Well, folks, we did it! 26.2 miles! My second marathon, the wife’s first. Here’s our route, freshly uploaded from the GPS into Google Earth.

Temperatures were in the low 60s with fog, which made it perfect for me and perfect for running. In fact, it was so foggy, I couldn’t see further than 100 feet ahead when we were running across the bridge. The marathon was organized extremely well, with aid stations approximately every 2.5 miles, serving Ctyomax as electrolyte (which was excellent in taste and re-hydration) as well as water. There weren’t as many spectators as New York, but the ones that were there were genuine and enthusiastic. A great experience overall. If only I could say the same for my quads, at this point.

…cycling is a lot more forgiving of body type and age than running. The best cyclists going up hills are those with the best weight-to-strength ratio, which generally means being thin and strong. But heavier cyclists go faster downhill. And being light does not help much on flat roads. [link]

Woo hoo! I’m taking up biking! Seriously though, the same thing can be said about swimming, too. I’ve seen some people considerably larger than me (yes, they exist – in small numbers, I concede – but they do exist) just whoop my ass in the pool. I mean, they swim right past me like a blue whale going in for a kill, while I’m left gurgling in the wake of the mini-tsunami that ensues.

Seems to be celluloid-blogging day here…

Generally, they have a full-page ad with a before and after picture. This one’s before/after pic is really suspect. They’re not even the same person!

An article by Alec Wilkinson in last week’s double-issue of the New Yorker is about parkour – the art of running up walls, going down the rails (as opposed to the stairs) and jumping across rooftops. As it says in the magazine:

Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path a vocabulary, that is, to be employed in finding one’s way among obstacles. Parkour goes over walls, not around them; it takes the stair rail, not the stairs. [link]

Parkour has a cousin – free running, seen in this ad for Nike.

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The performer (and inventor of free running) is Sebastien Foucan. You may remember him from the opening scene of Casino Royale.

While the sport is fun to watch with its daredevilry, what caught my eye was its connections with India.

David Belle

The inventor of parkour, David Belle, went through a period of confusion in his life. His father was a fireman, and he became one too. But he found that the life did not suit him. So he joined the Marines. That didn’t work out, either. So where did he end up going? None other than apna des.

David was briefly a fireman recruit, until he hurt his wrist. While he was recuperating, he started thinking things over and saw that the life of a fireman had too many rules, and not enough action, and he decided to join the Marines, but he didn’t find the same values among them, the “traditional values.” He left the Marines and went to India, where he stayed for six months. [link]

Parkour took off after his return. When he got back, he began to get involved with his performances of parkour and creating videos, which eventually led up to a demonstration (which also included Foucan, incidentally, a childhood friend), that resulted in widespread publicity for the sport, and him getting several invitations to perform.

Belle’s inspiration for parkour was monkeys. And not just any monkeys – it was Indian monkeys. Including the one and only monkey god himself. That’s right, I’m talking about Hanuman.

Here’s what Belle did in India:

“I just kept training,” he said. “I was training in the trees.”

[...] “I was at a waterfall one day,” David went on, “and..in the trees were monkeys…I went…and played with the monkeys…learning how they climbed. All the techniques in parkour are from watching the monkeys.”

He then showed us, on a computer, a documentary called “Warriors of the Monkey God.” It was about a tribe of monkeys who live on the rooftops of Jodhpur. The people regard the monkeys as holy. We watched them leaping from rooftop to rooftop and through the trees.

[...] When it was finished, he said that after coming home he had just continued perfecting what he had learned from the monkeys. He had plans, he said, to make a movie with them. [link]

The Upshot
Interesting. So Belle was inspired by monkeys from the motherland. Notwithstanding his undoubted preconceptions of India being “exotic”, “spiritual”, and a place where one can “find oneself”, I have to admit, the stunts are damn cool.

In this one, Belle avoids rush hour to catch the evening line-up on the BBC.

