You don’t have to be an athlete to notice how ruthlessly age hunts and how programmed the toll seems to be. We start losing wind in our 40s and muscle tone in our 50s. Things go downhill slowly until around age 75, when something alarming tends to happen.
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?
(via Olga Kotelko, the 91-Year-Old Track Star - NYTimes.com)
This is heartwarmingly awe-inspiring, particularly in light of the fact that my mother, who is not quite in her 90’s (she has a ways to go), recently started training to be a runner, finished her first half-marathon this fall, and is continuing to train for her second in the spring of 2011.
The accomplishments of both these women truly inspire me.
