Well for some of us the risks are worth it versus smoking, drinking, and overeating. Some people can't handle life a life of moderation.
Well for some of us the risks are worth it versus smoking, drinking, and overeating. Some people can't handle life a life of moderation.
In 1995, I attended a seminar by Dr. Kenneth Cooper, author of Aerobics, who showed a chart that explained this pretty clearly.
The graph looked like a ski jump going from left to right. Sedentary adults were at the very high beginning of the jump. Moderate runners who ran 12-30mpw were at the bottom. Runners who ran more than 30mpw were at the end of the ski jump chart where the ramp begins to slope upwards again.
Yes, these extreme exercisers' risk was higher than ideal, but it was still way lower than the non-exercisers.
A lot of the peeps on these forums would love to know the truth here. I know I'm not gonna be 20 something forever. I wanna know if I could be like Haile Gebresalassie and dominate the local half-full marathons as an old fart or if I'd be better off sticking with an hour of whatever once this crazy sport chews me up and spits me out at 30-35.
Most are recovering drunks / druggies .
They gotta die some way .
Yes this and many older runners were overweight/unhealthy when they were in their 20's 30's, even 40's, when their doctor said to get healthy or die.
Even for long time runners, there was a belief back in the day that if whatever you ate you would burn- many runners felt "immune", so to speak, from the dangers of unhealthy food.
If the hard miles don't get me, it will probably be the 10 gallons of Kroger diet red pop I consume every week. (more in the summer)
A book titled "The Haywire Heart" was just released and is the first to examine the potential negative effects high end endurance training can have on the heart. The author is a cyclist and I think most of the book is from the perspective of a cycling, but is applicable to running nonetheless. There is a long excerpt from the intro on Amazon that provides a pretty good picture of the argument the author will make.
https://www.amazon.com/Haywire-Heart-exercise-protect-heart/dp/1937715671
I don't run much anymore anyway, but in the past year, I have developed the same concerns as the OP. Yes, I know that odds of being one of the people to to experience the negative effects are minimal, but I personally have run into a lot of stories recently of athletes between the ages of 20 - 60 dying during activity due to cardiac issues. Also antidotal, but in my experience, people I know who would be considered runners, or once a runner, as a group don't appear to be healthier in old age.
Tangentially, there was a study done a few years a go that examined the lifestyles of the individuals who lived in "Blue Zones", geographic areas where the population had a significantly higher average life expectancy than most other areas. One of the major takeaways of the study was the prevalence of moderation, specifically in terms of diet and activity. None of these groups did something we would recognize as exercise, but they were all active individuals. All of that is to say that, although not indisputable, the argument that running is an excessive form of exercise that does extreme things to the body and can result in negative longterm heath effects is a reasonable one.
Micro years?
At age 60, lifelong runner, I have come to see systemic inflammation as the culprit in most of my former health issues. I was a very competitive AG runner ages 40-50, developed an A-fib mid-40's, was cardio-converted six times from age 44-53. I went to a lower carb diet and reduced training in my early 50s and have had no recurrence since 2010. I am now full ketogenic, and run 50-60 miles, mostly very easy, without issues, including no aches or pains. I have long runs up to five hours with no need for added carbs. I am slower, but healthier than I ever have been before, going back to my teens (I always battled sickness/injury associated with high-carb diet).
I feel very lucky...to have the innate persistence to get to the bottom of my health issues: high-carb diet coupled with too stressful training. I will trigger the anti-Maffetone trolls with the following: he is right on the money when it comes to running healthily and at a sustainable level. Hope to see some you other "lucky" cohorts on the starting line in ten years :)
imo flopping dead on a trail run at 60 is a good way to go out.
People always make this argument by citing examples of very fit people dying during excercise and it does happen on occasion. These events make the news because they are shocking and outside the norm.
What Doesn't make the news are the myriad number of cases of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. These account for around 1 in every 4 deaths in America each year. Death from a sedentary lifestyle has become so common, that people just figure it cannot be prevented.
I'm going to take my chances and keep running.
I've never smoked. I only drink in moderation these days. I eat pretty healthy. I don't touch soda. If running--the activity that has brought me more joy than any other--turns out to be mildly bad for me, well, I think I'm still doing okay.
