The Kiev Gym

At CNN's website there's a very cool collection of photos by Krill Golovchenko of an outdoor public gym in Kiev, Ukraine. It was built in the early 1970's. As you'll see, it's pretty crude because it was built with scrap metal, chains, ropes and old tires.

But you'll notice that this gym produces the same physical challenges and muscle definition you'd find in any fancy gym in America.

You also can't help but notice that these people are focused on their exercise, not their outfits. No spandex and $120 workout shoes. The man below swinging a sledge hammer has sandals on. His muscles don't care.

This gym is open at no charge to the public. People of all shapes, sizes and ages use it.

This photo collection demonstrates how basic fitness really doesn't require very much when people have the desire.

And it begs the question that in a rich country like ours with a runaway epidemic of heart disease and obesity, why isn't there one of these in every city in America?



What If

Below is an exhilarating amateur video from a contest at Mark's Daily Apple, a really good website for "primal" living, that is, basic exercise and real food. There were many fine entries in their contest, but this one especially caught my eye.
 
What's so uplifting about it, beyond just a great song to accompany it, is you see a guy breaking out of the the confines of an office to set his body free. Many of think of exercise as a trip to the gym, a special space set aside to exert your body. But no matter how well-equipped, nothing you do on a machine will match a total body workout like he demonstrates or provide the Vitamin D he gets outside.

It would be a better, healthier, less stressed world if more people felt free (as in it's ok and they aren't weird) to take off their ties and high heels and go to a park for some exercise. Right now it's acceptable to run, but not so much the norm to exercise anywhere and anytime, and turn objects in the environment into a physical challenge.

They guy in the video is really creative. All he needs is a patch of grass, a weight from the trunk of his car, a bag with something heavy in it, his own body weight, and even a playground or some broken concrete.

This is what the world would be like if health really was a priority. We'd build more playgrounds for adults to use, too. Your employer would give you time to get out of the building and do some short Tabata workouts, like the one in the video, that would make you more focused and productive at work.

 

Yes, it would be different. People would value what they feel on the inside as much as what they look like from the outside. Sure people would be a little more rumpled upon returning to their office cubicles, but that's no big deal, nothing that couldn't be cured with a dab of perfume or aftershave.

 

And everyone would be thinner, healthier, happier.

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 



You Don't Know Squat

Not long ago, I was with a couple of doctors, chatting in the shade of an umbrella at a Starbucks, when they surprised me by their lack of knowledge of one of the most basic body movements known to man - the squat. 

We had been talking about much healthier people would be, and how they would access the health care system less, if they ate more whole food and exercised more. I mentioned how earlier that week at our wellness club at work we had explored some very basic exercises everyone could do, without a gym, without any equipment, like push-ups, planks, the squat...

When this TOJ said "squat," one of the docs said, "Oh, no, you want to avoid those. They wreck knees. The patellar shear." The other nodded in agreement. "Yeah, those can be dangerous." One of these docs was an avid bicyclist and the other a distance runner, both of which can be very hard on knees. Not only that, both were family practitioners and one of the major complaints of people coming to see them is lower back pain, often caused by not being able to do a squat correctly.

The squat is one of the basic movements that is unavoidable in daily life. If you are going to lift a child or a bag of dog food, you are going to squat. If you don't use the squat, or don't do it correctly, you risk a back injury, usually in the lower lumbar area. Injuries occur when you try to use your back, rather than legs, to lift something off the ground. A properly executed squat requires you to have a strong core and correct posture. It ain't rocket science, but there are some fine points you need to be aware of.

The "patellar shear" mentioned by the doc is caused by using the large thigh (quadriceps) muscles rather than the butt (gluteus) muscles to lift your body during the squat. It's easy to determine whether you are glute or quad dominant by doing a squat. Just do a couple. If you lift your heel off the floor, you are likely quad dominant (and may also need to work on your ankle flexibility) and more prone to knee and back injury. Your heel will be solidly on the ground throughout the entire squat when you are using your glutes.

Learn to do a good squat so it's second nature. When you're comfortable doing them, you can add some weight if you like. But if all you ever do is use your own body weight, you will get stronger and burn lots of calories because you are using the largest muscles in your body.

Here's an excellent video tutorial on how to do a squat. Don't be put off by the trainer's muscles. He knows what he's doing and demonstrates the correct way to do a squat without using any weights.

The two docs know more anatomy and physiology than this TOJ will know in ten lifetimes. But if they want to help people avoid back or knee pain, they need to go back to basics. Until then, they don't know squat.

Belly Scans

Sometimes you read something that's especially enlightening and really makes you think. Not the usual TOJ stuff involving reps, muscle fibers, and VO2 max, but something exceptional and notable. That's the way I felt about this  article by Kevin Patterson, a Canadian and doctor of internal medicine.

Dr. Patterson was in Afghanistan at at Canadian hospital to care for casualties of the war, both his countrymen and Afghans. Something startling caught his eye. He noticed a stark contrast between the CT scans of Canadians and Afghans. The organs of Canadian soldiers were packed in fat, while there was no fat to be found in the Afghans. (I remembered looking at the dissected cross section of an obese person at Body World. It is shocking to see the dark organs as if packed in yellow putty.)

Dr. Patterson is certain that the abdominal body fat is connected to the rise in diabetes. He suspects urbanization and affluence, with their accompanying poor (processed) diets and lack of exercise, are what is making so many of us sick.

