My wife talked me into running a marathon this year. As you know, a marathon is a running race that covers 26.2 miles and for many runners is the culminating event in a career of running. I started training about 5 months ago and now I into my last week—the race is this Saturday. The marathon I’ve chosen takes place in St. George, Utah and is a beautiful course that descends through the red rock country of the desert southwest. I ran this particular race exactly 21 years ago and haven’t done it since. Not learning my lesson from this first painful experience, I then ran several other marathons in different cities but stopped putting myself through this misery about 12 years ago. My wife ran the Boston Marathon last spring (not long after knee surgery) and was such an inspiration to me that I agreed to sign up for one last race.
I still consider myself a youngish person, but if I compare myself to active professional athletes I come off looking like a wizened old geezer. Most pro basketball and football players retire in their 30s, most tennis players hang up their racquets in their 20s, and nearly all gymnasts and figure skaters transition into “where-are-they-now?” status shortly after puberty. Anomalies such as Brett Favre and Michael Jordan manage to drag themselves back for a “post-retirement” second act, and the mere fact that they can still walk makes the front page of the sports section. In all these sports the athletes peak in their mid-twenties and quickly decline thereafter.
Running (and other endurance sports, ala Lance Armstrong’s return to a strong 3rd place in this year’s Tour de France) may be an exception to this.
Professor Dennis M. Bramble, a running expert from my alma mater University of Utah, poses a question (as cited in the immensely inspiring book “Born to Run”) that I find interesting:
“We monitored the results of the 2004 New York City Marathon and compared finishing times by age. What we found is that starting at age nineteen, runners get faster every year until they hit their peak at twenty-seven. After twenty-seven, they start to decline. So here’s the question—how old are you when you’re back to running the same speed you did at nineteen?”
The answer he came up with is surprising: 64. The decline in performance over forty-five years is so gradual that the sixty-four-year-old crowd can still compete with the nineteen-year-olds.
My own experience substantiates this. Three weeks ago I ran a 10-mile road race here in Omaha. About 150 people showed up—all of them fairly hard-core runners. Of the thirteen runners who beat me only five were in age divisions younger than my own (40-45) and none were under the age of 32. Finishing ahead of me were several runners older than I, including a 55-year-old man who bested my time by nearly 2 minutes. Despite plenty of entrants in their twenties, only two finished in the top 25.
Last week I ran the Corporate Cup 10K (6.2 miles). Again, I found that the majority of the best runners were over the age of 30 with plenty of top finishers in their forties and fifties. The winner of this week’s Omaha marathon is 46 years old and a veteran of years of pounding the pavement.
Some of you may be familiar with an amateur runner by the name of George Sheehan who wrote the bestseller “Running and Being.” Dr. Sheehan, a physician, took up distance running at the age of 45 and went on to great acclaim with his regular submissions to the magazine Runner’s World. He was also pretty fast—he was the first person over the age of 50 to log a sub-five minute mile (4:47—something I’ve never been able to do)—and competed in countless marathons. He was able to keep up his competitive 10-kilometer race pace until he was in his mid-sixties. His key to success?: run, run, run.
This brings me to my point. I believe your heart, lungs, and muscles are built to sustain amazing stretches of aerobic activity from childhood into old age. Our problem is that we allow ourselves to slide into sedentary living somewhere in the third decade. From that point our muscles fall into disuse and our joints deteriorate under the added weight of adipose; our vertebral disks suffer from lack of postural muscle tone; and our heart and lungs reward our physical complacency with poor performance.
Your body was made to move—your heart wants to beat hard, your legs want to burn under the stress of exercise—and if you manage to keep moving throughout your life you will find that your slide into old age will be a far shallower slope.
I plan to keep these thoughts in mind as I drag myself through the final miles of my race this weekend. I don’t imagine I’ll post a personal record but at the least I’m hoping to finish with a respectable time and beat a few nineteen-year-olds while I’m at it.
Enjoy the run, best of luck
Enjoy the run, best of luck this coming weekend!
Running Into Old Age
What a fascinating post. I had no idea that sustained success could be maintained for so much time. I'm going to have to redouble my efforts (as age is no longer a viable excuse).
Go the Distance!
Ok, since I'm not a runner, the only line of encouragement that popped into my mind was the above from "Field of Dreams." But your most interesting post inspires me to get moving more on my level. Good luck...and let us know how it went!
