News content of article contained in these 12 words:

>... elite athletes only being slightly more death-proof than merely highly active people ...

So, rational expectation confirmed: gradually diminishing returns to general health as fitness increases.

If I'm reading this correctly the study tested people's athletic ability at some point in time and tracked when they died.

The article conflates athletic ability and exercise. Sure a person that has great athletic ability would likely exercise a lot. But not necessarily and certainly not for the remainder of their life.

Good athletes might have good genes. Maybe over exercise actually hurts your fitness and you would scores lower on the initial fitness test. Either way, I don't think the study even remotely supports the claim purported by the article

This headline and article may be right in spirit, but are obviously wrong in letter. And we do ourselves a disservice calling this oversimplification news. If you run/bike/whatever too hard for too long, you die. Plain and simple. Obviously, almost no one reading this article would ever be in danger of doing such a thing, but there is obviously an upper bound to how much exercise a human can perform. For those who don't feel like reading the article, the claim is that running is good for you, and that those who claim running too much can harm your health are wrong.

I suppose it's theoretically possible to perform some type of exercise until you die. It's also a lot more likely that exercise will strain your heart enough to cause a heart attack, or some other injury that leads to death. What the study is saying is that even accounting for all of those situations that actually happened, the odds are still in your favor to exercise more. So the odds are, you won't exercise until you die.

>So the odds are, you won't exercise until you die.

How did you know this about me?

Statistics say nothing about individuals. I cannot say you won't exercise until you die, but I can say there's a very low probability you will.

you could drink so much water that you die, as well. but... should we carefully note this every time someone says to drink a lot of water?

You could inhale too much air too, your lungs aren't balloons, man!

Interesting, have always believed in exercise, but felt marathons were "too much" of a good thing. Should I reevaluate that?

Just an anecdotal observation, people I know that run 70+ miles a week, and have full time jobs/families, etc. have to get up at 4:30 AM to get the miles in or rearrange schedules to fit everything in. So maybe any health decline is due to a decrease in quality sleep and increased stress to get the miles in, not the increased mileage. If you have tons of free time, run as much as you like.

To be honest, I won't be running that long anyway, though do ride my bike and hit the gym. It's just before I had a nice justification. ;-)

This is just another one of those issues where a scientifically illiterate magazine/paper picks up some article to confuse people even more. It's just pop science, you can't rely on single studies, a lot of studies suck in terms of how they're designed.

One example where this is wrong: It's been clearly established that enough long distance running, like marathons, is cardiotoxic

A more educated view without the clickbait title: http://suppversity.blogspot.com/2018/10/survival-of-fittest-...

Different article about the same study from 2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18264436

What about overtraining syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome?

What about chronic fatigue syndrome? Is there some relation to too much exercise? Will it kill you?

While they both suck, AFAIK none of them will increase your mortality.