Run Fast - Jog Those Memories

For the experiment, published last month in Neuroscience, researchers in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., recruited 54 adults, ages 18 to 36, from the college and the surrounding community. The volunteers were healthy but generally sedentary; none exercised regularly.It’s well established that exercise substantially changes the human brain, affecting both thinking and emotions. But a sophisticated, multifaceted new study suggests that the effects may be more nuanced than many scientists previously believed. Whether you gain all of the potential cognitive and mood benefits from exercise may depend on when and how often you work out, as well as on the genetic makeup of your brain.

During their first visit to the lab, they completed a series of questionnaires about their health and mood, including how anxious they were both at that moment and in general.

They also gave blood for genetic testing. Earlier studies had shown that exercise can increase levels of a protein called brain-derived neurotropic factor, or BDNF, which is thought to play a role in the positive effects of exercise on thinking. But some people produce less BDNF after exercise than others because they have a variation in the gene that controls BDNF production, though it’s unknown whether they derive less cognitive benefit from exercise as a result. So the scientists wanted to determine each volunteer’s BDNF gene status.

Then the group submitted to a memory test, consisting of pictures of objects flashed across a computer screen. Soon after, another set of pictures appeared, and the volunteers were asked to note, with keystrokes, whether they’d seen each particular image before.

This task involves a different part of the brain from the one most often focused on in studies of exercise and memory, says David Bucci, an associate professor of psychology and brain science at Dartmouth, who oversaw the study. Other experiments typically examine the effect of exercise on the hippocampus, the brain’s primary memory center, he says, but the object-recognition task involves activity in the perirhinal cortex, a portion of the brain essential to remembering particular things or objects and whether they happen to be new in your experience. Without a healthy perirhinal cortex, you might recall where you’ve put your car keys (a hippocampal memory task), but not what car keys are.

Finally, after completing the tests, the volunteers were randomly assigned to exercise or not during the next four weeks. Half began a supervised program of walking or jogging four times a week for at least 30 minutes. The other half remained sedentary.

After a month, the volunteers returned to the lab for retesting. But first, some exercised. Half of the exercising group walked or jogged before the testing; half did not. Ditto for the sedentary group: Half exercised that day for the first time since the start of the study; the rest did not.

The earlier tests of memory and mood were repeated.

The results were, in certain aspects, a surprise. As expected, many of the volunteers who’d been exercising for the past month significantly improved their scores on the memory and mood tests. But not all of them did. In general, those volunteers who had exercised for the past month and who worked out on the day of retesting performed the best on the memory exam. They also tended to report less anxiety than other volunteers.

Those who had exercised during the preceding month but not on the day of testing generally did better on the memory test than those who had been sedentary, but did not perform nearly as well as those who had worked out that morning.

Interestingly, while exercising before the test didn’t improve the memory scores of those who’d remained sedentary for the past month, it did increase their self-reported anxiety levels. They were more jittery than they had been on the first lab visit.

Perhaps most intriguing, though, was what the researchers discovered when they compared the volunteers’ BDNF gene variants and their scores on the memory test. They found that those with the variant that blunts BDNF production after exercise — a fairly common variation, existing in about 30 percent of people of European Caucasian heritage — did not improve their memories, even if they exercised regularly. (No consumer test exists to check for the variant.)

Wait, what was I writing about...?

peace out

Johnny Boy

Too Many Miles?

*Johnny sucking air after the Can 5km Track Championships - with my boy, James E*

I used to train with a guy who was unhappy with the way his performance had deteriorated over the years. In his early 20 and 30's, he had been super-fast. A couple of decades later and about 40 pounds heavier, he had lost that speed.

“Too many miles on the tires,” he would say. His idea was that if you start racing when you are young, you will be worse in middle age than if you started fresh when you were older.

But is it true, and if so, how does it happen? Do athletes accumulate injuries, for example, or just get mentally fatigued after competing nonstop for decades?