He also happens to be a sailor. In the article, he recounts some of his sea journeys to primitive areas of the world. In those places still less civilized, the people are leaner and more active. Where civilization is creeping  in, he noticed people spend more time sitting on their butts, in front of computers or riding around in motorized vehicles.

While not a back to nature romantic, he speculates that many ccivilized folks, bored with their professions and desperate from sitting around so much, take up hobbies like sailing and bow hunting or doing home improvements. Every generation sees itself as a decadent, diminished version of its predecessors. What is different is the extent to which we actually are.


Absent from his thoughtful speculation is exercise, but it could be added to his list. Many of us exercise maniacs are probably seeking adventure, challenge, and even danger. But just as often we are just feeling the exhilaration of of being alive. And, yes, burn the fat out of our civilized bellies.

Switching Food Gears

Making changes in your lifestyle can be difficult, even if they're good for you. The other day I was at a health conference where a doc explained how frustrating it is when she has a diabetic patient who fully comprehends that he or she needs to change eating habits and exercise, but won't. She observed that intellectually understanding something doesn't mean you will act on it.

Old habits die hard, including doing stuff that really isn't good for your health. In the last few years, I've made big changes in the types of food I eat. I followed the food evolution described in three blogs last year called "How to Become a Lean, Mean, Eating Machine," from the conventional American diet to more veggies, lean meats, and raw food.

The major reason I altered what I ate wasn't because of a pressing food-related health issue, but because my wife became a vegan. She became focused on how food affected her, while I was focused on exercise. As part of her food quest, she learned a great deal about nutrition, which periodically she would share with me.

At she started to make food changes in her diet, of course she would offer me some of it, and at first I would decline or make a snide remark like, "Are you eating tree bark or pine needles?" Her food changes at first caused some friction. When you have been sharing meals with someone for years, and their tastes change and yours haven't, a source of conflict arises. For instance, you sit down to a meal and winter squash with a little cinnamon has been substituted for a white potato with butter.

However, as she explained what made the food nutritious and even tasty, I started to sample it and found that I liked it and felt satisfied after eating it. Meantime, I was studying up on nutrition, and experts confirmed what she had been saying all along (she studied the same experts before I did). Now the only differences in our diets are that I do eat some meat and dairy a few times a week because I have muscle to feed.

There's been some interesting research on the negative role of social contagion in the spread of obesity. To cut to the quick, some studies show that people who are fat usually live and hang out with other fat people and share eating habits, especially married couples and close friends. When they get together, the cake and cookies are around, and the bag of fried potato chips and sour cream dip on the table in front of the TV.

Of course, this social contagion is reinforced by millions of dollars of advertising. Food choices are reinforced by social and cultural norms. When you watch the Super Bowl, the ads will show happy friends stuffing their faces with fried chips high in fat, salt, and carbs.

But social contagion can play a positive role as well. This TOJ is proof. Thanks to my wife, I eat and enjoy foods I never would have dreamt possible, like spinach and avocado smoothies, flax crackers, and "cheese" made of nuts. I'm leaner, stronger, and more energetic than I've been in a long time. It's probably not just the food because I've also changed my exercise pattern from mostly running combined with a little weight work to mostly high intensity resistance exercises and some running.

Right food and right exercises are good habits to catch.

Blue to Green

On Christmas Day, I woke up feeling blue. Hard tell why. Maybe it was lingering frustration over unsolvable  PC-to-Mac technical problems that happened when my wife and I tried to Skype a holiday puppet show to our grand kids the night before. Or separation from family. Or seasonal affective disorder (SADS). Who knows?

But I got cured. I was moping around and my wife asked what my exercise plan was for the day, which I usually have figured out mid-first cup of coffee. I said I didn't know. She said let's go snow-shoeing. At first I balked -- have to find the shoes (easy, hanging the the garage), my fleece pants (easy, folded in the closet), the dog's leash (easy, by the back door where it always is), plus, uh, there might be noisy snowmobiles. She gently quietly insisted: Let's go, it's a beautiful day, and the snow should be good.


So we drove up to Sunlight, a nearby ski area with a nice trail system, and, after minor equipment adjustments, off we went on a steady climb to a favorite meadow.  The air was a crisp 28 degrees, quiet, and the sun breaking trough the bare aspen. The snow glittered with large crystals. Deeply breathing the cold air, within just a few minutes, less than half a mile, my mood completely changed. My funk had vanished. I felt elated to be out there and be alive in such a beautiful place.

A little over a year ago, I put a video on YouTube, called "Running, Shakespeare and Zen," which talks about a Harvard psychiatrist's research on exercise and depression. New research conducted in the UK shows that exercising in the "green" outdoors improves mood and self-esteem. And the benefits happen very quickly, within the first 5 minutes, and just get better from there.

In the winter, when the days are short and it's cold outside, a lazy part of our nature tells us, like bears, to overeat and hibernate indoors. But there's another part of us, more like wolves, that leads outside, into the cold, onto the trails, where you'll feel like howling with delight.

Happy Holidays to All and to All a Good Hike!

Olga's Telomeres

If you've followed TOJ for awhile, you've seen an increasing focus on the importance of doing intense exercise, not just light aerobics. The evidence that hard exercise pays health dividends, regardless of your age, continues to mount.

