My family attended the Great Eastern Run yesterday, it’s an
annual ½ marathon running race, held in Peterborough, to generate funding for
good causes. My Wife ran it for the
first time, and in a time of 1hr 50mins which she was pleased with. It was a beautiful sunny morning, and a
pleasure to see 4000 happy people going for a run and enjoying what they do. The theme of this blog is the issue of safety
by comparing stats in fatality rates between running and driving (no offence is intended as a result, please be
mindful of the sensitivity of this subject).
Last night, I saw a
tweet come through from a reporter from the local evening newspaper, saying
that a chap had collapsed on the finish line, and thankfully was successfully
resuscitated by some nearby St Johns Ambulance volunteers. I mentioned it to my Wife who said that she
heard 2 people had collapsed on the day, but did not know the severity of
either. When she started to train with
her local running club (Bourne) for this race, she told me that an established
member collapsed and died while running, who was in his 40’s.
I googled the race last night, and saw that in 2010, two
runners died and 6 were taken to hospital with ‘serious’ conditions http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/news/local/two-tragic-deaths-at-great-eastern-run-1-1546803 I can
see from that article that the fatalities were the first since it started in
2006. So it appears that in the 6 years
it has been running, as a direct result of running in the race, there have been
2 deaths and the chap needing CPR yesterday.
While I was trying to find some information on the Bourne
runner I noticed this entry of the sad death of a 42 yr old only last Sunday http://www.thisisderbyshire.co.uk/Ilkeston-fellrunner-42-dies-collapsing-run/story-17051251-detail/story.html
It has got me thinking about fatality stats in running,
compared to driving. In driving the
stats quoted tend to be a certain number for a given population, like this....
In order to make any sense of the stats, I need to make sure
I’m treating like with like. As it is difficult to identify with any accuracy how many driving hours people do
within the range of EU countries, it is difficult to say ‘x’ number of
fatalities are occurring after an average of ‘y’ driving hours. Very similar in the running world, for how many
hours does the average ‘runner’ run?
I appreciate that the following is very unscientific, but on
the basis of my Wife’s finishing position yesterday and her time, let me
assume for the sake of a starting point, that the average runner yesterday took 2.5hrs to complete the race. Let me also assume that over the 6 races,
4000 runners have run on each one.
That
would suggest that 24,000 runners, running on average for 2.5hrs has caused 2
deaths – 60,000 running hours have resulted in 2 deaths, a death every 30,000
running hours. If you were to join a
running club of let’s say 20 members, and over a week each of you run for 2 hrs
each, the club will consume 40 running hours per week – 2080 per year. Whilst
it might not be entirely accurate, at least you can begin to make some sense of
the figures.
Contrast this with driving.
How many hours do each of us on average drive for? Even if I were able to identify a reasonably
accurate figure, other than creating a stat of fatalities per average driving
hours, what purpose would it serve when you consider the following quote from
the above Eurostat link:
“The use of alcohol or drugs,
the failure to observe speed limits, and the refusal to wear seatbelts are
involved in about half of all road fatalities in the EU.”
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