Aging and Athletes

Do you want to live forever?  Do you want to avoid living in a worn out, useless, limiting body which makes a mockery of living?

Too me, these are two different questions but the yin/yang of aging.

In the long run, fitness is about living while being alive, and whatever your concept of living is should direct how you invest your training hours in 'fitness.'  While an old but tarnished concept of fitness involved endurance training, the newer and I think more relevant model requires that one attend to endurance, power, coordination and strength (and perhaps other trainable attributes like agility, flexibility, speed, stamina, accuracy and balance).  As the benefits of anaerobic training become more widely known, for example, we see more studies which document the "why."  Excerpts follow:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/magazine/28athletes-t.html?_r=1

Exactly how exercise affects older people is complicated. On one level, exercise is a flat-out insult to the body. Downhill running tears quadriceps muscles as reliably as an injection of snake venom. All kinds of free radicals and other toxins are let loose. But the damage also triggers the production of antioxidants that boost the health of the body generally. So when you see a track athlete who looks as if that last 1,500-meter race damn near killed him, you’re right. It might have made him stronger in the deal.

Exercise training helps stop muscle strength and endurance from slipping away. But it seems to also do something else, maintains Mark Tarnopolsky, a professor ofpediatrics and medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (who also happens to be a top-ranked trail runner). Resistance exercise in particular seems to activate a muscle stem cell called a satellite cell. With the infusion of these squeaky-clean cells into the system, the mitochondria seem to rejuvenate. (The phenomenon has been called “gene shifting.”) If Tarnopolsky is right, exercise in older adults can roll back the odometer. After six months of twice weekly strength exercise training, he has shown, the biochemical, physiological and genetic signature of older muscle is “turned back” nearly 15 or 20 years.

This article is a good read, and the conclusion matches the model of the paleolithic peoples:

This is the other story of the future of aging. When the efforts of medical science converge to simply prolong existence, you envision Updike’s golfer Farrell, poking his way “down the sloping dogleg of decrepitude.” But scientists like Taivassalo and Hepple have a different goal, and exercise — elixir not so much of extended life as extended youthfulness — may be the key to reaching it. James Fries, an emeritus professor at Stanford School of Medicine, coined the working buzz phrase: “compression of morbidity.” You simply erase chronic illness and infirmity from the first, say, 95 percent of your life. “So you’re healthy, healthy, healthy, and then at some point you kick the bucket,” Tarnopolsky says. “It’s like theNeil Young song: better to burn out than to rust.” You get a normal life span, but in Olga years. Who wouldn’t take it?