There are no definitive data on this question, but there are some suggestive findings, according to Dr. Vonda Wright, an orthopedic surgeon and exercise researcher at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Wright’s study of senior Olympians — athletes age 50 and older who participated in the National Senior Olympic Games, a track and field event — found what she considers a surprisingly small rate of decline in performance until age 75: just a few percent a year in their times. After that, though, the athletes slowed down considerably.

She asked the athletes when they began participating in sports. In her survey, 95 percent said they were active in sports when they were teenagers and 85 percent said they were active as young adults.

But the survey did not ask what sports they played when they were younger — the same sports or different ones from those they were competing in now — or when they began to compete (it is likely that many of the women, growing up before Title IX [this was an American study !], did not compete when they were young). Both factors bear on whether late-blooming athletes have an advantage as they get older.

Hirofumi Tanaka, an exercise researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, has some data that bear on the question, albeit obliquely. He and his colleagues measured the maximum oxygen consumption, or VO2 max, of 153 men ages 20 to 75. Because VO2 max describes how much oxygen can get to muscles during exercise, it is measure of how well a person can perform. Sixty-four of the men in his study were sedentary, and 89 were trained endurance athletes.

The results were something of a surprise. The endurance athletes had a greater VO2 max than sedentary men of the same age, but this measure also declined more swiftly with age among the athletes. And although Dr. Wright may be right that each year performance times decline only a few percent, that steady decline year after year takes its toll.

In their 20s and 30s, the endurance athletes could run 10 kilometers, or 6.2 miles, in about 36 minutes. In their 40s they were almost as fast — 38 minutes. But in their 50s, the men averaged about 44 minutes. Those older than 60 took about 53 minutes to run that distance.

If sedentary men suddenly took up an endurance sport, could they match or even surpass the longtime athletes? Without years of cumulative injuries, the inevitable price of any long-term and rigorous exercise program, might the newer athletes have the edge?

“This is a good question that nobody has addressed in the past,” Dr. Tanaka said. But, he added, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that older elite athletes often were not athletes when they were young.

Kozo Haraguchi, a former world record holder for his age group in the 100-meter sprint, ran it in 22.04 seconds when he was 95 years old. Mr. Haraguchi broke his own record two months later, with a time of 21.69 seconds. Yet this astonishing sprinter did not even start jogging until he was 65. He did not start sprinting until he was 76.

“Most of the masters distance runners who compete at a high level are also slow starters,” Dr. Tanaka said. In his study of endurance athletes and sedentary men, the average age at which the distance runners who were older than 60 had taken up the sport was around 40.

But might this simply reflect the fact that so many longtime athletes retire when they are still young, before they stop winning races, leaving the field to novices? If elite athletes like the swimmer Dara Torres, 45, and the marathoner Joan Benoit Samuelson, 55, choose to stay in the game, to continue to train hard and compete, then maybe it will turn out that long years of competition hold a big advantage for older athletes.

Or maybe not.

At this point, Dr. Tanaka said, “nobody has the answer.”

All I know is, I am one of those who is thankful I didn't start piling on the km's until my late 20's - with only 25 years of pounding on these legs, maybe there is hope yet for this tired old, breaking down, body (upcoming surgery notwithstanding).

peace out

Johnny Boy

Plato, Dave Scott and Michael Phelps

IF only I had read Plato.

That’s what I thought when, now 2 days after my last race, I revisited my MRI: 68 images, impossible to deny, of a torn hip labrum/Cam & Pincer impingements — a consequence of years of running, Ironman and just getting old. And that’s just my hip. May I present my rebuilt Right shoulder, my twice 'scoped Right knee, my chronic Achilles tendonopothy, etc— residual damage done to a body, now nearly 50, in the name of exercise, in pursuit of being "manly".

