Running and life expectancy

/ Health and Fitness / 1 minute of reading

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

Does sports participation give you a longer life?

That’s what this article asks. The result?

The data here seems to suggest that participation in aerobic activity has a positive impact on overall life expectancy. Further, participation in these activities may delay the development of heart disease. While this is encouraging, more research should be done on the subject to detail if this increase in life expectancy and disease resistance is due to the activity in question or some other factor like genetics or other lifestyles.

The study participants were former elite athletes so the carryover may not be quite there to average athletes. Or maybe it is. More study would be needed.

That said, there is an interesting chart showing former endurance athletes have a median life expectancy roughly 6 years longer than that of the controls.

I think this confirms what most of us would tend to believe. Our extensive aerobic activity provides health benefits that extend our lives. That said, as the quote above mentions, it would be nice to see further study done to determine what factors actually extend our lives and maybe even quantify them.

“Push” weeks

/ Training / 1 minute of reading

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

The runners I have coached for some time can probably think of times where I said something like feel free to challenge yourself because next week is a cutback week. I don’t say it often and I’ve been saying it even less often recently (maybe I should increase my frequency again).

One of the runners who I know I’ve told this to sent me this link that does a nice job of explaining the concept behind what I was getting at with the idea of challenging yourself with the cutback week coming up.

I might write more on this later but, for now, I thought this was a good primer on the topic. Consider adding some "push" weeks to your training. Just make sure you are using them sparingly.

Move over beet juice

/ Training / 1 minute of reading

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

I’m sure we’ve all heard about beet juice as a performance enhancing supplement. Well, we may now have a more tasty (in my opinion) alternative.

Watermelon juice appears to have similar benefits:

The increase in time-to-exhaustion in a test that lasted about 10 minutes was 12 percent, which might correspond to a time-trial improvement of a bit less than 1 percent. There are many, many unanswered questions, such as whether trained athletes would get similar benefits.

I’m left wondering a few things that I suspect future studies will answer:

1) Is this real? Will future studies corroborate this result?

2) How does the benefit compare to beet juice?

3) Will taking both increase the benefit of taking either separately?

Obviously, more research is needed in this area and I’m sure it will be coming. The initial results, though, seem very interesting.

Protein before bed and compression socks

/ Roundups / 2 minutes of reading

This article was originally posted by Ryan at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

I’m leaning heavily on one of my favorite blogs this week. Alex Hutchinson’s Sweat Science blog is always a good one. This week, two of my favorite reads came from there.

Protein before bed

We’ve known for some time that it’s best to spread your protein intake out across the day. Your body can only process around 20-25 grams at one time. If you take more, it doesn’t really do anything for you.

So, would getting an extra dose of protein right before bed be beneficial or do things change as we go to sleep?

We now have the answer.

More generally, think in terms of getting four to six distinct doses of protein throughout the day and evening.

To me, that’s the key. Is the timing of that before bed dose of protein significant? Probably not. The key is that it was an extra dose of protein spaced out from the others throughout the day. Whether it comes at bedtime, when you first wake up or some other time during the day probably doesn’t matter. What matters is that it does come.

Compression socks

Do you believe compression socks will help you recover? If so, good news. If not, bad news.

That’s what a recent study tells us.

So for the believers, there was a tiny (and non-significant) speed-up in the second trial, while the skeptics had a significant (and unsurprising) slow-down. The error bars here are +/- ~20 seconds, but the difference is still striking.

This was a test of two 5K time trials with an hour between the two. The question was whether wearing the compression socks between the trials would affect the second. As it turns out, those who believed the compression socks would help them ran about 3 seconds faster on the second time trial. Those who didn’t believe ran about 17-18 seconds slower on the second time trial.

While this result is within the margin of error so we can’t say this result is conclusive, that’s a pretty amazing spread.

That’s the likely power of the placebo. Our minds are amazing things.

Monthly Update

/ Miscellaneous / 1 minute of reading

This article was originally posted by Ed at the original HillRunner.com Blogs.

Instead of a daily or weekly blog post I will do a monthly update instead.

After all that time off from running I am finally getting back into good shape. I started running again on 03/10/2015 and here is a simple breakdown of each month through the end of June.

March – 16 runs – 39.66 miles – 2.48 miles per run (average) – 5 hours 17 minutes – 7:59 average pace per mile

April – 26 runs – 113.79 miles – 4.38 miles per run (average) – 14 hours 34 minutes total – 7:41 average pace per mile

May – 24 runs – 129.46 miles – 5.39 miles per run (average) – 16 hours 9 minutes total – 7:33 average pace per mile

June – 28 runs – 186.8 miles – 6.67 miles per run (average) 22 hours 56 minutes total – 7:22 average pace per mile

Scroll to Top