A lot of carnage in this year's race!  Plesko's wrist, Seidner gets rhabdo, Refsnider drops out early with knee injury, and the list goes on and on.  Best wishes for speedy and complete recoveries to these courageous athletes.  It does seem to be getting a little silly when so many athletes are getting f-ed up like this.   Hopefully as the sport develops we'll figure out ways to reduce the injury rate when competing like this.

Hi,
I'm one of the many noobs whose imagination has been captured by this sport.   The longest I've ever ridden is a century on a road bike, many years ago.    As I have been eyeing and training for my first race, I have been increasingly concerned about potential long term injury coming out of these.   Which of course seems totally counterproductive to the underlying biking goal of increasing fitness.

It seems like there are an excessive amount of people with nerve injuries and numbness in their fingers coming out of these races, lasting weeks, months or even permanently. 

It seems there are also potential negative effects of submitting your body to the elevated cortisol levels that racers subject themselves to by the length and sleep deprivation.

This one may be crazy, but I swear that the people who do ultra endurance seem to appear older than their age.   As if the races could be taking years off life. 

I even wonder if riders may come out of these with ED issues that nobody really wants to talk about. 

All of this has me questioning if I may be signing up for something that will ultimately harm my body, despite the obvious mental and experiential benefits that would come from completing a race like this.

I'm curious how those of you who have done these events would honestly answer this question:  Is this sport bad for your health?