Plato could have warned me. In “The Republic,” he advises “temperance” in physical training, likening it to learning music and poetry. Keep it “simple and flexible,” as in all things, don’t overdo. Follow this course, and you will remain “independent of medicine in all but extreme cases.”

Plato was an athlete, particularly skilled as a wrestler. His given name was Aristocles, after his grandfather, but the coach under whom he trained is said to have called him “Plato” — from the Greek for broad, platon, on account of his broad-shouldered frame. It stuck.

So good a wrestler was Plato that he reportedly competed at the Isthmian Games (comparable to the Olympics), and continued wrestling into adulthood. Ensconced at the academy, he spoke strongly on behalf of the virtues of physical education. He felt that one should balance physical training with “cultivating the mind,” exercising “the intellect in study.” The goal “is to bring the two elements into tune with one another by adjusting the tension of each to the right pitch.” Equal parts thought and sweat, so to speak.

As one can see most obviously in gifted athletes and performers, the body itself can be a source of knowledge — coordination, grace, agility, stamina, skill — both intuitive and learned. Indeed, there are rare few whom I would call Einsteins of the body — geniuses at inventing, expressing and employing movement. Is that not what the Ironman Dave Scoot or Mark Allen are? Or the tennis great Roger Federer? Michael Phelps in the water?

The contemporary philosopher (and self-admitted sports nut) Colin McGinn points out that physical education should be a lifelong pursuit. “We like our minds to be knowledgeable, well-stocked with information; we should also want our bodies to be similarly endowed,” he writes in his book “Sport.” “The erudite body is a good body to have.”

Of course there is the risk of taking things too far. Again, from “The Republic”: “Have you noticed how a lifelong devotion to physical exercise, to the exclusion of anything else, produces a certain type of mind? Just as neglect of it produces another?” Plato writes, recounting the words of Socrates. “Excessive emphasis on athletics produces an excessively uncivilized type, while a purely literary training leaves men indecently soft.”

Even if I’d been sitting at Plato’s feet as a young man, I would not have listened. Back then, looking good and getting faster mattered most. I suppose it was all very Darwinian — puffing myself up and trying to make myself attractive in order to attract a mate (as if!). But I was not explicitly conscious of such aims. I liked swimming, running, riding, climbing, whatever  - in itself, the pure satisfaction of using full force against a resistance. I sought what Pavlov — a lover of biking, rowing and swimming — so beautifully called “muscular gladness.”

Alas, today I’m paying a price in tears and frays and consequent surgeries. But in my aches and pains I am choosing to see wisdom gained. If the human body is the best picture of the human soul, as Wittgenstein said, then mine is ok. But I have pressed pause on the track work outs and stepped away from the Ironman and marathon for a time. Now it is Plato’s body to which I aspire.

Or at least one I can use to bend over and tie my racing flats with.

peace out

Johnny Boy

Perspective and New PB's

As some of you may know, I have been battling a pretty bad injury (hip) for some time now*. It has really impacted on both training and racing - in fact, I did my first 5km race 2 weeks ago, the last one being over 8 months ago. It went pretty well - but, I paid for it for several days following, when my hip and psoas felt like death warmed over...it really sucked.

[*Note I FINALLY see my surgeon on May 22 - some 3 months after my MRI and nearly a year after the initial preliminary diagnosis. Oh well, patience is a virtue].

I had previously entered Sporting Life 10km, a fixture on the Toronto running scene [notwithstanding the change in race director - it is the same course etc] having done quite well there over the last 3 years. In fact, I set my PB there of 35:07 there a few years back - and was understandably reluctant to race this year without the fitness or hip strength (not too mention nearly zero temp runs). So, I looked for sources of "inspiration": I could have watched "Rudy" [click for sheer awesomeness!] or "Pre", I could have just had several drams of 18 year old scotch last night and not given a damn, or just skipped the race entirely.


Instead, I read this last night - and re-read it this morning before the race; it is worth spending 5 minutes to read this, because it makes you realize just how damn lucky we are as runners. 


