Post date: Jan 28, 2020 4:53:47 AM
this is a suggestive headline:
"Run a First Marathon, and Your Arteries May Look 4 Years Younger (NYT)"
well, at least they threw in the word "may" to discourage the absolute certainty of the study's findings. some of the outcomes sound very positive, such as:
"Ultimately, 136 men and women completed the race, in an average finishing time of 4.5 hours for the men and 5.5 hours for the women. A week or two later, they returned to the lab to repeat the tests.
"Their aortas proved to be more flexible now. In fact, their arteries seemed to have shed the equivalent of about four years, in functional terms. The aorta of a 60-year-old marathoner in the study now expanded and contracted about as lithely as that of a 56-year-old participant did at the study’s start, and the 56-year-old’s arteries worked like those of a pre-race 52-year-old, and so on.
"These improvements were most marked in older male runners and those whose finishing times had been slowest. They did not depend on changes in runners’ fitness or weight, which, in most cases, had been negligible. All that had mattered was that people had kept up with their training and raced."
promising, right? marathon training helps those that are the least expert; in particular, it doesn't just reward the fast or the naturally able.
at this point, who wouldn't want to run a marathon?
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initial details (like the ones below) give me pause, however:
"The researchers zeroed in on race participants who had reported on entry forms that they were newcomers to the sport and to exercise in general, rarely working out before signing up. The scientists found more than 200 of these men and women, most of them middle-aged and all sedentary, and contacted them six months before race time.
"These soon-to-be marathoners agreed to visit the university’s lab, completing health and fitness tests and a sophisticated scan of their aorta, designed to measure its flexibility. None of the group showed signs of heart disease or other serious health problems."
"Each runner then began his or her preferred marathon-training program, with most jogging a few times a week. This training continued for six months, although some developed injuries or other concerns and dropped out."
wait: they lost 32% of their participants? what are these other concerns? (is this normal?)
more questions come to mind:
what happened to those who didn't complete the training?
what were their aortas like? did they improve too?
did anyone's arteries get worse? how does this compare to average wear-&-tear?
questions and the absence of answers, like this, keep me up at night.
i hate it when blanket statements, like the headline above, appear in the public sphere with little disclaimer. yes, this is a matter of public health: obesity is rising in the united states, so any push to improve health and fitness in the general population is (to me) a good thing.
however, insinuating that "everyone should run a marathon!" is overly simplistic; wasn't there once a rallying cry like ...
"everyone should go to college!"
... that subsequently put a generation of middle-class Gen-X'ers/millenials in semi-permanent debt, for the rest of their lives?
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anyway, the study appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology; the link is [here], as provided in the NYT article.
in that sense, this newspaper is doing a good job!
they are reporting and they are even referring their readers to the actual science. (i may be critical, but i still appreciate being given a path out of my ignorance.)