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Apparently, running when you’re injured is good for you. An article ($) in January’s NYT talks about running through injuries and how it helps them heal faster. Now, before you naysayer couch-potato-types jump on me, it’s not like you should run with shattered kneecaps and fractured tibias, but you can run with certain not-so-serious (that’s a technical term) injuries. In fact, it may help them heal. The bottomline, of course, is that you should use your common sense.

It sounds almost like heresy. The usual advice in treating injuries is to rest until the pain goes away. But Dr. Weinstein and a number of leading sports medicine specialists say that is outdated and counterproductive. In fact, Dr. Weinstein says, when active people consult him, he usually tells them to keep exercising.

The idea, these orthopedists and exercise specialists say, is to use common sense. If you’ve got tendinitis or sprained a muscle or tendon by doing too much, don’t go right back to exercising at the same level. [link]

Weinstein is an orthopaedic surgeon at Dartmouth College. He should know. Not just because he’s in the business, but because he himself has run through several injuries, including lower back pain.

[He] was stretching to lift a heavy box and twisted his back. The pain was agonizing. He could not sit, and when he lay down he could barely get up.

”I took an anti-inflammatory, iced up, and off I went [for a run],” Dr. Weinstein recalled. When he returned, he said, he felt ”pretty good.” [link]

Picture Source: National Library of Medicine

The running is particularly good for inflamed tissue, but only when they are at a particular stage of inflammation.

…painful conditions that are essentially inflammation — arthritis and chronic lower back pain — actually improve when patients keep moving.

…

First, forceful stretching of tendons elicits the production of molecules that are involved in inflammation. But small repeated stretching of tendons that are already inflamed leads to the production of molecules that heal inflammation. That suggests moderate exercise can actually speed healing.

And now, their [Dr. Freddie Fu, a sports medicine expert and chairman of the orthopedic surgery department at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and a colleague, James H-C. Wang] preliminary results suggest that the usual treatment for tendinitis — taking drugs like aspirin or ibuprofen — can help reduce inflammation when the injury begins. But after inflammation is under way, they can make matters worse. [link]

Picture Source: National Library of Medicine

The best advice comes from Dr. Mininder Kocher, a sports medicine specialist and orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Hospital Boston:

His rule of thumb, Dr. Kocher said, is that if the pain is no worse after exercising than it is when the person simply walks, then the exercise ”makes a lot of sense.”

It also helps patients psychologically, he added. ”If you take athletes or active people out, they get depressed, they get wacky,” Dr. Kocher explained. [link]

Hear, hear. Now get out there and start running. All that sitting around isn’t going to get you anywhere.

After years in which almost no deaths were attributed to heart attacks at this country?s major marathons, at least six runners have died in 2006. [link]

Ouch. But one explanation is in the law of averages. Says, Rick Neales, director of the Marine Corps Marathon:

Statistically, maybe, it was inevitable.

Maybe it’s not statistics. Check this out: Researchers tested 60 (41 male, 19 female) runners before and after the 2004 and 2005 Boston marathons. In addition to testing for the usual suspects they also tested for troponin – a protein that is found in cardiac muscle cells, but is found in the blood when the heart undergoes some kind of trauma. Here’s what they found:

The runners had normal cardiac function before the marathon, with no signs of troponin in their blood. Twenty minutes after finishing, 60 percent of the group had elevated troponin levels, and 40 percent had levels high enough to indicate the destruction of heart muscle cells. Most also had noticeable changes in heart rhythms. Those who had run less than 35 miles a week leading up to the race had the highest troponin levels and the most pronounced changes in heart rhythm. [link]

Wow. So one thing is obvious – if you’re going to run the marathon, start to increase your weekly mileage ASAP so that you get it above 35 miles. But does this mean that marathoning is bad for you? Well, not quite. First off, the abnormalities disappeared over time. Secondly, says Dr. Arthur Siegel, the director of internal medicine at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard (also a co-author in the study),

Their hearts appeared to have been stunned.

