In any given year, it is estimated that approximately 1 out of every 4 active ultramarathon runners will suffer from knee pain or a knee-related injury (Hoffman, 2104). What most people don’t know is that running, more...
Articles by Tracy Hoeg, Md, Phd
The West Coast saw another bad fire season in 2021, and we can only expect this to increase in the future. Summer wildfire frequency in the United States has escalated 18-fold between 1972 and 2018, with a five-fold a...
Myocarditis, or inflammation of the muscle of the heart, is a rare condition. It affects about 1-2 people per 10,000 each year, but this adds up to be around 1.5 million annually (Kang, 2021). It will typically cause che...
Over the last year and a half, we have seen approximately an 11-fold decrease (Scheer, 2021) in participation at endurance running events despite an estimated chance of less than 1-2 per millio...
As a society, we may be at the point where we’re ready move forward in how we view exercise – especially running during pregnancy. There is an antiquated, but at times, persistent view in medicine that “bed rest” is a...
As we have watched the story of the COVID-19 vaccine development unfold these last few months, I think it would be a fair assessment to say that what we are witnessing is nothing short of a miracle. We now have three...
In early January 2021, a year (give or take) into the COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccination process is just beginning. I received my first dose of the Moderna vaccine two weeks ago (and other than a slightly elevated hea...
2020 has been a year of race cancellations, which have persisted longer than anyone could have anticipated. On March 15, I shook my head in disbelief as I saw the pictures of 6,200 runners lining up to race the Bath H...
We know exercise is beneficial for the body, but are athletes who log many miles over the years doing damage to their heart? Long-distance runners live in a world of mixed messages. One article will say running prevents...
It has now been over six months since the initial wave of COVID-19 hit the United States, which means we are finally getting some early information about the long-term effects of the illness. What type of disease will CO...
Bone injuries may not get as much attention as Achilles tendonitis, plantar fasciitis and various causes of knee pain. However, stress fractures, or bone stress injuries (BSI), are not only common, but associated with os...
Near the beginning of the COVID outbreak, a physician stated in a discussion forum that she believed “ultra-endurance athletes would be expected to have more severe disease because of their baseline high level of inflamm...
Hormones can have a dramatic effect on our body composition, energy, recovery, injury risk and how we respond to training. Although this is becoming well known, it is actually still quite difficult for women to get usefu...
At around mile 70 of the Zion 100-mile race, Ken Huang fell for the first time and thought her depth perception was off. She then fell repeatedly, and both of her headlamps stopped working. When she finally got one of he...
There’s an indescribable joy of being able to run an ultramarathon again after what you thought was a career-ending injury. As John Trent recently explained in his column, “A resigned look in an orthopedic surgeon’s eyes...