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The article was not very convincing. It seems to make the case to slow down after age 50.
Heres my opinion: When one exercises hard the body has to recover from the stress. That is why nutrition, sleep, and stress control in other areas of life matter so much. Moderate exercise is good for you...but i agree with the author. Once the running is taken to the elite level or beyond it poses some risk. On the other hand...I find it funny that someone would take time to write this article when 2/3 of american adults are overweight and 1/3 obese and heart disease is the number 1 killer in the USA...further, these people that diet from heart disease are not dying from too much running. There is a fine line and most of us seem to be on one extreme or the other. Thats why ideally we should limit our run mileage, cross train regularly, and enjoy life.
I'm 54 and haven't been able to run for the last couple years because of knee (torn meniscus) and lower back (herniated disks) issues. It's been bumming me out, but this article makes me feel a little better. Maybe if I had been able to keep pushing myself so hard with my running, I would have incurred more serious health issues. I guess I'm just looking for a silver lining.
Bogus:
http://www.runnersworld.com/health/too-much-running-myth-rises-again
"What this means is that they used statistical methods to effectively "equalize" everyone's weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on. But this is absurd when you think about it. Why do we think running is good for health? In part because it plays a role in reducing weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on... They're effectively saying, 'If we ignore the known health benefits of greater amounts of aerobic exercise, then greater amounts of aerobic exercise don't have any health benefits.'"
article was meh, this was gold: "To finish at the front of my age group, yeah, that’s an inspiration."
I take this article seriously. I'm 58 and race about 7 to 10 times per year. I often run some miles in training well under 8 miles per minute. I run about 20 miles per week sometimes much less (if I have some ankle or foot injury I'm working through or taking time off). I don't run marathons but do run 1/2 marathons.
I need more information on this.
At 48, I feel most alive when I am pounding out 6 minute miles. Can't do it for near as long as I used to but I will keep doing it as long as I can.
I'm running in a 50 mile race in AZ at the end of next week. I'll be 61 on Dec. 16th.
Even though I'm not very fast, I like to push myself and train reasonably hard. I just enjoy it.
The alternative is much more of a death sentence for me.
[quote]Conundrum wrote:
I often run some miles in training well under 8 miles per minute.
[quote]
Pretty crazy stuff dude. Didn't even know 8 miles in one minute is humanly possible. I learn new things every day.
Conundrum,
don't sweat it (pun intended).
Read the RW link. The guy does a good job showing these authors currently have a hard-on to prove vigorous exercise is bad for you, even though some of the big studies they looked at did NOT show that.
The jury is most certainly out.
Many studies have shown that those with the highest levels of exercise capacity have lowest mortality rates. And you are not even doing the mega amounts that might warrant a concern (if you were trying to bike AND run an hour a day a hard for decades and decades into your 60's an 70's, you might be doing some harm eventually. But even still, there is no ironclad evidence that this is the case even with these large amounts).
How exactly do they control for smoking?
Funny that they offer martial arts as a safe alternative.
I hyperextended my knee while kicking in a karate class and tore the meniscus. It's easy to do. I'd never had any kind of knee problem during my many years of running. Needless to say, I quit the karate soon after that. I like running -- and my knees -- too much.
I did enjoy the conditioning exercises, which could be very tough. In fact, they probably put as much strain on the heart as hard running, especially when you consider the valsalva effect at work during some of the karate exercises.
Here is my take on this:
Going hard certainly increases your risk of injury, meaning there is a chance that you're sideline longer and can't workout. That's when you don't get the benefits of exercise. In other words: it's better to run 20mpw year round than 35mpw for half a year and be injured the other half.
But you hardly ever hear of people dying during a run (heart attack), that stuff usually happens at home or at work.
Mike Joyner's blog featured an entry on this in October. Mike's a true expert, so his more nuanced, balanced post is worth a look:
This is not news to WELL INFORMED people. Look at all the marathon runners, does this look healthy to you:
http://news.adventist.org/images/uploads/images/abel-running-web.jpg
They have virtually no arms, no leg muscles, no nottin. They have slogged every single last muscle out of their body.
If you want to be fit and healthy, go to the GYM. Lift heavy, lift often, eat a lot of protein.
Then, you can look like this:
Trick question: which of the individuals might be healthier? If you can't answer that question, ask your wife.
This is really nothing new. Dr. Ken Cooper said decades ago that anyone running more than 15 miles per week is doing so for reasons other than health.
I run a lot because running and racing is my hobby. If health were my only aim, I'd run 3 miles a day, 4 or 5 times a week. I've accepted that there are some risks associated with my hobby, and I'm fine with it.
Having read around a bit about this, one thing that is very clear is the study's authors have an agenda to push... and they're not being very subtle about it either. The same team have said the same thing in the same way consistently for some time now. It's a lot of effort to go to and it seems unlikely an anti-running mindset would prompt them to, in my mind, jepoardise their academic credentials (the hack jobs are that bad). This means they're instead PRO something else. This is the question that needs answering.
The title of one of their studies provides a clue.
"Exercise like a hunter-gatherer: a prescription for organic physical fitness."
O rly? Brass tacks have just been reached, I think.
The abstract states:
"A large proportion of the health woes beleaguering modern cultures are because of daily physical activity patterns that are profoundly different from those for which we are genetically adapted. The ancestral natural environment in which our current genome was forged via natural selection called for a large amount of daily energy expenditure on a variety of physical movements... The logical answer is to replicate the native human activity pattern to the extent that this is achievable and practical. Recommendations for exercise mode, duration, intensity, and frequency are outlined with a focus on simulating the routine physical activities of our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors whose genome we still largely share today.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21545934
No attacks on running here. Just a cheerlead for a different form of exercise. So the agenda is laid bare. Now, maybe you guys can help me out here but there's a very popular fad going around at the moment that's predicated along similar lines, is aggressively expansionist and seems to take particular issue with runners, mainly via tiresome trolls with eighth-grade writing level and lots of spare time. GotShit? CostIt? Something like that.
Trip-trapping over a bridge is fun. Let's see what drags itself out into the light and begins to grunt.
hold the phone wrote:
Bogus:
http://www.runnersworld.com/health/too-much-running-myth-rises-again"What this means is that they used statistical methods to effectively "equalize" everyone's weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on. But this is absurd when you think about it. Why do we think running is good for health? In part because it plays a role in reducing weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on... They're effectively saying, 'If we ignore the known health benefits of greater amounts of aerobic exercise, then greater amounts of aerobic exercise don't have any health benefits.'"
This article at RW destroys the claims by the authors of the study. The claim that running more than 20 mpw at 8 min/mile is bad for you has no basis if the study has intentionally eliminated any health benefits that might derive from running longer or faster than that.
The article also points out that in a population study that DOESN'T eliminate all of the possible benefits of running and just compares life expectancy, they did not identify any upper amount of exercise that cut life expectancy:
We were not able to identify an upper limit of physical activity, either moderate or vigorous, above which more harm than good will occur in terms of long-term life expectancy benefits.