Read this illuminating article by Bruce Grierson about a record breaking, 91 year-old athlete named Olga Kotelko. What drew my attention wasn't her athletic accomplishments, but what exercise physiologists in Canada believe is responsible for them. Grierson writes:

"EXERCISE HAS BEEN shown to add between six and seven years to a life span (and improve the quality of life in countless ways). Any doctor who didn’t recommend exercise would be immediately suspect. But for most seniors, that prescription is likely to be something like a daily walk or Aquafit. It’s not quarter-mile timed intervals or lung-busting fartleks. There’s more than a little suffering in the difference.

Here, though, is the radical proposition that’s starting to gain currency among researchers studying masters athletes: what if intense training does something that allows the body to regenerate itself?"

The source of our physical energy is in our cells, which reproduce themselves many times during our lives. Scientists believe a significant cause of the visible effects of aging (wrinkles, muscle loss) is the aging of our cells. One theory is that cells age because what are called telomeres at the end of our chromosomes, containing the code to replicate the cell, grow shorter, thus losing some genetic information with each cell replication that happens 50 or so times during the average lifetime.

What intrigues the physiologists about Olga is that she still has long telomeres, which may be giving her the lung and heart capacity and strength of a much younger person. It might be that intense exercise induces the production of an enzyme called telomerase that enables telomeres to maintain their genetic code (DNA) and thus produce healthy mitochondria inside cells that fuels human performance at all ages.

Every TOJ knows intense exercise makes you feel good. Now there's another reason to go hard. It helps you stay healthy and strong for much longer.

Healthy Herd Instincts

The other day I was letting my mountain bike rip down the last steep section of an old mining trail. It was a hot 90 degrees. I was drenched with sweat and coated with red dust and the speed-created breeze felt good. With the front fork bouncing wildly, I came around a narrow bend and saw a jeep pull quickly off to the side of the narrow road to make room for me. I hit my brakes and climbed up a bank alongside the jeep, with two young guys inside. I nodded a greeting.

They looked surprised at the sight of an old guy making a hairy descent. One of the guys smiled and yelled, " Good for you!"

As I passed, I yelled a "thank you" back over my shoulder and enjoyed the last drop.

I recalled a thought-provoking 2009 article in the NY Times by Clive Thompson, entitled "Are Your Friends Making You Fat?", in which he explored a newly described phenomenon called "social contagion." Of course, it's not news that people influence each other. Consider it was 2500 years ago when Aesop, a Greek slave and philosopher, smartly observed that "A man is known by the company he keeps." But Thompson had a new slant. He said scientists are discovering that ideas and behaviors spread just like physical diseases studied in epidemiology.

What caught this TOJ's attention was that the scientists had studied the behavior patterns and health of the many thousands of participants in multi-decade study of heart disease being conducted in Framingham, Massachusetts. What they discovered is significant. People with bad health habits tend to socialize with one another -- the smokers hung around with smokers, fat people hung around with others with poor dietary habits. Likewise, people with good health habits tend to hang with one another. Evidently, the behaviors and habits are spread by the very act of socializing.

I thought about the truth of this. My fellow exercisers are more alike than we like to admit. Without thinking much about it, when together we naturally share information on diet, wellness, fitness, improving performance, training and gear. Sometimes we do it without even saying anything, like by what we serve when people come to dinner.

When I was putting my bike on the car rack after my ride was over, I thought about the two young guys in the jeep. I hoped the exercise bug spread like a highly contagious flu, and that the next time I saw them, they were pumping up the mountain on their bikes.

Mops, Vacuum Cleaners and Health

While on my hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor in preparation for a visit to our house by four rugrats (my grandchildren), I found myself thinking about people who live in the so-called Blue Zones, such as Okinawa and Costa Rica, where super-longevity is commonplace. One trait they share is they do lots of physical work like tending crops, hauling water, hand-washing clothes, or chopping wood.

In so called-advanced industrial societies, physical work is considered to be beneath us. The smarter and wealthier we are we are inclined to hire someone else to do our labor so we can spend more time our butts in front of a computer at work or in front of a TV at home. However, the epidemic of heart disease and diabetes in the U.S. begs the question if our social ladder is upside down.

Many (especially those who sit in front of computers or jabber on the phone all day) have become wise to the dangers of sedentary life. We invented exercise, as distinguished from labor, as an antidote to the inactivity of white collar jobs. We hit the gym, run 10Ks, pump iron, and all the other stuff you read on blogs and magazines and watch on YouTube or FitnessTV. Exercise is a special activity where you put on special clothes and do special repetitive activities. The focus of those activities are usually the heart, lungs and muscles. Usually we slip in some performance measures demarcated in miles, minutes, pounds, or heart beats.

But, though I'm in pretty good aerobic shape and can do lots of push ups, after several hours of doing housework I felt pleasantly tired and, the next day, even had some muscle soreness here and there. For curiosity, I checked to see how many calories you burn doing work around the house. It's more than you think. For a 150 pound person, you burn 119 calories per half hour vacuuming and 128 calories per half hour scrubbing floors. You might counter, yeah, but you can burn that many calories running one mile. True, but you might spend several hours doing housework and the calories add up. Remember that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend 30 minutes of moderate to intense activity per day to stay healthy, and many household chores qualify.

The take-away lesson of people in the Blue Zones may have to do with something more subtle. Doing chores, you move your body in a variety of directions. You stoop, bend, twist, reach, and lift. You move from one activity to another, sometimes standing, sometimes on your knees. In each of these moves, you are contracting your muscles. Over hours of physical work, you are contracting your muscles many more times than you do in 3 sets of ten reps in a gym.

