Golden years gold medal

You've probably heard the old joke about a man going in for major surgery.  "Doc," he says, right before the anesthetic is administered, "I gotta ask... after this surgery, will I be able to play the piano?"

The surgeon smiles reassuringly and says, "Of course you will."

"Awesome!" the man says.  "I've always wanted to play the piano!"

That's what came to mind when I read an article in Science called, "Will You Keep Winning Races Into Old Age?  Your Cells Hold Clues," by Tess Joosse.  I'm hoping that like the aspiring pianist, old age will put me into the winner's bracket, because since I started running semi-competitively forty years ago, I've yet to win a race.  I train, I run regularly, but I'm still (and probably always will be) a solid middle-of-the-packer.  The closest I've ever come was about three years ago, when I came in third in my age group.

To be scrupulously honest, there were only six people in my age group.  But I'll take my little victories wherever I can get them.

Me last year, about to not cross the finish line first

Be that as it may, I'm still in there trying.  I'm 61, and I know that regular exercise is essential not only for continuing physical health but mental wellbeing.  In fact, on June 8 I'm running in the Ithaca Twilight 5K, a wonderful race down the footpaths along Cayuga Lake, and because I'm recovering from a series of health setbacks I've lowered my sights to simply getting across the finish line without having to be carted over it in a wheelbarrow.

Even though the "will you keep winning?" part of the headline of the article struck me as funny, the research itself is pretty cool.  Russell Hepple, a biologist at the University of Florida, wondered what was going on with people who are still competitive racers even into old age -- such as his father-in-law, who holds the record time for an eighty-year-old in the Boston Marathon.  Hepple and his colleagues did an assay on the muscle tissue of world-class senior athletes and a group of non-athletes, and found no fewer than eight hundred proteins that were produced in amounts that were significantly different between the two groups.  Some were higher in the athletes; others were lower.  But one obvious patterns was that over half of the proteins the study found were ones that are expressed by, or otherwise affect, the mitochondria.

For some reason, the factoid "the mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell" is one that sticks in the minds of just about everyone who has taken high school biology, but the way they work is actually pretty amazing.  Your mitochondria are actually symbiotic single-celled life-forms living inside your cells -- they even have their own DNA -- and they have evolved a complex series of chemical reactions (collectively known as aerobic cellular respiration) to break down glucose and store its energy in a molecule called ATP, which is the direct driver of damn near every process living things do.  The amount of ATP created and the rate at which it's used are in an incredibly tight balance; it's estimated that you produce (and consume/recycle) your body weight in ATP every day, which amounts to ten million ATP molecules per second, per cell.

So it's no surprise that octogenarian racers have better mitochondrial function than the rest of us slobs.  In fact, the study found that 176 of the proteins studied were unique to elite senior athletes; how much of that is because of a lucky combination of genes, and how much is because their continuous training has triggered protein production that in non-athletes tapers off or stops entirely, isn't known.

Also an open question is whether administering one or more of these proteins would boost aerobic exercise capacity in older people who aren't athletes (but would like to be).  Luigi Ferrucci of the National Institute on Aging, who co-authored the study, has proposed trying this in mice and seeing if it does increase endurance and stamina, without any untoward side effects.

In any case, I suspect that no matter what I do, I'll never be a gold medalist.  That's okay with me.  I love running for running's sake, and the race community (at least around here) is super supportive of everyone regardless of their level.  (At a race I was in a while back, a twelve-year-old boy had posted himself just past the finish line, and was high-fiving each runner as they crossed.  When I stumbled my way across, he grinned at me and said, "Well done, Shirtless Tattoo Guy!"  That, to me, encapsulates the spirit of racing in my area.)

But I'll be interested to see where this research leads.  Anything I can do to stave off decline (physical or mental) as I get older is a good thing.  Until then, though, I'll keep running, and keep being okay with finishing in the middle of the pack.

**************************************

Racing with death

Before I run a race, I have to give myself a serious pep talk, because I'm the kind of person who always assumes the worst.  Although I've run many 5Ks, there's always this haunting thought in the back of my head that this is going to be the one where I faint or puke or fall down and tear both of my Achilles tendons or get run over by a car.

Just a cockeyed optimist, that's me.

Me, attempting not to die

So it was with great interest that I read an article in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology that suggests my errant and morbid brain might actually be onto something.  In a paper entitled "He Dies, He Scores: Evidence that Reminders of Death Motivate Improved Performance in Basketball," Colin A. Zestcott, Uri Lifshin, Peter Helm, and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona's Department of Psychology have shown that thinking about death prior to a competition may actually make an athlete perform better.  The authors write:

This research applied insights from terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) to the world of sport.  According to TMT, self-esteem buffers against the potential for death anxiety.  Because sport allows people to attain self-esteem, reminders of death may improve performance in sport.  In Study 1, a mortality salience induction led to improved performance in a “one-on-one” basketball game.  In Study 2, a subtle death prime led to higher scores on a basketball shooting task, which was associated with increased task related self-esteem.  These results may promote our understanding of sport and provide a novel potential way to improve athletic performance.

