-mile swim, emerging in first place with a new course record of two hours, 19 minutes, 57 seconds. He then ran up on the beach, climbed on to his bike and raced 90 miles. The next day he rode 174.1 miles, and the day after that he ran back-to-back marathons (52.4 miles).

Nickles isn't crazy. He's an ultraman: a new breed of athlete that is stretching the bounds of human endurance to its snapping point. The Hawaii Ultraman, now recognized as the sport's world championship (other events include Ultraman Canada, to be held in British Columbia on July 31-Aug. 2), is perhaps the world's most grueling professional endurance race. It is not, however, the only one. Dozens of Herculean contests span the globe, and a daunting percentage of them are in the United States. The Badwater ultra-marathon in California's Death Valley pushes runners through 135 miles and 8,600 vertical feet of torturous terrain; and the RAAM (Race Across America) bicycle race challenges participants to traverse the country coast to coast as quickly as possible. The record, set by Rob Kish in 1992, is a mind-boggling eight days, three hours and 11 minutes, and racers have been known to rig up bungee-cord contraptions that keep their heads upright once their neck muscles have given out.

Is there such a thing as exercising too much? Find out here.

American athletes tend to be an obsessed bunch, but the trend toward endurance extremes has sounded alarms in the medical community. In the short term, common consequences of prolonged, strenuous exercise include tendonitis, stress fractures and chronic fatigue syndrome. But research is beginning to show that by racing ever farther and longer, athletes may also be putting themselves at risk for a host of chronic diseases, even cancer.

There's some irony in the suggestion that exercise should come with a health warning, but according to Liz Applegate, Ph.D., a nutrition professor at UC Davis and the author of "Eat Your Way to a Healthy Heart: Chocolate and 99 Other Foods to Help Your Heart" (Prentice Hall Press), the news that extreme athletes may be compromising their health shouldn't be too surprising. "People can do it," Applegate says, acknowledging the feats of athletes like Mark Allen -- a greyhound of a triathlete who has captured the Hawaii Ironman six times -- "but the body wasn't meant to do it."

The physical demands professional ultra-athletes put on their systems are tremendous. Their lifestyles are built fastidiously around repetitive, exhaustive exercise and they sequester themselves into regimented cycles of training, eating and sleeping. "Realistically, a professional ultra-distance athlete doesn't have a job," says Applegate. She estimates that ultra-athletes can burn as many as 5,000 to 6,000 calories a day (the average person burns 1,600 to 2,200 calories). Ultra-athletes might be capable of approximating their physical ideals, but maintaining superhuman athletic prowess is a biological impossibility.

Next page | The human body can run at maximum for only so long