Ok, that didn’t help much, did it? But this guy had something a little more enlightening to offer:

?Although the evidence is not conclusive, it does look like the Boston study is showing some effect on cardiac muscle,? said Dr. Paul D. Thompson, 59, the director of cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, and an author of an editorial that accompanied the study. ?It?s far too early to draw any conclusions,? he added. ?We?d be seeing lots more bodies piling up if there were real lingering long-term cardiac damage? caused by running marathons.

?Over all, the evidence is strongly in favor of the idea that endurance exercise is helpful in terms of cardiac health,? said Dr. Thompson, who has run more than 30 marathons. [link]

Ok, that’s a relief. But we’re not completely off the hook. There was another German study on middle aged marathoners (each of whom had completed at least five marathons). They found that:

More than a third of the runners had significant calcium deposits, suggesting they were at relatively high risk for a heart attack. Only 22 percent of a control group of nonrunners had a comparable buildup.

The researchers scrupulously avoided suggesting that marathoning had caused the men to develop heart disease. (After all, running may have kept them alive when they would otherwise have keeled over years earlier.) But neither did the authors rule out the possibility that in some baffling way distance running had contributed to the men?s arterial gunk.

Hmm, that’s not exactly heartening either. Yet, cardiologists still are big fans of running. Except if you have a genetic history of heart disease, then it might make sense for you to be a little extra cautious. Or worse yet, as Dr. Siegel suggests:

His advice to runners with any history of heart trouble is ?train for the race, getting the cardiac benefits of endurance exercise,? then watch the event on television.

The risk of going into cardiac arrest as a spectator, he said, is only about one in a million. (The applicable studies of spectators involved Super Bowl fans.) [link]

That’s gotta suck. But probably a lot less than a heart attack. I guess the bottomline is you should use your own common sense and if you have a history or a bad feeling about it, then avoid it. Still, common sense is not that common, as they say. Let’s wait it out to see what the researchers come up with. Until then, run slow, run easy and stop when you have to.

“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.

Part spiritual quest, part kamikaze mission, 4 Deserts has become the next big endeavor for people who have raced every marathon, Ironman triathlon, and Eco-Challenge out there.

This article is about a software consultant from Chicago, Greg Kunhau, who completed all four deserts of the 4 Deserts challenge. The competition covers China’s Gobi desert, Chile’s Atacama, Egypt’s Sahara and ends with Antarctica. Last year, the race started with the Atacama, and Kunhau was there:

The course there offered almost no shade and traversed salt flats with daytime temperatures near 120 degrees, even in midwinter. In that race, Kunhau lost a big toenail, shed 17 pounds, and contracted bronchitis and strep throat. “I wanted to die,” he says.

He was part of a team of three people who did it together. I cannot even imagine what it must be like doing it alone.

While most racers prefer to go solo, he competed as part of a team of three (all entrepreneurs), because they wanted the company. In 2004, Joel Burrows, now 30, and Nancy Fudacz-Burrows, 38, a married couple who own a gym in Chicago called First Step Fitness, traveled with Kunhau[.]

They next went to China, to run in the Gobi.

The next spring the team flew to China to run in the Gobi desert, which competitors refer to as the “oven” because of its relentless sun and seemingly endless expanses of bare rock. Kunhau suffered chronic nausea and hallucinated from lack of sleep.

And, next to the Sahara.

[I]n the Sahara he lost another toenail and started vomiting so violently from the 130-degree heat that he had to crawl under a Volkswagen-sized rock to cool down. But the intensity of the experiences started to become addictive. “You learn to overcome fear,” Kunhau says. “You have to if you want to get through.”

At this point, I am speechless. When I ran the NYC marathon, I thought that was gruelling. That was nothing compared to this. In fact, that was nothing even compared to the Ironman (swimming 2.4 miles, biking 112 miles, and then running a marathon – 26.2 miles). And Kunhau has run three of them.

