bushytailed said:
This makes my heart hurt. Prayers for his family and friends.
74-year-old runner dies at mile 16 of Houston marathon
I hate hearing stories like this. I'm glad someone was right there when it happened, which means that there was very likely nothing that could have been done as the response time should have been as good as you can hope for.
Because I was curious, I looked up this information. (My wife has had a rough go lately, as 3 people have died or almost died in races that she has run in the last year)
This is very rough, and I'm sure statisticians would poke holes in it, but it should be directionally accurate.
Approximately 7,452 die per day in the United States whereas there are approximately 327.2 million people. Thus, 0.002275% of the population dies every day. (1 out of 43,956 people)
Per the article - "A marathon spokesperson said he became the fourth person to die in the race's 48-year history....."
I was only able to find participant numbers for the last 10 years (all of which were between 19,000-24,000 total participants). It was a total of over 219,000. So even if you shrink the 48 years to instead be only the last 10, then 0.0018244% of people have died during the event, which means that you would be about 20% less likely to die while running a race than the average person.
If you include my estimates on the other 30+ years, the stats would point towards you being 50-70% less likely to die while running than the average person.