Some participants were given cheerful directives like  "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead," and those who didn't break down into sobs were instructed to take some shots on the basketball court.  Surprisingly, these players scored better than ones who were directed to think about the game itself, with prompts like "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of playing basketball arouses in you," and, "Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you play basketball."

So the time-honored method of coaches telling their players to keep their mind on the game might not have as much of a beneficial effect as if they said, "Have you pondered your own mortality lately?"

Author Lifshin explains why he thinks they got the results they did.  "Your subconscious tries to find ways to defeat death, to make death not a problem, and the solution is self-esteem.  Self-esteem gives you a feeling that you're part of something bigger, that you have a chance for immortality, that you have meaning, that you're not just a sack of meat...  When we're threatened with death, we're motivated to regain that protective sense of self-esteem, and when you like basketball and you're out on the basketball court, winning and performing well is the ultimate way to gain self-esteem."

Apparently even a subtle suggestion worked.  When Lifshin wore a shirt with a human skull on it while working with test subjects, "Participants who saw the shirt outperformed those who did not by approximately 30 percent. They also attempted more shots — an average of 11.85 per minute versus an average of 8.33 by those who did not see the shirt... They took more shots, better shots, and they hustled more and ran faster."

So maybe my incessant focus on the worst-case scenario is a good thing.  And whether or not my attitude has anything to do with it, I've been pretty pleased with my run times lately, and in fact just set a personal record for a 5K two weeks ago -- 29:57 (which may not seem all that great to any competitive runners out there, but considering that I'm 56 and until this year hadn't run at all for ten years, I'm pretty damn pleased with it).

I can't say it's a pleasant attitude to have, however, and I've tried to adopt a sunnier outlook whenever possible.  I'm not sure my natural bent will be that easy to eradicate, however, and given the research by Zestcott et al., maybe it's better just to embrace it and run each race as if it'll be my last.

Aliens in Australia

A few days ago, I lamented that the United States has far more than its fair share of complete lunatics.  This prompted a loyal reader of Skeptophilia to send me a link that indicates that Australia is also in the running.

The Land Down Under's candidate for International Wingnut of the Year is cricketer Shane Warne.  Warne is no slouch as an athlete; he's widely considered to be one of the best bowlers in the history of cricket.  However, as we've seen over and over again, being a brilliant actor or sports figure is no insurance against being a complete loon, and Warne makes this clear in an interview he did for the television show I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, in which he tells us about his personal theory of evolution.

It's unorthodox, to say the least.

He starts out with a line that we science-types have heard all too many times before.

"If we’ve evolved from monkeys, then why haven’t those ones evolved?" he asks fellow guest Bonnie Lythgoe.

Lythgoe, taken a little aback, just said, "Yeah ..." in a dubious sort of way, instead of to ask some version of what I always do, which is "My ancestors came from France.  Why are there still French people?"

But Warne wasn't heading where anyone thought he was.  He continued, "I’m saying: Aliens.  We started from aliens."

And why, Mr. Warne, do you think this?

"Look at those pyramids... You couldn’t do ‘em.  You couldn’t pull those huge bits of brick and make it perfectly symmetrical ... couldn’t do it.  So who did it?"

The Egyptians.  With a shitload of slave labor.  Thanks for asking.

What is the most amusing about this is that Lythgoe, rather than saying, "Um, Shane?  You seemed a lot saner before you started talking," decided to take the low road and egg him on.  "Has to be from another world," she said.  "Has to be."

Cheered on by the fact that she wasn't guffawing directly into his face, Warne continued, "Whatever planet they’re on out there, they decided that they were gonna start some more life here on Earth and study us."

Only then did Lythgoe seem to have any reservations.  "Scientifically, we have so many similarities to monkeys," she said.  "So I don’t know ... yeah."

But Warne didn't get where he is by backing down in the face of uncertainty.  His voice full of the enthusiasm that is a characteristic of the cheerfully insane, he said, "Maybe they turned a few monkeys into humans and said 'Yeah, it works'!"

Well, I dunno.  Considering that Shane Warne is one of the outcomes, it didn't work all that well.  Maybe the aliens need to come back and do a little fine-tuning.

What always strikes me about these situations is twofold.  First, why does anyone think that being a good athlete qualifies you to weigh in on anything else?  Take, for example, Manny Pacquaio's comments about gays being "worse than animals."  He lost his Nike sponsorship for this -- entirely deserved, allow me to add.  But why are his comments even relevant beyond that?  He's a boxer, for crying out loud, not an ethicist, or even a politician.  The fact that he doesn't like gays carries as much weight as my opinions would about boxing strategy.

But second, why do we continue to listen to the ravings of people who obviously have a screw loose?  Why is this entertainment?  I have to admit to being in the minority of Americans who have absolutely no comprehension of why anyone would want to watch Duck Dynasty or Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo or Real Housewives of New Jersey.  I am not entertained by random people doing random stuff and then mugging for the camera as if they had just given an Oscar-worthy performance.

But there it is: and the reassuring thing, for me at least, is that the United States doesn't have the market cornered on wackos.  Good thing, because I needed the reassurance.  This year's presidential race is shaping into having to vote for the person who is the least insane, and it's nice to know that we're not the only ones in the world who face this problem.