Running

Please check out the PaNu blog I've added to the left. Dr. Harris has a fantastic recent post about "cardio" and heart disease. It's long, but filled with good info and well worth a read. The upshot is that serious recreational marathon runners (minimum 5 marathons in past 3 years) don't fare well compared to sedentary age-matched peers in terms of heart disease. The implication is that obsessive mileage is bad for your heart. I find this entirely believable. (Marathoners never look all that healthy or robust to me -- Paula Radcliffe looks like she could be done in by a bad sneeze.) That said, I'm not going to stop running, because I enjoy it. I run 2-3 times a week, between 25 and 90 minutes per session, less than half the weekly mileage of the runners in the study, and no plans or amibitions to do a marathon. The people who especially should take not are the ones running because they think it's healthy, even though they don't enjoy it. I've known people who've told me flat out, "I hate running", but do it anyway. For me, running helps with stress, anxiety, mood -- I enjoy it in and of itself, even though I'm a bit of a plodder. If I hated it, I would never do it. A modicum of weight-bearing exercise -- walk, stress your arms out sometimes, add the occasional sprint -- is helpful for just about everyone, even people who can't stand to get off the sofa. Beyond that, don't obsess over "cardio" unless you enjoy it.