Go the distance!
I'm 50 and work with Dr. Van De Graaff. I've always tried to stay in shape (with very limited success) but really just got into endurance sports in my mid to late 40s. I've done 5 sprint and olympic distance triathlons now and one half marathon along with a couple of 5k and 10k races. What's great about it is that you don't have to be good or fast. REALLY. I'm getting a little faster now but for the most part I shoot for a 10 minute mile pace(some people walk that fast) and I'm passing plenty of people. So get out there and give it a try. In many of these races(in fact even in H.S. cross-country) the slower you are the more people are cheering for you.
Running into Old Age
Great blog. I'm inspired. Have fun this weekend.
Mariana Phipps
For another great example of getting and staying in shape later in life just "google" Mariana Phipps. Or go to (http://www.maureenoclark.com/articles/Ex-Smoker_Now_Ironman_Triathlete.html) She lives right here in Omaha and her story is truely inspirational. From what I've heard she's still going strong. In fact she should be in Kona, Hawaii right now for the 2009 world championship Ironman Triathlon this weekend and if my info is correct she'll be in a new age group this year, 65-69. GO MARIANA!
How do marathons affect your heart?
I read your entry the other day, and thought of it again this morning as I read this post in the WSJ health blog: http://bit.ly/43tA0U. I find it interesting that there still isn't a clear-cut answer as to whether or not long-distance running causes heart damage.
That being said, I was just curious about your perspective, as both a cardiologist and long-distance runner, about this article or these theories?
Marathons and the heart
Jen,
You bring up a very interesting subject. You ask how marathons affect the heart. The positive effect of endurance exercise on the heart could fill textbooks and is not really controversial. It's the possible negative effects that are more interesting.
I am quite familiar with the studies cited in the NY Times article you linked. In one, researchers in Germany performed CT scans on the hearts of marathon runners and found a higher amount of coronary calcium (an easily quantifiable marker for coronary disease) in the runners than in age-matched controls. I don't find this research very compelling for several reasons. The average age of the participants in the study was 57 and I know from my experience with cardiac CT that coronary calcium is ubiquitous in patients of this age. Furthermore, the majority of runners in the study were current or former smokers (56%), suggesting that they had not been lifelong health enthusiasts. We know that nascent coronary disease is found in males as young as 18 and 19 year of age and progresses steadily through life--by the time someone decides to turn their life around and start living healthy they may already have substantial coronary calcium. Finally, the number of participants was quite small from a statistical point of view.
A more interesting study along these lines would be to evaluate "plaque burden" in marathon runners (using the more advanced coronary CT angiography), a better marker for coronary stability.
The other studies, which look at serum troponin at the end of a marathon, are far more interesting to me. Researchers measured in runners the same marker we measure in patients having heart attacks--cardiac troponin (enzymes)--and found a rise suggestive of cardiac muscle damage.
My opinion on this is similar to that of one of the doctors cited in the commentary:
"But most sports cardiologists are quick to point out that the majority of these studies have been small and the results open to differing interpretations. “We don’t necessarily completely understand what’s going on inside” the hearts of runners during a marathon race, says Paul D. Thompson, MD, the chief of cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut and one of the nation’s leading experts on sports cardiology, as well as, himself, an avid marathon runner. “It’s possible that the heart may be stressed somewhat” by the exertion of a marathon race, he says, just as quadriceps and other muscles are. But “most folks don’t really think there is serious cardiac damage,” he continues, “although there may be fatigue, transient cardiac fatigue.” It’s also possible that some of the blood markers indicate damage to muscles other than the heart. Injured skeletal muscles produce excess troponin, too, he says, and although the troponin measured in the current studies has molecular qualities that indicate it originated in the heart, “it’s just not really clear yet what’s going on,” he says. He’s still running marathons and has no plans to stop."
It's likely that one of 3 possibilities exists: 1. Other muscles in the body release troponin. 2. The heart releases troponin but sufferers no meaningful damage (skeletal muscles release CK with exercise as part of the process of becoming stronger and fitter) 3. I'm absolutely wrong and should stop running marathons right away.
In the end I still feel that the research showing the beneficial effect of marathon running vastly outweighs the yet controversial evidence of damage, and I plan to keep it up.
Now, wear and tear on the knees might be a different issue.
Thanks for your comments!
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