Unfortunately, yes, people do believe that xine267, Somebody goes even further and suggests that you only have a certain number heartbeats, breaths, steps, elbow bends, knee bends, etc in you. I stand by the way argument that, even if the heartbeat thing is true, our resting heartbeats are pretty damn low compared to most people's, so it probably all evens out...
I just updated the blog to add in another study that I found quite interesting. This study suggests that smoking is beneficial for endurance athletes. It's lucky the media never got hold of that one! Just so you know though, this is in no way a study by a scientist claiming that endurance athletes should smoke. The author is "proving" an intentionally controversial point to show that if you do science badly then you can prove anything. In this case he has cherry picked a couple of example studies that show potential benefits of smoking to runners (loss of weight, increased lung volume, increased serum haemoglobin levels, etc.) and used them to argue an obviously incorrect hypothesis. But let's be honest, most people are going to read the title and make their judgement from that.