One of the great miracles of the human body is the lymphatic system. Lymph is a clear fluid that is pumped through your body by gravity and muscle contractions. It delivers nutrients like glucose to all the cells in your body, even ones the heart-powered bloodstream cannot. The lymphatic system also performs critical immune functions to fight off disease. Usually when lymph nodes swell and grow tender as we are fighting an illness is the only time we are aware lymphatic system is even there.

This is one of the secrets of health. You don't need to train like an Olympian (though if you do, more power to you). And it's also why gentle exercises like tai chi, yoga, and walking can keep you healthy. Check out a book by some docs at the Cooper Clinic entitled "Move Yourself." You'll see very small amounts of exercise go a long ways when it comes to wellness.

This TOJ loves the endorphin rush of aerobic exercise, lifting weights, and rigorous calisthenics. It can be fun to push hard and have a measurable goal, like running faster in minutes than my age in years in the Bolder-Boulder. But all these athletic activities depend on being in good health. For that reason, a vacuum cleaner, mop, and snow shovel are as important to a TOJ as good running shoes, dumbbells, and a jock.

TOJ's Top 10 Sorta-Resolutions for 2010

2010, this will be the year! I can feel it. Today I packed a snowball. Before I threw it, I vowed, "If it hits the ground, this will be the best year ever. Health, fitness, prosperity, peace, happiness. "

Sure enough, after a short arc through the cold air, down it went, hitting the ground! So with great confidence in the future based on that good omen, here are a TOJ's top 10 (you understand: it always has to be 10...Top 10 Movies of the Year, Top 10 Athletes of the Year -- I only had 7, but made up 3):

1. Eat more vegetables. (I'll try. I used to not eat them, but have learned to actually like some. The evidence is overwhelming that the more and the fresher and the rawer, the better. The complex nutrients in vegetables are better for you than almost any supplement -- and cheaper.)

2. Exercise less. (I keep running into this message. Latest is an article about Melody Fairchild in Colorado Runner. She was a child-phenom distance runner in high school who struggled in college. She realized, maybe too late, that less is more. Rest and recovery are the necessary yin of the exercise yang that enable health and even better athletic performance if that's what you're after.)
3. Drink less beer. (Ummm. I'll have to have a stout and think about that. Alcohol in moderation is supposed to be good for you, but there is countervailing evidence that beer gives you an insulin spike and contains empty calories. On the other hand, beer has also been shown to lower homocysteine (an amino acid that is considered a risk factor for heart disease) levels. Might have to have two stouts and think doubly hard about this.)

4. Stretch more. (I like stretching less than I like vegetables. I've never had an injury that stretching purportedly prevents. I like to do a few yoga positions, mostly along the lines of those in John Capouya's Real Men Do Yoga. For a TOJ it could make sense because as you age, tendons and ligaments tend to lose size and elasticity. A resolution needs the force of a goal: ok, I'll stretch at least 5 times this year.)

5. Warm up more. (Actually, I've gotten better and better with each year. Not before runs, because starting slow is a warm-up. But definitely before lifting weights. Joint sockets need to get lubricated and muscles warmed to avoid pulls and tears, both of which this TOJ has experienced. It takes only a few minutes to rev up your feet to your neck.)

6. Drink less caffeine. (I will go to Starbucks only on weekdays, weekends, and holidays. That's a promise.)

7. Drink more water. (Caffeine is a diuretic so it makes you lose water. Exercise makes you lose even more. Expresso and beer are not substitutes for pure H2O. Being properly hydrated helps your strength and stamina because you pump more blood easier and deliver nutrients and oxygen to cells more efficiently. Sure, you pee more and feel bloated. Tough.)

8. Sleep more. (There's a better chance this TOJ will eat more veggies. When I see recommendations for 8-9 hours for optimum recovery and health, I'm skeptical of the evidence. It seems too long. I'll take my 6-7 and a catnap here and there. Who's the rock star who said, "I'll rest when I'm dead?" Is he still alive?"

9. Take my fish oil. (I am fish-phobic due to childhood trauma from visits to the fish market in Tokyo. I strongly believe that we evolved from the ocean onto land to escape from fish. But the scientific evidence is overwhelming that the Omega-3's in fish oil (the refined stuff with the PCBs and other environmental pollutants removed) are good for both your physical and mental health. I cringe every time I swallow that pill knowing what's in it, but I won't be eating much fish in this lifetime, and this is one pill worth popping.)

10. When stressed, exercise harder. (This is as easy to me as eating chocolate. Whether little stuff at work (and remember problems at work are always minor in the same way most politics are banal) or the big stressors like war, global warming, terrorism, flu pandemics, disease and mortality, you cope better when you work up a sweat.)

Here's to a happy and healthful 2010 for you! Hope to see you out there!

Once Upon a Time a TOJ Discovered Trail Running

I remember my first trail run better than my first kiss. In the early 70s, we lived in an old house in Laporte, Colorado. With my two black Labs running around chasing squirrels, I'd walk for a half mile on a trail winding along the river, under a canopy of scraggly cottonwoods, then cut off at a fork in the trail to a junior high with a quarter-mile cinder track. There I'd do a regimen from Dr. Ken Cooper's Aerobics -- try to run two miles (8 laps) in less than 12 minutes (something like that, you got cardiovascular "points" for speed and distance).

