CUNY Interactive Journalism

A mile down the road from Brooklyn Academy of Music, which doubles on Marathon Sunday as the borough’s most densely-packed area for crowds on the course, Lafayette Avenue in Clinton Hill is just as vibrant, if slightly less prominent.

Against a backdrop of the towering Lafayette Gardens, a troubled housing project that has had two murders since August, an entire community – residents, elected officials, churchgoers and casual fans – turned out this month to cheer on the 40,000 runners to participate in the 2010 New York City Marathon.

If the highly-acclaimed British Journal of Sports Medicine and my little old informal – and wholly unscientific – survey are an indication,  runners hoping to remain injury-free face pretty stiff odds.

You heard that right. I put my research methods in the same sentence as the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Why? In a story about red flags that runners raise for health insurers, the New York Times cited one of their studies that “found rates of injury to the lower extremities were as high as 79 percent in long-distance runners.” (more…)