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Location: Formerly Pleasanton Ca, now in Marietta Ga
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mathjak107
i am in excellent shape and run 5 miles every other day . my average quick walk is 4.2-4.50 mph , i run 6.60 mph with bursts to 7.7 mph all while non stopping .
i have been doing this for 3 years now .but have been doing cardio for 15 years but at a lower level since i was not running .
until i started running and really getting my heart rate up i still needed my pressure medication and lipitor .
once i got to running and going up a level all the medications went away including for my diabetes .
do you think it was the running or did you lose weight that allowed you to get off the drugs?
i lost the weight before . running took me a few years to get up to this point and is more recent . i was a gym rat the last 15 years . but the level of cardio doing the bike and elliptical was just not demanding enough to really make a dent in my blood work . it wasn't until the last 3 years when i pushed and pushed the running that differences were being seen .
Peak fitness conditioning is hard to sustain. For me, my benchmark is to be within 10% of my peak; call if, for lack of a better phrase, within 10% of my fighting weight.
Unless you're training for competition, peak is a mythical benchmark that's constantly floating as we age.
I like to use a heart rate monitor and maintain a training journal to have some hard numbers to back up my perception of how good I am or not. But I'm an analytical kind of guy.
The thing about a "BOOM! Heart attack!" is that you might not even be able to prevent it, or have warning signs. I had a 55 year old uncle who dropped dead of one back in 2010 - no known symptoms. My two grandfathers had numerous heart attacks and both lived at least normal lifespans.
Here's the hard fact about this. At a certain age, which may vary among people, your body is just looking for a chance to retire and turn-down its functions. It isn't just a slow, passive process, but an active one. Your strength and abilities will quickly be taken from you, if you don't keep active. You have to continually prove to your genetic blueprint, that you really are engaged in an active and productive life, to earn its re-certification. It's to the benefit of the overall population, if you just fade away, if you stop being active.
The more closely your activities resemble those of a younger and athletic person, the longer your body will maintain its functions for you. The best formula, is to start training hard as a young child and never let up, also eating only healthy foods and avoiding harmful substances. Do people remember Jack LaLanne? He towed a boat with two dozen people in it, with a rope held in his teeth, handcuffed, swimming across San Francisco Bay, when he was 80. Do you think there was ever a day in his life, when he just laid-back and took it easy?
Many interesting, wise, and inspirational posts in this thread. Thank you for starting it, ER, and sharing your story.
I think I live in fear of losing fitness, the way ER describes it, because I know that it can happen. A 72-year-old that I know stopped running about 3 years ago after a lifetime of fitness, races, etc., and now he complains that his predicament is awful. He has to run a mile, work up to two miles, be very patient etc. He's shocked what's happened to his fitness and how hard it is to get it back.
In my case, I see my fitness eroding even as I work to keep it. I've run many marathons over the years and have exercised regularly ever since quitting smoking in my late 20s. (I'm now 66.) It's a constant battle, but one worth fighting. I'm a runner; it's my self-image.
BUT . . . . . many posters have provided examples of what can happen with the best of intentions. I have two such examples: 1) My training partner for 17 years of running, a guy with an incredibly healthy lifestyle, suddenly was diagnosed with brain cancer. He was dead within two months at age 62. 2) Jim Fixx (author of The Complete Book of Running) died of a heart attack at age 49 in my small home town in Vermont. I know you all know this example, but seriously, my home town! This got my attention. It taught me that being fit does not equal being healthy.
Many interesting, wise, and inspirational posts in this thread. Thank you for starting it, ER, and sharing your story.
I think I live in fear of losing fitness, the way ER describes it, because I know that it can happen. A 72-year-old that I know stopped running about 3 years ago after a lifetime of fitness, races, etc., and now he complains that his predicament is awful. He has to run a mile, work up to two miles, be very patient etc. He's shocked what's happened to his fitness and how hard it is to get it back.
In my case, I see my fitness eroding even as I work to keep it. I've run many marathons over the years and have exercised regularly ever since quitting smoking in my late 20s. (I'm now 66.) It's a constant battle, but one worth fighting. I'm a runner; it's my self-image.
BUT . . . . . many posters have provided examples of what can happen with the best of intentions. I have two such examples: 1) My training partner for 17 years of running, a guy with an incredibly healthy lifestyle, suddenly was diagnosed with brain cancer. He was dead within two months at age 62. 2) Jim Fixx (author of The Complete Book of Running) died of a heart attack at age 49 in my small home town in Vermont. I know you all know this example, but seriously, my home town! This got my attention. It taught me that being fit does not equal being healthy.
