The Great Ganesha

Are you one of those cynical people who sit on park benches and laugh at the joggers who pass you?

“Ha!” you scoff, “We’re all going to die anyway!”

Berating all joggers, you wait patiently for the next one to die of a heart attack, at which point you will say, with smug satisfaction, “What did I tell you? Jogging’s bad for you!” After which, you will once again lie down on the couch and complain about technology not being advanced enough because you have to resort to the crude technique of actually pressing that remote button, rather than just thinking of the channel you want to watch…

Well, my cynical friend, I have news for you. An article in today’s New York Times today says three basic things quite clearly:

Firstly, it says there is no doubt whatsoever that jogging increases your life-span. In fact,

In the long run, various studies have found, jogging adds years to life. Over all, each hour spent exercising (up to 30 hours a week) adds about two hours to a person’s life expectancy, according to the Harvard Alumni Study, which has tracked deaths among 17,000 men for more than two decades.

But what about those people who died of heart attacks while running? Well, here’s the thing – the risk of most heart attacks increase with the following factors: elevated blood cholesterol level, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, undue stress, family history and age. Except for family history and age, running reduces all of the other factors. There’s conclusive evidence to prove this. However, you can’t control family history and age (obviously) and therein lies the rub. Most people who died of heart attacks while running, usually had a family history of heart disease.

The heart is a muscle, like any other, except of course, that it’s an important one you can’t live without. When you run, you are causing your heart-rate to increase, and sometimes even become irregular. Your blood pressure can also increase. You are, essentially, putting it under tremendous stress. So, if you have genetic inclination towards heart problems, running will aggravate those problems. However, this is not to say that you cannot run, but you must be careful and not increase your pace suddenly, not make any abrupt lifestyle changes (like go from couch potato to marathoner in two days, for instance) and make absolutely sure that all the other risk factors are in check.

So, getting to the second conclusive point:

If you have a family history of premature heart disease (heart attacks in first-degree relatives that occurred before 65), or if you are middle-aged or older and have been fairly sedentary for years, you would be wise to undergo a thorough physical exam before taking up jogging.

If you have a family history of heart disease and you abruptly change your lifestyle and start running suddenly, you’re asking for trouble. This would especially be the case if you were middle-aged to boot. So take it easy, take it slow and let your body adapt to the increased physical stress.

And the third and final point is that even if you have a family history of heart disease, and you start running, you will lower your risk factors and improve your overall health. Further, it doesn’t matter that you waited till the age of 50 to start running, you can still reap the rewards.

…over all, people who jog, including those with major cardiac risk factors, are less likely to have a heart attack in the long run than if they had not been joggers… [A] study in Seattle of all people who died suddenly in one year showed that…if those with heart disease avoided all exercise, their overall risk of sudden death would increase, not decrease.

[Furthermore] a study of 7,620 joggers in Rhode Island [showed] that a middle-aged jogger with no known heart disease who ran for one more year was considerably less likely to die suddenly than was a middle-aged nonrunner who drove during that year.

Even those who did not start exercising until midlife had a 23 percent lower risk of death over the next 20-odd years.

And, by the way, what about us distance runners? Well, I can say, with smug satisfaction, that we have it best:

Endurance activities like running, cycling, lap swimming, brisk walking and cross-country skiing conferred the greatest benefit, adding six years of life expectancy over that of a couch potato.

Read the article.

Be Sociable, Share!

•