In those days, running was done almost exclusively on oval tracks. Few people even hiked on trails, much less ran on them. REI was still a tiny co-op in Seattle, selling climbing ropes and ice axes to hard core mountaineers. The only trail runner I'd ever seen was in a film clip of Kip Keino, the great Kenyan distance runner who beat American world record holder Jim Ryun in the Olympic 1500 meters in Mexico City, then won a couple more Olympic distance medals four years later in Munich. In the film clip, Keino ran up sand dunes and across a vast stretches of desert. His running seemed so effortless and free-spirited.

Late one fall afternoon I was on the trail, headed to the junior high to run some laps, when, for no reason, I started to jog. The dogs found it so unusual that they stopped hunting to come see what I was up to and trotted along with me for a couple of minutes as I hopped over a few downed logs and mud puddles. I took the cutoff, ran my laps, then ran back.

A couple days later, as soon as I got on the trail, I started running. I stayed on the trail and ran right by the track for a couple more miles. It was challenging, less monotonous than running laps on a track, and the sound of crunching leaves and the river seemed to carry me along. I found myself totally absorbed in navigating the rocks, roots and windfall, and watching for wildlife. That was it, I was hooked. Trail running had called my name.

Since that time, in all kinds of weather, I've run trails all over the West -- in the Tetons, Gros Ventres, Valhallas, Never Summer Range, Indian Peaks Wilderness, Flat Tops, Wind Rivers, Cascades, Elk Mountains, Rocky Mountain National Park, even into the back bowls in Vail.

My generation didn't invent trail running. Humans ran for many generations before they ever raced, and there does seem to be something primordial about it. Many books on running begin with speculation on why we run, whether as hunters pursuing prey or prey fleeing predators. It is so natural that you have to wonder why something so natural and exhilarating seemed to go into hibernation in modern industrial societies as social stature increasingly equated with the amount of time you spent sitting on your butt as your body atrophied.

When it comes to exercise, each of us discovers what we like to do best. I enjoy other workouts besides trail running, but it will always be my favorite. I think about the poem by Robert Frost that goes, "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..." That's how it was for me. I took off running on the one less travelled by, and it made all the difference.

Fitness Lessons from the Ultimate Coach

If I were going to be stranded on a desert island and could only take one book on exercise and fitness, it would be an easy choice -- The Ultimate Fit or Fat by Covert Bailey. That's a high compliment because I have a pretty good collection of books on those topics.

In the case of Covert Bailey, you really can't judge a book by its cover. They sometimes have a cartoon or a goofy picture of him wearing a tie, a stark contrast to the present day fitness books with Photo-shopped shots of sleek super-bodies and bulging muscles. Don't be fooled: he knows his stuff.

Now retired and in his late seventies, Covert Bailey made his book debut in 1978, around the time the aerobics movement was quickly gaining strength. He had a graduate degree from MIT in biochemistry and learned his first lessons on diet and exercise from lab rats. He went on to sell over 6 million books and had a show on PBS (though I never saw it). And he did it in a light-hearted, straightforward style that is accessible, inspiring, and devoid of scientific jargon (though he once expounded on the Krebs Cycle and ATP with a raw display of expertise that would stand with any PhD).

The Ultimate Fit or Fat, his last book, was published in 1999. That may seem so, like, last century, but Covert Bailey set forth all the enduring principles of exercise for health and wellness that are still valid today. I reread it recently and realized how much my guiding principles were influenced by him. Here are some lessons he taught me:

• The best exercise for you is the one you like to do best. No one exercise size fits all because of differences in age, genetic makeup, injuries and a host of other factors.
• Fitness is a lifelong endeavor that is health and wellness, not competition.
• Muscle metabolism, not just diet, controls your weight, and it's exercise that controls metabolism. If you focus on developing a conditioned body, weight takes care of itself.
• Forget about body image. Exercise to strengthen your bones, improve your immune and cardiovascular system, and improve your brain function and nervous system.
• Aerobic exercise must be mixed with sprints, strength training, and recovery.
• Exercise is for people of all ages.
• Keep exercise fun like play is for a child. If you get too intense about it, you steal the joy and increase the odds of injury.
• As you age, exercise longer, but more gently than you did in your youth. And don't do the same exercise two days in a row.

There's an insightful poem that Covert wrote when he was sixty-seven years old:

I'm in training!
For what?
Oh, just training.
I'm thinking about
the mountains I'm going to climb,
the rivers yet to be paddled,
the square dance that lasts half the night.

Read it a second time because this might be his most important lesson of all.

Not Too Much, Not Too Little -- Part 2

Back in January, I wrote, "If some exercise physiologists and medical researchers are right, the risk to a TOJ's long term health due to over-exercising is much higher than just catching a head cold, a topic to explore in my next blog." Okay, it turned out to be a few blogs later. Here it is:

There are friends and enemies of prolonged endurance exercise. The friends sometimes oversell it and understate both some of its risks, as well as the advantages of other types of exercise.

The enemies, like Al Sears, MD, who promotes intense short, interval training in his PACE Program, or Lou Schueler et al, who advocate that healthy exercise consists of building buff bodies with weight lifting in books like The Testosterone Advantage Plan, like to demonize conventional cardio/endurance exercise. What is odd is the militant tone of these opponents of aerobic exercise, especially against running. Scheuler almost gloats about the unfortunate death of Jim Fiix back in 1984, who wrote the then definitive book on running. Fiix had a family history of heart disease and was a former smoker who took up running in middle age. My hunch is that most enemies of endurance sports feel that way because they are either not very good at it, so it feels like pure drudgery, and they have never experienced the endorphin high that hooks you like a dope addict.



