Entries for September 2008

Lance Armstrong, Dara Torres, Brett Favre: They've all been in the news lately for their remarkable athletic comebacks. (And I've written before about how to return to a sport you love, not that those three need my help.) But what if you suspect you need not a comeback but a break—maybe even a permanent one—from your chosen activity?

The notion that you and your running shoes might be well served by some time apart might be a result of chronic injuries or just a general feeling of having been there, done that. Before throwing in the towel, diagnose the problem. If you are constantly battling a string of injuries, it's probably a good idea to try something else for a few weeks or months. Overuse injuries like tennis elbow, runner's knee, swimmer's shoulder, and Little League elbow are so named because they're associated with repetitive motion involved in those sports. Switching to some other activity that uses different muscle groups can give you a chance to recover without losing your aerobic fitness. When you return, you'll probably want to reassess your technique and the intensity with which you've been training. "If you're 45 and playing with college students, maybe it's time to play with 45-year-olds," says William Roberts, past president of the American College of Sports Medicine and a professor of family medicine at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

Since Lance Armstrong announced his plans to come out of retirement and ride in the 2009 Tour de France, I've been wondering how on earth he would get the motivation to train as insanely hard as he once did. The average American finds it hard to get in the 30 minutes a day of brisk aerobic exercise recommended by the government; when Armstrong was preparing for his seven Tour de France victories, he did many, many multiples of that.

At the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative on Wednesday, Armstrong elaborated on a major reason for his return: raising global awareness about cancer. Prospects for people with the disease vary widely, depending in part on where they live. In many countries outside Europe and North America, even good pain medicine—let alone treatment for cancer itself—is nearly nonexistent. And, heartbreakingly, there's stigma attached to being a cancer patient in many developing nations. Armstrong, a survivor of testicular cancer and founder of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, concluded that coming out of retirement in a very public way is the best route to drawing attention to the problem and to convincing people to do something about it.

But, he said, that need was coupled with what happened when he did a 100-mile mountain bike race, the Leadville Trail 100, in August. He placed second. That race, he said Wednesday, "reminded me that I love to ride a bike for hours at a time." (He announced his return to professional cycling weeks after the race.)

That, I think, is so key both to Armstrong's training and to the fitness regimes of us mortals: Find something you really enjoy doing, and it's not at all hard to get out the door. Forces other than pure love of the game—in Armstrong's case, cancer advocacy efforts; for the rest of us, maybe the desire to lose weight or go faster than we did last week—can only take us so far. At the heart of it, you're going to do best when you love what you do. So if you hate running, don't do it. Try cycling, swimming, dancing, rowing, or whatever floats your boat. That's not to say even Lance Armstrong doesn't have days he'd rather hit the sofa than the road, but those days are much rarer when your activity of choice is exactly that—your choice.

I was born in 1972, but I have a thrifty streak—the unkind might call it cheap—you might expect from someone who grew up during the Depression. And when I make dinner for myself, I have gotten in the habit of mixing my tofu or fish with tons of green beans to stretch out the protein and make it last for several meals, not just one. In addition to saving money, I've been inadvertently practicing the weight-control technique known as energy density reduction, or, more catchily, "Volumetrics."

That's the term Barbara Rolls, professor and Guthrie chair of nutrition at Pennsylvania State University, has coined to describe the method, which is based on a simple principle: People tend to eat the same weight, or amount, of food from day to day. Since some foods are less energy dense—that is, they have fewer calories per gram—than others, if you fill your plate with more of those foods, you'll be eating fewer calories without actually eating less food. It's a different slant than portion control, the usual rule of thumb for weight control.

On Labor Day, I was sitting in a theater waiting for a movie to start and couldn't help overhearing the guy behind me talking loudly to his friends. He was training for his second New York City Marathon, he said, and this year, he hopes to be even more prepared by doing an 18-mile run the week before the race. My boyfriend almost had to physically restrain me from turning around and telling the guy what was wrong with his plan: With fewer than seven days to go before the race, he shouldn't be running anything close to 18 miles.

It reminded me that how you train right up to an event can matter greatly, threatening to derail months of effort if you do the wrong thing. So after consulting 11 Olympians this summer about the kind of workouts they had done all year to prepare for Beijing, I decided to go back and get the skinny on how one of them actually trained during the games. I spoke with Bob Alejo, who is the strength coach for both Todd Rogers (whom I featured in the earlier article) and his partner, Phil Dalhausser, gold medalists in beach volleyball.

Thanks in part to a lot of drug commercials starring Sally Field, we've all heard plenty about osteoporosis (dangerously low bone mass), and its less severe sibling, osteopenia. Not as familiar is sarcopenia, the age-related decline in muscle mass and function. It's not as well studied, and its exact causes are still unknown, though it clearly contributes to frailty and a loss of independence in people's later years. The good news is there are things you can do to prevent its ill effects, and also to improve your condition if you're already feeling its consequences.

As a rule, muscle mass declines with age, starting in the 40s and picking up speed after about age 50. Then the typical rate of muscle loss really begins to outpace the rate of muscle gain, so that there's an increasing net deficit, says Robert Wolfe, a professor of geriatrics and director of the Center for Translational Research in Aging and Longevity at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. How dangerous that is depends how much muscle you start out with. The kind of decline that makes a lifelong runner go from a very fast 10k time to a slightly slower one in his 60s is not a big concern (except for the frustrated runner). The kind of decline in muscle mass that weakens an already frail elderly person so much that he or she is more prone to falls and can't lift a small bag of groceries onto the counter is something to worry about.