One of my favorite lines in the 2002 movie "The Rookie" comes when the aging hero Jimmy Morris, discouraged from the stress of the minor league circuit, wanders over to watch a Little League game from the outfield. Returning to the clubhouse, he tells a teammate, "You know what we get to do today, Brooks? We get to play baseball."

I was reminded of this perspective-changing ability of youth when I interviewed Alana Hadley on the eve of the USATF Cross Country Championships in February. Alana, barely 14, was the youngest competitor on the start list, running her first USATF race. With no pressure to run a certain time or place, nor a team counting on her performance, she was brimming with excitement at being able to toe the line at a championship against runners she'd only heard about before. "When I get into big races like this," Alana said, "they actually are better for me. I tend to do better when I get excited, when I'm all super-happy about a race."In contrast, I realized I had been nervous about my race in the masters field for several weeks, since my training hadn't progressed exactly as planned and the likelihood of running my goal time became increasingly in question. While I, like Alana, had no team to hold up or anyone counting on me to run a certain time or place, my self-imposed goals loomed large enough to dampen nearly all of my excitement about running in this race.
"You have to think about it, why do people run?" Alana told me. "If you're doing it and not enjoying it, there's really no purpose in doing it." Out of the mouth of babes, they say.
Why was I racing? While a lucky(?) few get to run for their living, the rest of us, no matter how serious we take it, are doing this for recreation. This isn't news, but somehow I need to be reminded of it often. I was running the race because it had given me a focus for training over the winter, because I enjoy the challenge of cross country, and mostly, because I could: to celebrate being 46 and still running strong (for me, although I regularly need to revise my idea of what strong is these days).
None of these reasons would change whether I ran 29 minutes or 35 minutes for the 8K the next day, and no one but me cared. All of the pressure came from comparing my self-image with my reality and falling short, or fearing that I would. Granted, the pressure I put on myself is part of why I race: Setting an audacious goal, being afraid of it, and then conquering it is one of life's great joys. But when that pressure causes me to approach a starting line with more fear than excitement, something has gone wrong.
I thought about this more as I researched the story in this issue on kids' mileage. Time after time, experts said the key issue is that it has to be fun for the kids. "Fun," however, can be tricky. Few would find running 3 hours to exhaustion fun or how they would want to spend most Saturday mornings. I think we want to teach our children how to enjoy this type of fun. But I came to the conclusion that where the fun stops is when the runner isn't choosing to do it, and/or expectations exceed the runner's ability.
It occurred to me that this isn't limited to kids: The same can be said for adult runners. Regardless of where the pressure comes from, if we've stopped enjoying running or racing because it's something we have to do or because we're unable to live up to our expectations, we need to revise something.
David Ramsey, coach of the successful youth team Brocaw Blazers of Kansas City says, "Our kids go to the starting line laughing." Of course, there's a place for focus, and the lack of a smile doesn't always mean something isn't enjoyable. But maybe going to the line laughing--confident in our training, celebrating our health and fitness, ready to do something really hard that we love--is a good goal for all of us.
I was still nervous on the morning of the race, and, as it turned out, I didn't run my goal, but I was still glad I raced. In my next race, my goal was challenging, but more realistic. And, thanks in part to Alana, I went to the starting line thinking, "You know what we get to do today? We get to race!"
**credit to Running Times

So there it is - the race today went pretty well, all things considered; I was only marginally slower than last year (there is that slow, inexorable creep into old age again!), and THANK GOD cracked 38 minutes! And unlike the "Occupy Toronto" Movement, I was quite happy to finishing in the top 1%. Sweet. But even better, one of my closest friends and training partners had a cracking good race, ripping out a new PB - 44 min - over 3 min faster than she had ever run before!! 
And now, I sit with ice strapped all over the place - but feel like today was a helluva lot of fun.
And it does not get any better than that.

peace out
Johnny Boy