Saturday, February 12, 2005
Ed Whitlock, from Milton, Ontario, is 73, and fast. How fast? 2:54:49 marathon fast. 18:22 5k fast. He's an impressive guy, but what moves me to post about him is something that a doctor quoted in the article said: "Dr. Benjamin D. Levine, a cardiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, found that a group of people with an average age of 70 who had started exercising in midlife - as Whitlock did at age 41 - and kept it up had "hearts indistinguishable from healthy 30-year-olds."
Instead of the heart shrinking and stiffening with age, as it does in sedentary people, and impairing performance, Levine said, those trained 70-year-olds had larger, more elastic heart muscles. The findings were reported in the journal Circulation last September.
Exercise, Levine said, would enable someone like Whitlock, who had trained for years, to pump more blood, to feed the working muscles with oxygen levels associated with younger athletes.
A colleague of Levine's at Southwestern, Peter Snell, an exercise physiologist, said Whitlock's marathon pace required a level of oxygen consumption that is "what you'd expect for someone around 40 who's a very good runner."
This put me in mind of something I've heard Dave say: "I just do this now so that I can do it next year."
