Stay Youthful, Keep Running

Many experts at the time believed that the long-term outcome of serious running would be a plethora of orthopedic injuries, with older runners especially encountering chronic injury. But Fries believed that it could improve a person’s quality of life and shrink the period of disability at the end of a person’s life where they are unable to carry out everyday tasks without assistance.

The study appeared in the Archives of Internal Medicine and tracked 538 runners over age 50 while comparing them to a similar group of non-runners. The follow up survey of subjects, now in their 70’s and 80’s, inquired about their capacity to complete daily tasks such as dressing and grooming, walking, getting out of a chair, and gripping objects.

Researchers also followed national death records and were able to determine that nineteen years into the study, only 15% of runners had died, compared to 34% of non-runners. Of the course of the study, runners ran for an average of four hours each week. After 21 years, the average running time decreased by 76 minutes, but participants continued to see beneficial health effects.

In general, both groups were more disabled after aging 21 years, however for the runner group, severe disability onset was delayed. The researchers concluded that runners’ initial encounters with disability were 16 years later than non-runners.  In summation, the runners remained healthiest for the longest duration.

An even more extensive study was begun back in 1991, lead by Dr. Paul T. Williams, a researcher in the Life Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Called The National Runners’ Health Study the program has followed in total 120,000 runners over 20 years, looking at a range of issues and variables, including alcohol, foods, gender, age, weight and genetics.

One interesting aspect of William’s work was studying the benefits of running between identical twins – where one twin was a runner and the other was not. The research looked at 35 pairs of identical twins, 25 male and 10 female to determine in running impacted levels of HDH or the so-called cholesterol levels in one’s blood.

Tests showed that though each pairs of twins had relatively similar health profiles that there was a statistically significant difference between runners and non-runners.

After discounting lifestyle and dietary factors, researchers were able to demonstrate the impact of running on individuals with identical genetic background.