I agree with everything you said, even the bolded sentence. However, the way you worded that final sentence could be a tad misleading, especially for someone who is just looking for an excuse to deny the real benefits of exercise, which are substantial. I would put it this way:
Being fit carries no guarantees, but it sure improves the odds. In addition, it makes us feel better in a general sense. Thanks for the excellent post.
being fit does not always lead to better health , but being unfit and obese can take away from it . many times things are measured in what we are not losing vs what we are gaining.
in fact my weight lifting is like that . while my arms are still pretty big , i no longer am getting bigger , but i am not shrinking much either .so the weightlifting is sustaining me while others my age lose muscle like crazy . things just are not measured in gains now , but measured in what we are not losing .
my wife gets frustrated all the time because her gains in muscle have stopped , and i have to remind her all the time to look at herself at 66 and to look at others and things are measured now in what you are not losing , not gaining
that is me in the orange recently , not as big as i once was but just kind of sustaining and reducing the shrinkage . sounds like a seinfeld episode ha ha ha
Last edited by mathjak107; 02-09-2017 at 02:30 AM..
A person in his 40's or even 50's might be able to take a few years off from regular physical activity and bounce back fairly quickly upon resumption. But I am the poster boy for what not to do, namely taking a few years off from age 69 to 72. I had been in pretty fair shape up to about age 69, at which point I got lazy - no decision, no medical reason - I just stopped systematic work-outs. Sure, I kept walking to various errands and I kept lugging around extention ladders when doing outdoor painting, but that type of activity (while it's good for us and is so much better than nothing) is simply not enough.
I know what you must be thinking: What I did was close to the stupidest thing a person can do, as it constitutes being horribly negligent about one's own health and well-being. Well, there is no need for you to post those thoughts because I am painfully aware of the reality and I plead guilty on all counts. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Nor was it ignorance on my part; at various times in my life I have done extensive technical reading on exercise physiology and the health benefits of the various types of exercise - cardio-vascular (aerobics), resistance training (weights), balance and flexibility.
I had a dramatic wake-up call about a year ago. There is an art house cinema about four miles from me; occasionally I would walk there, see a film, and walk home. After a year or two not having done that, I walked there one day and watched the film. Then after the film I noticed there was something wrong with one knee, so I took a bus which dropped me about a mile from my house. I barely managed to walk home on the painful knee, even stopping to rest. No, it wasn't a knee problem in the medical sense - it was disuse! Use it or lose it! The knee hasn't bothered me since, but I stopped trying to walk that far and I'm now ready to resume (see below).
On January 1 (2017) I decided it was then or never if I wanted to get my life back. (I was/am 72). So that was my New Year's resolution - to prepare for an elementary school jog-a-thon on February 24. Not much time but I decided to give it a serious shot. I did some very slow jogging around the neighborhood for the absurdly short amounts of time I could manage it (like 10 minutes!) for a few days in a row, then went to the gym. The first day at the gym I walked on the treadmill for 10 minutes at 4.7 mph to warm up, then set it for a slow run (5.8 mph). I only lasted two and a half minutes! Pathetic beyond words to describe it!
But I kept showing up three or four days a week. Here are the number of minutes I was able to run slowly (5.8) at each session on the treadmill: 2.5, 3, 3, 4, 5, 4, 5, 5.5, 6, 7, 6, 6, 8, 8, 10, 11. The eleven minutes was yesterday, and I have done some running at 5.9 and 6.0 mph, the latter pace being a 10-minute mile pace. The progress, alhough slow, has been its own reward and motivation. The worst thing would have been to get discouraged and quit! I knew it would be very slow at my age, especially starting from a point of essecentially zero fitness.
Guess what? I am going to participate in that jog-a-thon on February 24 with the fifth graders to whom I read aloud once a week. It doesn't matter how well or how poorly I fare in comparison to them. It will be fun, and I wlll regard it as a beginning point, not an end point, to regaining my fitness. I already feel better in general!
Don't be like me. Don't let yourself go in the first place! Almost nothing in life is more important than this. We can acquiesce in being crippled or we can do something about it. (Like my knee, for example). I am diabetic, so this is even more important in my personal case.
i'm 24 so correct me i am wrong, but isn't muscle atrophy the biggest concern for seniors in terms of fitness? If so, less effort should be put on running (hard on the knees) and more on resistance training ( squats are the best for any age, but esp for the seniors, since it trains multiple muscles). Start lighter, and have a spotter, for safety
I highly suggest the book titled "Body by Science" by Doug Mcguff, an MD. I would skip the section on nutrition, though, which is not his bread and butter. Mcguff offers very dangerous diet advice (low carb). For nutrition, i suggest the book "How not to Die" by Michael Greggor, another MD who specializes in nutrition.
absolutely true . but being diabetic i need the intense cardio to stay off meds . weight lifting and lighter cardio still had me on lipitor and blood pressure meds as well as needing some meds for the diabetes ..
so i use a balance of the intense cardio and weight lifting . as you see i have lost very little muscle mass and i will be 65 . my arms have not really lost much strength eiher . i still am within 15 pounds or so of what i did 15 years ago .
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