July: Mortals

   You run for your life. Whether you ultimately chase trophies, slender thighs, tranquility, or vindication, the benefits of running cascade across every aspect of your health, including your mental equilibrium. Even so, you probably know that more running doesn't yield still more robust health. In fact, most evidence suggests that the benefits peak with moderate amounts of exercise. To most runners, this is counterintuitive. Nothing makes us feel more alive than the vigor and satisfaction that come from hard training.

   Unfortunately, you tempt fate by trusting your intuition on matters of health. You can't outrun your genes, for example. If you have a family history of stroke or heart disease, your training program should proceed under the watchful eye of a physician, especially if you're male and over 35. Even if you've been running hard for decades, cardiovascular problems can erupt suddenly and without warning. The American Heart Association provides guidelines for athletes with a family history of heart disease. Periodically, you should ask your doctor about a cardiogram and possibly a treadmill test.

   Nor can you outrun years of debauchery, though a good training program can halt physical decline as if you'd lassoed it. This is deceptive. Running makes you look younger and feel better, which makes it easy to entertain the delusion that hard training erases Twinkies and cigarettes and long afternoons with the TV remote in your hand. The truth is that smoking, cholesterol, obesity, and even stress wreak cumulative damage. Great efforts have been made to prove that running reverses these assaults. Alas, the best evidence we have shows otherwise.

   Almost as depressing is the mistaken hope that you can run back into the embrace of your youth. Those who begin running in their later years don't feel compelled to recapture bygone glories. Everyone else trains harder to retain yesteryear's abilities. As you age, you must eventually change your goals, change your measures of achievement. Face up to hard limits. It's a psychological leap that usually brings relief and sacrifices little in the satisfaction you get from running. The secret lies in mustering the humility to make that leap before a moment of reckoning confronts you.

   You also have to acknowledge the constants of injury and illness. In the big picture of health, a good training program wards off these problems and helps you recover quickly when they sneak past your defenses. So why do runners invariably feel surprised and furious when suddenly wounded? At some unconscious level, we talk ourselves into believing that training makes us immortal. It's a perilous kind of thinking, a natural result of the innocent fulfillment we get from running. It's why we rush recovery, often with disastrous results.

   It’s also why we deny we're sick or injured in the first place. In fact, a good training program feeds all manner of dangerous thinking. It's ironic: running makes us feel more alive than ever. At the very least, it should allow us to be human.