Heading to Prescott Saturday to pre-ride the Epic “Whiskey Off-Road” Race Route… 

Date: April 29 – May 1, 2011
Location: Prescott, AZ
Duration: 15, 25 & 50 miles
Number of Participants: 1,500
To benefit: Yavapai County Food Bank

http://epicrides.com/events.htm

http://epicrides.com/wor/wor.htm

The human mind is predetermined to discover, explore and understand… within this natural proclivity is the need to build explanations of everything.

In fact, so called experts have theories, which are accepted to be true (after validation) until proven otherwise, in all the major fields of endeavor; from physics to religion. Stating and proving theories is a noble endeavor and I certainly wouldn’t bash this notable human tendency, but the human mind is innately ill-equipped to explain and understand everything and that’s something we as human beings should accept… “faith and wishful thinking” do not fill in all the gaps.

Knowing that there are things that we cannot know and will never know in this lifetime, is a sign of wisdom and strength, not weakness.

When Exercise Is Too Much of a Good Thing

 Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images

Recently, researchers in Britain set out to study the heart health of a group of dauntingly fit older athletes. Uninterested in sluggards, the scientists recruited only men who had been part of a British national or Olympic team in distance running or rowing, as well as members of the extremely selective 100 Marathon club, which admits runners who, as you might have guessed, have completed at least a hundred marathons.

All of the men had trained and competed throughout their adult lives and continued to work out strenuously. Twelve were age 50 or older, with the oldest age 67; another 17 were relative striplings, ages 26 to 40. The scientists also gathered a group of 20 healthy men over 50, none of them endurance athletes, for comparison. The different groups underwent a new type of magnetic resonance imaging of their hearts that identifies very early signs of fibrosis, or scarring, within the heart muscle. Fibrosis, if it becomes severe, can lead to stiffening or thickening of portions of the heart, which can contribute to irregular heart function and, eventually, heart failure.

The results, published online a few weeks ago in The Journal of Applied Physiology, were rather disquieting. None of the younger athletes or the older nonathletes had fibrosis in their hearts. But half of the older lifelong athletes showed some heart muscle scarring. The affected men were, in each case, those who’d trained the longest and hardest. Spending more years exercising strenuously or completing more marathon or ultramarathon races was, in this study, associated with a greater likelihood of heart damage.

The question of whether years of intense endurance training might, just possibly, be harmful to the heart is hardly new. It arises whenever a seemingly healthy distance runner, cyclist or other endurance athlete suffers a heart attack. It’s also sometimes invoked by those looking for an excuse not to exercise.

But, to date, science has been hard pressed to establish a clear cause-and-effect link between strenuous exercise and heart damage. A much-discussed 2008 German study of experienced, older marathon runners, for instance, found signs of fibrosis in their hearts more frequently than in a group of less active older men. But some of the racers had taken up regular exercise only late in life, after decades of smoking and other bad health habits. It was impossible to say whether their current heart damage predated their marathon training.

The new study of elite lifelong athletes avoids that pitfall. None of the athletes were new to exercise. Only one had ever smoked. But even so, the study can’t directly prove that the older athletes’ excruciatingly heavy training loads and decades of elite-level racing caused heart scarring, only that the two were associated with each another.

But another new study, this time in laboratory rats, provides the first solid evidence of a direct link between certain kinds of prolonged exercise and subtle heart damage. For the study, published in the journal Circulation, Canadian and Spanish scientists prodded young, healthy male rats to run at an intense pace, day after day, for three months, which is the equivalent of about 10 years in human terms. The training was deliberately designed to mimic many years of serious marathon training in people, said Dr. Stanley Nattel, a cardiologist who is director of the electrophysiology research program at the Montreal Heart Institute Research Center and a senior author of the study.

The rats had begun their regimens with perfectly normal hearts. At the end of the training period, heart scans showed that most of the rodents had developed diffuse scarring and some structural changes, similar to the changes seen in the human endurance athletes. A control group of unexercised rats had developed no such remodeling of their hearts. The researchers also could manually induce arrhythmias, or disruptions of the heart’s natural electrical rhythm, much more readily in the running rats than in the unexercised animals. Interestingly, when the animals stopped running, their hearts returned to normal within eight weeks. Most of the fibrosis and other apparent damage disappeared.

What does all of this mean for those of us who dutifully run or otherwise make ourselves sweat several times a week? Probably not much, realistically, said Dr. Paul Thompson, the chief of cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut and an expert on sports cardiology. He was one of the peer reviewers for the British athlete study.

“How many people are going to join the 100 Marathon club” or undertake a comparable amount of training? he asked. “Not many. Too much exercise has not been a big problem in America. Most people just run to stay in shape, and for them, the evidence is quite strong that endurance exercise is good” for the heart, he said.

Dr. Nattel agrees. “There is no doubt that exercise in general is very good for heart health,” he said. But the emerging science does suggest that there may be a threshold of distance, intensity or duration beyond which exercise can have undesirable effects.

Unfortunately, it remains impossible, at the moment, to predict just what that threshold is for any given person, and which athletes might be most vulnerable to heart problems as a result of excessive exercise, said Dr. Paul Volders, a cardiologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, who wrote an editorial accompanying the recent rat study.

“Let’s say we ask 100 people, all same age, all same gender, to start a marathon training program at the age of 20 years,” Dr. Volders wrote in an e-mail. If the runners continued their training uninterrupted for 30 years and scientists then scanned their hearts, “it is very likely (one may say: for sure) that there will be major differences in the tissue of the chambers of the heart between these people,” he wrote. For some, the changes will be beneficial; for others, probably not.