I'd write more, but I'm off for a run with my 13- and 15-year-old boys, who are rapidly becoming better runners than I ever was. And if a slightly early death is the price I pay for sharing my passion with a couple of kids whose peers want nothing to do with their parents, I'll accept that death with a smile on my face.
cake good running bad
Max J Powers,I don't disagree with your sentiment as a whole, but would argue that things such as "obesity, diabetes and heart disease", which have become prevalent in Western Culture, are caused by extreme sedentary and dietary lifestyles and can be mostly solved by moderate activity and dietary adjustments. Exercise is a relatively new concept; general activity is not. Healthy people weren't brought into existence with the jogging boom.
Max J Powers wrote:
People always make this argument by citing examples of very fit people dying during excercise and it does happen on occasion. These events make the news because they are shocking and outside the norm.
What Doesn't make the news are the myriad number of cases of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. These account for around 1 in every 4 deaths in America each year. Death from a sedentary lifestyle has become so common, that people just figure it cannot be prevented.
I'm going to take my chances and keep running.
This is probably the best (albeit not funniest) thing I've ever read on LRC.
FUZK death. I just pounded out 17 miles on the treadmill.
I saw a message on a Cowtown Marathon poster today. " You only get one life, but if you do it right, that is all you need."
nothing new here - as what pointed out in a RW article in response to O'Keefe, basically that he "controls" (i.e., removes) all the benefits that you would expect to come from exercise (e.g., lower weight, blood pressure, etc.) to get to his "finding." - "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." Pretty stupid.
From the article:
Cox regression was used to quantify the association between running and mortality after adjusting for baseline age, sex, examination year, body mass index, current smoking, heavy alcohol drinking, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, parental CVD, and levels of other physical activities.
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 (for more details on how this distorts the results, including evidence from other studies on how these statistical tricks hide real health benefits from much higher amounts of running, see my earlier blog entry). 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."
(2) A minor example from the earlier review by this group in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Early in the article, they make this key statement:
A very large recent study found that [the benefits of endurance training] accrue in a dose-dependent fashion up to about an hour per day of vigorous physical activity, beyond which more endurance training does not yield further benefits.
So what happens if we actually dig up this "very large recent study" they refer to? Sure enough, the study, published in The Lancet, contains this graph, based on a longitudinal study of more than 400,000 people:
And yes, for vigorous activity, the curve starts to level off after about an hour. Are there no further benefits? That's what it looked like to O'Keefe et al., so they wrote a letter to Lancet making that point:
We are curious as to whether Wen and colleagues have data about long-term survival in individuals who did vigorous exercise for more than 50 min per day. Do the mortality benefits begin to erode away as the daily time spent doing vigorous physical activity increases beyond 1 h?
Wen and colleagues reply that yes, they do have data -- and it doesn't show what O'Keefe et al. hope:
By 120 min [per day], the hazard ratio for all-cause mortality was around 0·55 [which is better than it was for 60 min per day], with even better hazard ratios for cardiovascular diseases... The adverse effects of strenuous exercise for incremental efforts for more than an hour a day did not seem to outweigh the benefits. 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.
This exchange took place before the recent spate of review articles about the dangers of too much exercise was published. And yet the study is still being cited as evidence that doing more than an hour a day of exercise is bad for you. As a subsequent letter to the journal from Michael Bubb of the University of Florida put it, "The interpretation of the data provided in the review by O'Keefe et al is misleading, particularly given the response of the authors of the original data."
http://www.runnersworld.com/sweat-science/the-too-much-running-myth-rises-again
Star wrote:
Micro years?
The poster meant to say micro-tears.
running isn't a kale salad wrote:
I've never smoked. I only drink in moderation these days. I eat pretty healthy. I don't touch soda. If running--the activity that has brought me more joy than any other--turns out to be mildly bad for me, well, I think I'm still doing okay.
I'd write more, but I'm off for a run with my 13- and 15-year-old boys, who are rapidly becoming better runners than I ever was. And if a slightly early death is the price I pay for sharing my passion with a couple of kids whose peers want nothing to do with their parents, I'll accept that death with a smile on my face.
+1 it's nice to see kids wanting to run with their parent. Start them young and they will come to appreciate your company until you become too slow for them..;)