It is true that sometimes endurance athletes die suddenly. For over thirty years, sports science has been aware that many highly trained endurance athletes have over-sized hearts and, often, irregular heartbeats. These irregularities were often the usual suspect when an otherwise healthy endurance athlete keeled over dead. But heart size is no longer considered the problem as it once was. Lance Armstrong has a hypertrophied left ventricle that makes his heart one third larger than the average person and can pump at 200 beats a minute, no problem.

As a friend of endurance exercise, I was concerned when I heard that Alberto Salazar, the great marathoner, suffered a heart attack (but again, a long family history, and already diagnosed risk factors) at the Nike training center in Oregon a couple years ago. Or when I read in Runner's World that Rich Trujillo, an fifty-something runner who has accomplished amazing track and trail running feats over decades, has had a heart bypass operation. And he still runs, a true DTOJ, double-tuff old jock.

You have to wonder if the real underlying cause of their heart conditions is what I first mentioned in the January blog -- chronic inflammation. Ironically, running is likely what has kept them alive, although they were unknowingly setting the stage for future problems. They ran often and ran hard at the highest competitive levels. Years ago, Ken Cooper, M.D., the father of the aerobics movement, noticed that an unusually high number of elite athletes were coming down with illnesses, sometimes very serious ones like cancer.

In recent years, exercise physiologists have been studying the sad phenomenon where athletes train harder and harder, yet their performance gets worse and worse. They have given the condition a name: Overtraining Syndrome (OTS). The subtle physiology of the condition is fascinating, and the net result of the cascading electro-chemical events in the body is inflammation.

The syndrome starts when an athlete over-reaches, that is, tries to exercise faster, longer, or more
frequently than their fitness level is ready to handle.

If you are interested in a good discussion for the layperson, Gretchen Reynolds wrote an excellent article about OTS in the New York Times. Just go to:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/sports/playmagazine/02play-physed.html?ref=fitnessandnutrition&pagewanted=all

And if you are interested in the the hard science of OTS, go to:
http://www.woongbee.com/Cytokine/Cytokine%20bulletin/Spring%202001/spring2001-4.htm

So, you wonder, what does OTS have to do with TOJs, who are not elite athletes? TOJs work out hard and often, too. As you age, you are more prone to the very same fatigue and inflammation as the best. TOJs are exercise nuts, so they are predisposed to OTS. It's all relative. Where 100 miles a week might push an elite athlete into the inflammation zone, it might only take 30 miles a week to do the same damage for a over-zealous TOJ.

Or maybe you are one of the one in a million who do not develop inflammation, like ultra-runner Dean Karnazes. He ran 50 back to back marathons, one day after another, with no rest period between days. After the 50th, they drew some blood to measure the effects on his body from such an extreme effort. All the markers of inflammation, like cytokines, were absent.



The good news is that inflammation can be avoided or controlled by three factors every TOJ needs to understand: 1) rest and recovery, 2) the right foods at the right time, and 3) knowing when you are over-reaching.

More on each of those is coming soon. But first it's off to Moab...

Running Over, Around and Through the Recession

Whether you are looking for work, renegotiating your mortgage, reallocating your IRA, haggling with your creditors, or personally okay but worried about your family and friends, find the time to run more and run harder.

One of the worst things about economic chaos is that it makes you feel like you have lost control of your life. Maybe you've lost your job, or your retirement, or your house. Or economic events are going to force you to make difficult business decisions or career decisions you dread. But you own your body, and can still put one foot in front of another. Every step you take is a reminder that you have more control than you realize. Running empowers you.

Economic problems are stressful for you, your family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors. Running will pump endorphins into your brain and help you chill out. You will sleep better. Your body will produce less cortisol and adrenaline. As you go about your day more relaxed, you will help those around you relax. Your peace will breed peace in those around you. The Buddhists have understood that for over two thousand years. The Old Masters would be runners today.

Running allows you to escape the incessant negativity of television. TV thrives on drama, tragedy and conflict. Unfortunately, pessimism is contagious, and the constant bombardment of the angry talking heads breeds fear in anyone who watches it. Peace and quiet don't work on the tube. It's a puny, square, distorted window on a big, multi-dimensional world that can only hold your attention with loud noise, canned laughter, and extreme views and behaviors. Running puts you in the real world where you listen to your own thoughts and the reality around you.

And while you are away from the TV, you will also escape all the ads telling you that you need to go buy something to overcome a personal shortcoming, satisfy some craving, keep up with the Joneses, and achieve happiness or faux security, whether or not you have the money to do so or it's really in your best interests. During a recession is a good time to take a break from it. TV doesn't know you and cares about you only as a customer.

Running keeps you healthy, thus lowers your healthcare costs. Medical costs are the major cause of personal bankruptcies. During a recession, more and more people are uninsured. If you are behind on your mortgage or out of work, the last thing you need is to pay more money to a healthcare system that already consumes more than any other industrialized country on earth. Plenty of reliable evidence shows that regular, moderate exercise helps prevent numerous chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes, cancers and a host of other degenerative conditions. With every step, you protect your health and assets at the same time.

You need to think clearly because you are faced with difficult decisions, irrational fears, and an unstable, shifting economic environment. When you run, your brain will produce brain-derived neurotrophic factor (see Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey's Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain), which actually makes you smarter and more creative. You will be armed with the best weapon a human has to cope with adversity: a high-functioning mind. You are better able to see the Big Picture and find solutions, rather than get stuck in the problems of the moment. Some of your best thinking happens while you are running and not fretting. You are in the present, where problems vanish as you struggle to keep a pace, breathe, and ignore the growing pain in your legs.