Before the desert events, Kunhau had completed 17 marathons, three Ironman competitions, and, as he says, “too many triathlons to count.”

Amazing. How did he train for these things?

Before work Kunhau would wake at 5 A.M. to get in a 30-minute bike ride or a five-mile run. Other mornings he took his work to the Lake Michigan shore, ran an eight-mile loop along the waterfront, returned to his car for an hour or so of conference calls with clients, and then put in another eight-mile loop. At night he went to the gym for weight training, swimming, and treadmill work.”For a few months I didn’t have much of a social life,” he says.

I can empathize with the lack of a social life (I’m a grad student). And even I work out twice a day, but this is amazing. I mean, talk about life-changing experiences. The next time you say that a movie or a book “changed your life,” think about this. I think this is the real thing. In fact,

Life altering is the first expression most use when describing the desert races. According to Mary Gadams, 41, the U.S.-born founder and CEO of RacingThePlanet, the desert-based ultramarathons are so transforming that after completing one, about a third of the competitors quit their jobs to do something more fulfilling.

For once, I have nothing say except that this is one more thing to add to my life’s to-do list…

The understanding now is that muscle cells convert glucose or glycogen to lactic acid. The lactic acid is taken up and used as a fuel by mitochondria, the energy factories in muscle cells.

In fact, lactic acid actually disappears from our muscles in about an hour after exercise, so that is not what causes soreness. Coaches apparently have known this all along, despite so many running websites and magazines telling us to work out at our “lactic threshold” – that point where you feel your muscles being worked out to the fullest.

Yet, Dr. Brooks said, even though coaches often believed in the myth of the lactic acid threshold, they ended up training athletes in the best way possible to increase their mitochondria. “Coaches have understood things the scientists didn’t,” he said.Through trial and error, coaches learned that athletic performance improved when athletes worked on endurance, running longer and longer distances, for example.

That, it turns out, increased the mass of their muscle mitochondria, letting them burn more lactic acid and allowing the muscles to work harder and longer.

So folks, this is yet another way in which distance running helps you – it makes you faster! Incidentally, if you’re wondering what actually causes muscle soreness (now that we know it’s not lactic acid) – it’s, essentially, your muscles repairing themselves. Pushing yourself to your limit causes microdamage to muscle fibres and the soreness you feel hours after your workout is called DOMS (or delayed onset muscle soreness).

It takes at least eight hours to feel this type of soreness. You finish a workout and feel great; then you get up the next morning and your exercised muscles feel sore. We used to think that next-day muscle soreness is caused by a buildup of lactic acid in muscles, but now we know that lactic acid has nothing to do it. Next-day muscle soreness is caused by damage to the muscle fibers themselves. Muscle biopsies taken on the day after hard exercise show bleeding and disruption of the z-band filaments that hold muscle fibers together as they slide over each other during a contraction.

So the next time you feel that soreness, remember to take it easy until it goes away.

On one day, go out and exercise right up to the burn, back off when your muscles really start to burn, then pick up the pace again and exercise to the burn. Do this exercise-to-the-burn and recover until your muscles start to feel stiff, and then stop the workout. Depending on how sore your muscles feel, take the next day off or go at a very slow pace. Do not attempt to train for muscle burning again until the soreness has gone away completely. Most athletes take a very hard workout on one day, go easy for one to seven days afterward, and then take a hard workout again.

The stuff about lactic acid is from an NYT article, and can be read here. The stuff about muscle soreness is from DrMirkin.com and can be found here.

Incidentally, there is pretty solid evidence that the right kind of music can enhance athletic performance. This meta-analytic study (that means an analysis of other people’s analysis) in the Sports Journal says that it three ways:

1. Distraction from fatigue
2. Stimulation
3. Synchronicity of exercise rhythms with musical ones

Check out the article.