Rhabdomyolysis, the breakdown of skeletal muscle cells that leads to poisoning of the body, was the cause of death of a 24-year-old runner from Pennsylvania during Sunday’s 50th anniversary New York City Marathon, her father said.
Rapel Apa was running the distance for the first time. She collapsed in Central Park, a few kilometers from the finish line. She was running in a charity fundraiser for the fight against Parkinson’s disease, hoping to honor the memory of her grandfather, who died of the disease in 2022.
The young runner’s devastated father said his daughter had never had problems with fitness and had been in very good health.
Apa played on her university’s field hockey team and had just begun graduate studies at Charleston Southern University. After she collapsed, a passerby began cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which medical personnel then continued, but it was unsuccessful.
The prestigious marathon was won by Sweden’s Andreas Almgren, who was making his debut in the event, and Kenya’s Cheila Chepkirui, who won for the second time in her career (she triumphed in 2024). Almgren’s time of 2:06.01 was the third-best result in the 50-year history of the New York City Marathon. The runner from Scandinavia became the first marathoner to win as a debutant since Ethiopia’s Gebre Gebremariam won in 2010.
This was the 50th edition of the marathon, whose course runs through all five boroughs of New York City. In 1976, during the seventh edition of the race, just over 2,000 runners lined up at the start, including only 88 women. On Sunday, as many as 61,146 of the 61,529 runners from 153 countries finished the race, with women making up nearly half of them (almost 29,000). (PAP)
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Source: Nowy Dziennik
