> A thin-faced, introspective Montanan, Wolfe had recently quit his job as an assistant U.S. attorney in Helena to concentrate on running for the North Face’s global athletic team.

Well yeah, that seems more important. /s

Article is faintly ludicrous.

Extreme endurance exercise is bad for your body. Medicine has understood this for years. Marathon runners, cyclists and swimmers have one of the highest incidences of atrial fibrillation once they pass age 60. If you took a blood test right after running a marathon, doctors would think you’re having a heart attack.

> Back in Montana he started running 25, sometimes 30 hours a week, fasting to drop any extra weight off his already thin frame and beating himself up in the margins of his training logs.

> Skaggs told me after Hardrock, he took a single day off, then started training for a marathon. “Stupid-hard running,” he says, “and the symptoms just kept getting worse and worse.”

This article is about people who are damaging their bodies through extreme, unnatural exercise - and then they are surprised that they’ve damaged their bodies. This publication is blithely unaware of how ridiculous this sounds. Like reading a Reddit thread of coke addicts earnestly cheering each other on to consume more and more coke, then being disappointed when their nose disintegrates.

I suppose it’s scientifically interesting that we don’t know the cause down to the biomolecular level. But that’s not surprising either. Other than genetic disorders that can be traced to a single faulty protein, or those caused by some external causative agent like a toxin or a virus, we don’t really know the root cause of that many diseases.