Finally, running is cheap. Cheap is good if you are broke or need to hold on to your savings in case you are going to be out of work. All you need a good pair of shoes, you can skimp on everything else. You don't need to spend money on a gym, exercise DVDs, or fancy home equipment or fru fru lycra with dayglo trim. You can just step outside of your door, lace 'em up, and go.

Out on the trail, you will run over, around and through rocks, stumps, downed timber and streams. You'll go up, down, then up again. You see the world is alive and constantly changing, everything is passing by. The recession will pass too.




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Note: What is true of running is also true of biking, hiking, swimming, rope jumping, rowing -- whatever you do hard enough to elevate your heartbeat for thirty minutes or more each day. Running is my favorite. Follow your own bliss.

Mud: Sacred Rite of Spring

March 1. When I started up the trail in early Sunday morning, it was still close to freezing, but my running shoe cracked through a thin layer of frozen crust into a couple inches of red mud. It was a thrilling sensation, a sure sign of Spring.

All week the temperature was in the 40s, melting down the snow that has covered the trail for almost three months. It's been a grey winter, not that cold, but plenty snowy. I keep a half-assed journal of my runs with elapsed time, temperature, milestones along the trail, and sometimes heart rate. I have plodded over light powder, snow mobile-packed corduroy, deep wet cement, ice and rotting crust, in rain-snow mix, blizzard conditions, graupel squalls and clear, frigid air. The coldest run was 9 degrees. The only sound on most runs was the wind or caw of a raven.

Once when the snow was falling hard, it was like running through a silent white tunnel. It reminded me of a short poem Basho wrote in the 12th century in "Narrow Road to the Deep North":

Deep as the snow is,
Let me go as far as I can
Till I stumble and fall,
Viewing the white landscape.

I love winter, but the short, dark days get old. Seasonal affective disorder (SADS) and cabin fever aren't imaginary. Going to work in the dark, coming home in the dark makes you want to hibernate, but you can't. Unlike a bear, it's not in your nature. The dark makes you want to go to bed too early and sleep too long. Some part of your brain remembers the warm Africa Savannah where we originated a long, long time ago. Your body longs for sun and warmth.

The animals feel the spring change too. I smelled a skunk, and cattle are calving on the ranch below. The small birds, like Chickadees and Towees, are coming back. I heard them for the first time, flitting in the bushes. Here and there small herds of deer foraged amid the sweet smelling sage in patches where the snow is gone. Soon they will go back up to the high country because the sun will beat down, making it too hot for them. But today, it is just right. In the warm sun they relax a little. Every warm-blooded mammal gives a sigh of relief.

It was a hard winter for the deer and elk. There are signs of winterkill, bones left along the trail, pieces of shrunken, torn hide. The coyotes have been scavenging. Most deer and elk die from hunger and the cold, a few from mountain lions and poachers. Coyotes don't do most of the killing, but much of the cleanup. The Navajo say, "Coyote waits. And coyote is always hungry." They are opportunistic, just like us.

A tuff old jock offers this poem for you:

Ah...Spring
Skunks, birds, sage,
the snow reveals its bones.
The Great Wheel of Birth and Death
turns silently again,
my running shoes are muddy.

PS: Go to tuff old jock on Facebook and join the tuff old jock group. It's painless and free. You will find exhilaration, inspiration and motivation.

May You Live Long And Prosper

TOJs live to exercise more than they exercise to live. But we have a natural interest in wellness because without wellness you have no energy, and without energy you have no strength and endurance.

Because many wellness books are written by aging Boomers for Boomers, they tend to focus on anti-aging and longevity. The titles promise you an easy six week plan that will make you look twenty years younger and feel as horny as a teenager. Rarely do they say their recommendations may not work at all, or if they do, might take a lot of time and effort on your part for relatively modest gains. In truth, nothing stops aging. But some of these books are based on solid science that will help you stay healthy, which is good reason to read them.

So you don't waste another moment of your precious life sliding helplessly towards old age and death, here, absolutely free, are all the oft-cited secrets of health and longevity as distilled from the books I've read:

1. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables, preferably organic
2. If you eat meat, eat small portions, only grass fed and without antibiotics or hormones
3. Smile, be happy, don't sweat the small stuff
4. Live in a place with a temperate climate like Palm Springs or Costa Rica
5. Avoid environmental pollution
6. Have a purpose in life that gives you a reason to get out of bed
7. But don't get out of bed too early, get plenty of sleep
8. Connect to family, friends and community
9. Eat fish, preferably from the deep not poisoned with PCBs and mercury
10. Eat good fats like Omega-3s found in flax and nuts
11. Learn to breath deeply with your diaphragm
12. Take anti-oxidant supplements and a daily multi-vitamin
13. Go easy on alcohol
14. Avoid sugar and refined grains like white flour and white rice
15. Don't smoke
16. Eat to live, not live to eat
17. Drink 4 - 8 glasses of water a day
18. And, yes, exercise!

