Run 2,800 miles in 64 days - loose muscle, fat, and brain!
Friday, December 10, 2010 at 12:13PM 
Course of a previous race, the Transeurope-Footrace 2003On April 19, 2009, 45 ultra-endurance runners (39 men and 6 women) took off from southern Italy to run to North Cape, Norway, a distance of 2,800 miles in 64 days!! Why? “Because its there” doesn’t cut it. Certainly only a few can do this; congratulations to runners. But this is extreme. Persitence hunters in the Paleolithic covered a lot of ground chasing down an antelope but they did not run such distances in such a short time. The Trans Europe Footrace is possible only because of the large supporting cast. (The results of the 2009 race can be found here.)
Dr. Uwe Schutz and colleagues from the Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at the University Hospital of Ulm in Germany decided to tag along with the runners and periodically study the anatomical and physiological impact of this ultra-endurance event. Their findings were presented at the Radiological Society of North America annual meeting on November 29, 2010.