Retired Runners

People today switch not just jobs, but careers several times in their work years. That wasn’t usually the case for the generation of people now retiring. These were the company men—you got a job with Industrial Behemoth, Inc. when you were young, and you stayed there until you retired. You weren’t encouraged to do much more than be an employee, a husband, and a father. The women were encouraged to stay home and raise the kids while tending to the endless household chores. You didn’t have hobbies; you had responsibilities.
But what now? You’ve retired, the kids are long gone and that dream of hours of leisure time might have become a nightmare. Throughout this book, I’ve shown how running is not just exercise; it’s a lifestyle. No, you’re not going to spend your entire day running, but it does help to center your day. Having this activity on your schedule has a way of organizing your day; there seems to be more of a purpose to what you do. I keep mentioning how running improves the quality of your life. This benefit is especially important for older people, who suffer from depression at a higher rate than young people. One of the most amazing runners I know of is Warren Utes of Park Forest, Illinois. Utes began running in 1978 at age 58. When he retired in 1985, he had several years of base behind him and went on a running rampage that hasn’t stopped. Among his many records are a 39:41 10K at age 74, making him the oldest person ever to break 40:00 for the distance. Need me to do the math? That’s almost 6:20 per mile for 6.2 miles! Utes runs 60 miles a week and is having the time of his life. Wouldn’t you like to join him?

Leaving Youth in the Dust

If you’re over the age of 50 and have been sedentary for a long time, do you remember how you felt more than 20 years ago? Probably pretty darned good, huh? Even if you weren’t brimming with vitality, you probably wouldn’t mind feeling like that again instead of how you feel now, right? Well, if you start running, you can feel that way again.
A study of runners age 50 and older compared them to healthy nonrunners in their 20s. The women runners had an average level of aerobic fitness the same as the sedentary 20-somethings, and the 50+ men runners had slightly higher aerobic capacities than the young couch potatoes. Based on these figures, you could say that running cuts 20 to 30 years from your age!

All Ages Welcome

It’s never too late to get in shape. People who start running in their 70s will see the same kinds of gains that people in their 20s do. The principles that underlie why your aerobic capacity and strength increase when you start running have no idea how old you are. That’s not what older people have traditionally been told. People past the age of 60 were told to take it easy—maybe putter around the garden a couple of times a week or walk the dog (assuming the dog is no bigger than a dachshund). Get the old ticker going, and you’ll be pushing up daisies, not pulling in Social Security. Getting sick and increasingly dependent on others is an inevitable part of getting old, we were told. Now we know that that advice, like history, is bunk. As one of the leading researchers in this area likes to say, what most people think of as the natural consequences of aging are really the “atrophy of disuse.” Our bodies are machines that like being used. Start them up at a good rate after years of practicing “atrophy of disuse,” and they will thank you for it.
One study started a group of sedentary men in their 60s on a walking and running program. They worked out four times a week for 30 minutes at 70 percent of their maximum heart rate. (Sound familiar? See Chapter 3.) After only four weeks, their aerobic capacity had increased by six percent, and their heart rate at their training pace decreased by 10 beats per minute. After another five weeks, they had another six percent increase in aerobic capacity, and their training heart rate fell another six beats.
Older people can benefit from strength training as well. One of the main reasons that older people lose independence, and with it, quality of life, is because they’ve lost so much muscle mass that they can’t perform basic daily tasks. Being unable to lift more than five pounds might not seem like much of a big deal until you do some quick math: Half a gallon of milk weighs three pounds. Go to the store and buy that, a few pieces of fruit, and maybe some chicken breast, and you better be able to lift more than five pounds unless you want to rely on others to carry even the lightest groceries for you.
A famous study at Tufts University started frail people in their 80s on a serious weight training program. The old folks did repetitions at 80 percent of their one-rep maximum. That’s hard work for anyone, believe me. In just eight weeks, their strength more than doubled.
The bottom line: Not only can older sedentary people start an exercise program like younger people, but they should. The benefits of exercise, as well as the principles for obtaining these benefits, are the same no matter what your age.

Teen Angels: High School Runners

Once kids are in high school, it’s OK for them to become more serious about competition. By this age, they’ll be able to understand what training is and how sometimes you have to suffer in the present to have a better future. Racing might still be frustrating (it is for everyone at some point), but if they’ve freely chosen to compete, then a few bad experiences probably won’t sour them on running for the rest of their lives. Also, by this age, their bodies can handle the training better. Training for even the longest distances usually offered in high school (5K for cross-country, two miles for track) involves a lot of short, fast speed work, usually on the track. By high school age, more runners are going to be able to do this type of training without breaking down. Most children who race the mile or two-mile in outdoor track are going to top out at about 30 miles a week. Anything more than that, and I’d get a little wary. Certainly, some teens can handle more running than that, especially if they started when they were younger. But even in high school, I think it’s worth erring on the side of caution.
Some coaches are going to encourage members of the team to run more. It’s not unheard of for cross-country team members to run 70 or so miles a week. Whether that’s a good idea is going to be a judgment call. If a high school runner is doing that kind of mileage and understands why, then it can be OK, so long as the runners on the team are progressing and enjoying themselves. But if most members of the team aren’t progressing, then the coach is trying to use methods that might work with older, more developed runners on younger ones who aren’t ready yet for that high of a level of training. Because most high school runners are new to the sport, they should see steady progress in bringing their times down. If they’ve plateaued, it usually means that they’re doing too much.