You don't have to workout as hard as most TOJs to gain the life-enhancing benefits of exercise. In fact, the prominent cardiologist Dean Ornish, M.D., says in his latest book "The Spectrum" that only
60 to 90 minutes a week of exercise is plenty to keep you healthy. For years he was best known for recommending an austere low fat diet to reverse and/or prevent heart disease. However, a huge volume of incontrovertible evidence has been collected in the past couple of decades since the aerobics-running-exercise revolution swept nation that proves the incredible contribution of exercise to health. So now diet gurus like Ornish prescribe it right along with near starvation and fish oil pills. He's not the only one. The latest version of the South Beach diet also recommends a dose of exercise, which before was noticeably absent.

My hunch is that the secrets of longevity are well beyond our understanding, at least for now. It is probably a complicated brew of diet, exercise, genes, personality and sheer luck, like avoiding being hit by a drunk driver or crossing paths with street gangs at midnight in LA.

Being preoccupied with either longevity or wellness can become an unhealthy mania. The actress Suzanne Somers wrote a book called "Breakthrough: Eight Steps to Wellness." The book is a collection of interviews with some innovative and visionary medical professionals who recommend some very extreme measures to stay alive. Somers wants to live to 120. To reach her goal, every day she injects herself with human growth hormone, rubs on estrogen cream, rubs on "a little glutathione cream on top of my liver to stimulate it," injects Vitamin B12 and vitamin B complex, injects Iscador (a mistletoe extract popular in Europe as a substitute for chemotherapy - Somers is a breast cancer survivor), plus she takes unnamed supplements and vitamins, bioidentical hormones, and reverstrol twice a day. Monthly she also receives intravenous Vitamin C and glutathione. She also uses nanotechnology patches which stimulate acupuncture points. As final longevity insurance, she writes that she banked her stem cells in case she every needs a new organ, eyes, teeth, skin or limbs. Her exercise is walking and yoga.

She is not alone in her lust for long life. A more extreme example is the futurist and inventor Ray Kurweil, who is trying to attain a form of immortality in what he calls singularity. Wired magazine had an article that said he takes between 180 to 210 vitamins an minerals per day, plus DHEA and testosterone. His regimen is so elaborate that he employs someone to keep track of them for him. In addition, he spends one day a week being intravenously fed phosphatidylcholine in hopes it will keep his tissues young. He even uses special filters to ensure his water is alkaline, thus producing negative ions to eradicate any free radicals hiding in his body. Visit
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/16-04/ff_kurzweil to see how zany the search for the fountain of youth can get.

Most TOJs aren't too preoccupied with longevity. In fact, their passions put them at risk of inadvertently shortening their lives, a topic I'll address in my next blog. Certainly they would never have the time (not to mention the money) to follow the exotic regimens of a Somers or Kurzweil, even if their elixirs of youth proved to work. Who wants to be hooked up to an IV when they can be outdoors running? Why would you inject B vitamins when you can drink a beer?

About the time I was finishing Somers' book, I read that Amanda Roberts Jones had died at the age of 110 in Austin, Texas. She was the daughter of a slave, the mother of 10 children, who picked cotton and had a deep religious faith. I doubt she ever wore nanotechology patches or laced on a pair of running shoes, yet her life touched three centuries. She knew the real secrets.

Surviving the Medicine Show

TOJs have a natural interest in health so that they can keep being TOJs. In the Information Age, separating the signal from the noise (that's the hip digital metaphor), or the truth from lies (old fashioned knowledge), ain't easy, especially when it comes to how to best maintain your health. There are a few reasons why this is so difficult:

1. The human body is very complicated. Modern science finds more and more to marvel at as it goes deeper and deeper into electro-chemical physical processes.

2. Each of us are more different from one another than science wants to admit. Complex factors like genetics, environment and age can make what is good for one person be poison to another.

3. Science is for sale. In the western world, scientific method is the accepted means by which truth is discovered. But we have also discovered that scientists are not above biases and skewing data (maybe even unconsciously) so their tainted conclusions are eventually rewarded with money, whether it's doctors selling their own concoctions to endowed chairs at prestigious universities.

4. A numbing barrage of advertising promises easy sleep, unbounded energy, four hour erections, etc. Much of it is not true.

So what's a TOJ to do, especially one like me who took a one too many shots to the head playing football and boxing causing my synapses to misfire here and there? I think you need to be skeptical, cautiously experimental, and open minded. What does that mean?

There's a good book by Robert Davis called The Healthy Skeptic: Cutting through the HYPE about Your Health. In addition to a hilarious (he didn't intend this) history of health scams through the centuries -everything from enemas, sexual deprivation, zany diets and food fetishes - he exposes some of the popular ones now like supplements, diet books, sunscreen mania and anti-aging doctors. After each chapter, he provides excellent sources for credible health information. Like him, you've got to dig for facts.

By cautiously experimental, I mean if something seems to have some encouraging evidence, and often it might be anecdotal, check it out yourself. Take glucosamine-chondroitin. I first heard about it from a neighbor and happened to mention it to my brother, who was a professional football player. He said he and other players he'd spoken with found it helped their battered bones. Academics have come out with recent studies that say it "probably" doesn't do anything. In my case it did, and it isn't the placebo effect (and if it were, so what?). I read about the pros and cons, got a reliable brand, varied the dosage, and gave it time to work. My knees feel better.

Finally, by open minded I mean you need to be curious about research and studies going on. I listen especially closely to people who are not being paid to endorse or recommend something. Health care consumes 16% of the country GDP. It's going up every year. The Boomers threaten to break the Medicare bank. Armies of researchers are looking for valid solutions to health problems. More than ever they will be making important discoveries, many of which will help TOJs, and I will discuss here.