Trail Running Blog

Use this in your arguements with people who say running isn’t good for you (notice those people are almost always fat, lazy or smokers…)

A few years ago, the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine released a study recommending an hour a day of exercise for all Americans. A runner logging miles at an eight-minute per mile pace for an hour a day would get in — guess what? — about 50 miles a week.

The recommendation was criticized by many as too demanding, but I believe most of us are capable of far more than we give ourselves credit for.

Consider an article that ran in the March 2006 Journal of Applied Physiology, where researchers conducted a study on 25 Ironman competitors to see how rapidly they recovered from such an extreme event. They specifically looked at the athletes’ cardiac indices and blood pressures.

The researchers were surprised to discover that only one day after competition, most significant parameters were already back to normal, and by three days, “all the other major hemodynamic/autonomic changes also had returned to their baseline levels.”

To explain the rapid recovery, the authors reached way back in time, about 5 million years. They concluded that, “The rapid recovery after what we consider now to be an extreme endurance exercise may throw some light on the true capabilities of the human body acquired during human evolution. For the largest part, namely for the 5 million years of the hunter-gatherer age, mankind had to perform daily a regimen of six to 18 miles of walking and running for survival.

Link.