The Right Races for Rug Rats

In the 1970s, a young runner named Wesley Paul ran faster than 3:00 for the marathon at age 9, the youngest that anyone had ever done so. This feat got him a lot of attention in the press, and one running magazine even speculated that he would grow up to break the world record. You don’t hear about Wesley Paul these days, however. That’s not surprising. For whatever reason, almost every child who is highly motivated to compete in races at a young age doesn’t become a lifetime runner. Probably for the same reason that kids who are gymnastics dynamos aren’t big on tumbling when they’re 40 years old—the activity is associated with a lot of pressure, not fun, and we all have enough pressure in our adult lives as it is.
I’m not a big fan of age-group track meets for junior high and elementary school kids. There’s just too much of a risk that the children are so serious at such a young age for the wrong reasons. Sure, some of the runners might be mature enough to be able to state why they’re training hard toward meeting competitive goals, but I’d rather err on the side of caution. Kids who have the ability and interest to become top runners will have plenty of time to work on that goal later, when both their minds and bodies are more mature, and they can make fuller use of their potential.
Kids are naturally competitive. Watch the start of these children’s runs, and you’ll see the term “youthful exuberance” defined. They just tear away from the starting line in a sprint! But to keep the events fun and worthwhile for all the young runners, children’s races should give some kind of award to every finisher. At a young age, the top finishers are going to place first because they have more talent for running. Preparing for the event doesn’t factor into winning as it does for adults, especially at short distances. Acknowledging all of the participants, by giving them all identical finisher’s medals, for example, gets across the idea that the most important victory is participating. This emphasis encourages the slower kids to keep coming back and to view running as a sport that’s for everyone, not just the talented few. Kids see enough of the elitist view of sports as it is, with the overemphasis that school sports such as football and basketball receive.

The Fun of Family Fitness

My wife and I like to introduce our two daughters to as many activities as possible. Sure, running is one of them, and it’s kind of hard for them not to notice that it seems as though Daddy is always heading out the door for a run. But we never tell them how running is the greatest sport, or how they’re wasting their time when they’re skating, dancing, boating, playing basketball or tennis, or doing any of the other activities that they’ve found that they enjoy.
What we want to do is get across the idea that fitness is a lifestyle. We want to show them that being active and healthy and feeling good while using your body on a regular basis should be the norm. Children are much more likely to develop good fitness habits for the rest of their lives if they see that fitness is important to you. That’s a much better message to send than presenting fitness as an occasional intrusion that you have to tend to out of obligation. In terms of running, this approach means that if your child expresses an interest in it, explore that interest together. Go for a run with your kid. Take him or her to your races, not so much to run, but to show the festive atmosphere that races have. Do what you can to expose your child to those elements of running that are going to have the most appeal to kids.
You might not think so, but one of the biggest appeals of running is going to be the chance to spend some quality time with you. Young kids, especially, will do almost anything to get adult attention. So if they want to run with you, indulge them. Running together can strengthen your relationship, because the child will see your runs as one-on one, undivided attention time. Let these runs unfold on the child’s terms. That might mean jumping through puddles, or stopping to look at animals, or heading home after just a few minutes. Let them set the pace and the course. Remember, it’s supposed to be fun for them, which means feeling good right then.

Keep It Enjoyable!

Even if your kids want to run for all the right reasons, I don’t think that children under the age of 14 should look at their running as training. This advice doesn’t mean that children under this age can’t run as much as 20 miles a week. If they want to run that much, enjoy doing so, and don’t get hurt, I think that’s an acceptable upper limit of mileage for preteens. Three miles or 30 minutes are good measures of the farthest that young runners should go at a time.
But although kids may run as much as adults, running should remain a part of their play and one of many regular activities, not something that they plan and obsess about. Going for a run should be primarily about enjoying it on that day, not to build endurance so that they can try to run twice as far in a month. This book has emphasized that if you’re going to make progress in your running, then you need to be consistent with it. Kids who run should ignore all of that. If they hit a spell where they don’t feel like running for a month or two, don’t force them to. If you do, you’re sending the message that running is something that they have to do, not that they want to do.

Be a Running Role Model

You certainly shouldn’t force children into running. Little League syndrome is as bad in running as it is in baseball. Children can sense when you’re pushing them into an activity. They might not resist immediately, but eventually they will. Having fun consistently ranks as the top reason that kids give for participating in sports. For preteens, fun almost always means the here and now. Most preteens haven’t developed what psychologists call abstract thinking, the ability to set long-term goals and to see how doing something that might not feel good right now is worth it for the pay-off later. In a certain sense, isn’t that what a lot of running is about? A big motivation for getting out for a run today is because you know that doing so will benefit you later—you’ll feel better the next day, or you’ll be able to run faster in a race a month from now, or you’re working toward a weight-loss goal, or you’re making one of an ongoing series of contributions to fighting disease, and so on. When children don’t come to running on their own terms, they’re not going to like it because they don’t yet have that sense of delayed gratification.
If a kid wants to run and can state why and seems to enjoy it, then I’m all for some low-level regular running.
Children’s attitudes toward running largely stem from what they notice about how the adults around them approach it. If you’re always walking around the house before your runs moaning about what a horrible chore running is, then don’t be surprised if your kids don’t show much interest in it. But if your children see that running to you means getting outside and exploring and feeling good and being with your friends and having fun, they’ll probably think otherwise. Running will seem like a form of play.