May 13, 2026 · 1 hr 45 min · 34 segments
In this episode, I cover "athlete's heart" — the paradox where the same cardiovascular adaptations that make endurance athletes exceptional can also mimic, and sometimes mask, real risk. I trace the…
Andy GalpinHost
For those Spanish-speaking friends out there, that of course means The White Horse.
And Caballo, as he was referred to, terrorized and mystified the Copper Canyon range of the Sierra Madres in northern Mexico for the better part of twenty years.
Many years later, of course, the story would be unraveled as an individual by the name of Micah True, which was also, in fact, not his real name.
But as the lore goes, Micah, or Caballo, lived most of his life in this desolate canyon region, and he would live running between thirty and sixty miles from village to village, gathering up resources, and then running back to his hut, and no one really knew what the heck he was doing.
Micah himself was running somewhere between one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy miles per week for nearly two decades.
And again, keep in mind, he was doing this in an area where he had no access to running shoes, medical care, or really any advanced technology, nutrition, hydration strategies, so simply surviving by running large amounts every day for decades on end.
But really, he became one of the most central and legendary figures in the ultramarathon circles.
But where the story is of use today is the fact that Micah himself, while running those, again, one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy miles per week for decades, eventually ended up dying at age fifty-eight during a very routine twelve-mile jog.
And if you're from the running community or world at all, you probably know this exact story.
If you don't know of Micah himself, you know the bigger plot here, and that is this juxtaposition or paradox between really incredibly, highly cardiovascularly fit individuals, oftentimes runners, who then end up paradoxically dying in mid to early age of cardiovascular disease.
And so if you looked at the title of this show and were kind of wondering what it meant, this is really exactly what I'm talking about.
It's this phenomenon of trying to understand, well, how are these people who are elite in this physiological area also at extremely high risk? The story itself is really as old as we've understood cardiovascular physiology, and so when we actually get into what's happening here, we don't know Caballo's story itself.
He was lost in the middle of a canyon somewhere, and by the time they got to him, it was too difficult to perform a proper autopsy.
But the prevailing wisdom here is he likely died of something called left ventricular cardiac myopathy.
For those Spanish-speaking friends out there, that of course means The White Horse.
And Caballo, as he was referred to, terrorized and mystified the Copper Canyon range of the Sierra Madres in northern Mexico for the better part of twenty years.
Many years later, of course, the story would be unraveled as an individual by the name of Micah True, which was also, in fact, not his real name.
But as the lore goes, Micah, or Caballo, lived most of his life in this desolate canyon region, and he would live running between thirty and sixty miles from village to village, gathering up resources, and then running back to his hut, and no one really knew what the heck he was doing.
Micah himself was running somewhere between one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy miles per week for nearly two decades.
And again, keep in mind, he was doing this in an area where he had no access to running shoes, medical care, or really any advanced technology, nutrition, hydration strategies, so simply surviving by running large amounts every day for decades on end.
But really, he became one of the most central and legendary figures in the ultramarathon circles.
But where the story is of use today is the fact that Micah himself, while running those, again, one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy miles per week for decades, eventually ended up dying at age fifty-eight during a very routine twelve-mile jog.
And if you're from the running community or world at all, you probably know this exact story.
If you don't know of Micah himself, you know the bigger plot here, and that is this juxtaposition or paradox between really incredibly, highly cardiovascularly fit individuals, oftentimes runners, who then end up paradoxically dying in mid to early age of cardiovascular disease.
And so if you looked at the title of this show and were kind of wondering what it meant, this is really exactly what I'm talking about.
It's this phenomenon of trying to understand, well, how are these people who are elite in this physiological area also at extremely high risk? The story itself is really as old as we've understood cardiovascular physiology, and so when we actually get into what's happening here, we don't know Caballo's story itself.
He was lost in the middle of a canyon somewhere, and by the time they got to him, it was too difficult to perform a proper autopsy.
But the prevailing wisdom here is he likely died of something called left ventricular cardiac myopathy.
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