Similarly, because most of the research has been done in men and male animals, it is unclear whether the hearts of long-term female athletes are affected in the same fashion. But Dr. Nattel said it seems likely that the latest finding would also apply to women.

So for now, the best response to the emerging science of excessive exercise is to just keep exercising, but with a low-level buzz of caution. If your heart occasionally races, which could indicate arrhythmia, or otherwise draws attention to itself, Dr. Nattel said, consult a doctor.

But if you exercise regularly and currently have no symptoms, “I think it’s safe to say that you should keep it up,” Dr. Thompson said.

A study of the two most popular weight-loss surgeries found obese diabetics who had gastric bypass surgery lost 64 percent of their excess weight after a year, compared with 36 percent in those treated with the Lap-Band device.

StrengthLab Thoughts: This is like choosing between the governments of Iran and North Korea… which do you like better?

“How about Eat Less, Eat Better and Move More?”

The study: conducted by researchers at Northwestern University, found that young adults who frequently attended religious activities were far more likely to become obese than those who didn’t.

“Our main finding was that people with a high frequency of religious participation in young adulthood were 50 percent more likely to become obese by middle age than those with no religious participation in young adulthood,” says Matthew Feinstein, the study’s lead investigator and a fourth year medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. And that is true even after we adjusted for variables like age, race, gender, education, income, and baseline body mass index”.

StrengthLab Thoughts: Renouncing personal responsibility, in things that you can control, is frequently proceeded with negative consequences; gaining weight is merely the least of them.

ARR South Mountain Classic 20K and 5K Races this Saturday, March 26th, 2011 

Race day registration begins at 6:30 AM.

The 20K starts at 7:30 AM and the 5K begins at 7:40 AM. The 5K course

http://arizonaroadracers.com/Calendar/south-mountain-classic.php

See You There!

 

  

See you There!
ST. PATRICKS DAY RUN
4 Mile Run/Walk
Old Town Scottsdale
Saturday Night – March 19, 2011 – 5:00pm

http://www.4peaksracing.com/event.php?id=125

Informal education is in many cases more important than formal education and it’s considerably less expensive too. Myriad schools dictating the required material necessary to be enlightened and properly educated is short-sighted and narrow-minded. Individuals who want to learn have numerous opportunities to do so within the United States… and for those who don’t want to learn, well no school is going to correct that character flaw; it’s a personal choice – no matter the circumstances.

I hear the word “passionate” thrown around a lot within the fitness industry; I know what passion looks like… so when I hear someone say it, I know that I’m not looking at it.

We human beings have a tendency to rate ourselves as better than other species because of our innate intellectual capacities; we frequently rate ourselves as superior within our own species as well for this very same quality. But, we all might do well to keep in mind, that we all suffer the same fate, regardless of intellectual capacities – imagined or real. Are you smart enough to avoid that end? Then how much better then everyone else are you?

The ability to fully recognize, appreciate, understand and even share feelings as they’re being experienced is one of humanity’s greatest characteristics; in fact, the future success or failure of our species rests directly upon it.

The “HCG Diet” is so far fetched, I have a hard time even talking about it without sneering. 

A fertility hormone, virtually lost within a liquid homeopathic remedy, that helps you lose weight when you place a few drops under your tongue? Believe me… not a chance! The 500 calorie diet that is prescribed to go along with the supplement may help you lose weight, but it’s nothing more than a starvation approach to weightloss and that can be performed without the supplement; although I’m certainly not advising that either.

There’s no “evidence based” information anywhere that states HCG (or Human Chorionic Gonadotropin) aids in weightloss… Buyer Beware!  

Quick and convenient Grains to go! And it really tastes good too!  (Trader Joe’s stocks this cereal.) 

INGREDIENTS: Organic whole wheat meal, organic wheat bran, organic evaporated cane juice, organic soy flour, organic flax, organic puffed Kamut® Khorasan wheat, organic barley malt extract, organic soy fiber, organic oat bran, organic freeze dried blueberries, sea salt, organic cinnamon and tocopherols (natural vitamin E) – That’s it!  Only 3 grams of fat, 7 grams of fiber and 9 grams of protein per serving!

Trader Joe’s Organic Multigrain Artisan Sandwich Bread

This is another great choice for those who need convenient Grains to go!

Organic Ingredients Include:

Unbleached Wheat Flour, Whole Wheat Flour, Vita Grain (Barley, Corn, Millet, Triticale and Rye), Sunflour Seeds, Sea Salt, Flax Seeds, Oats and Whey – That’s it! 

During his lifetime, Albert Einstein was right about some very big and new ideas that still hold true today; but he was also very wrong concerning many of these same large paradigm shifting ideas as well.

Remember, that what we don’t know is considerably more than what we do know.

To conceptualize and remember that last sentence… is to stay interested, interesting and engaged for a lifetime.

Sally Meyerhoff (27 years old) considered one of America’s top female marathoners and winner of this year’s PF Chang’s Marathon, was killed Tuesday when the bicycle she was riding collided with a pickup truck in Maricopa, Arizona. She will be missed by many!

I find it interesting that our formal educational system within the Unites States, if not the entire world, is primarily focused on building the rational mind (e.g. math, chemistry, biology, physics, etc.). Yet, the decisions that have the vast importance to the quality and depth of our lives have very little to do with reason or logic. Wisdom can be taught, wisdom can be learned, wisdom can be applied and it should be a primary goal for all of us…

The NorthStar is the brightest star in the Ursa Minor and regardless of your position in life, you too are someone’s NorthStar; so stand tall with courage, take thoughtful care of yourself and make the most of it… because your light is needed.