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.

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Racing against your brain

Being a devoted (if not especially fast) runner, and also ridiculously competitive, I'm always interested in ways to increase my speed and endurance.

It's not, honestly, that I am under any illusion of my becoming a world-class marathoner, or anything.  I'm 58 years old, and don't think there's any way I'd ever have the determination to train intensely enough to be a contender for first place.  But I'd like to see some improvement -- specifically, more improvement than I've seen over the past two years, when I've been stuck averaging around a ten-minute mile while younger and more athletic guys are clocking in with seven-minute miles or better.

Yesterday I found out that some of my problem is probably in my brain, not in my legs.

A study published last week in Nature: Human Behavior called, "Learning One's Genetic Risk Changes Physiology Independent of Actual Genetic Risk," by psychologists Bradley P. Turnwald, J. Parker Goyer, Danielle Z. Boles, Amy Silder, Scott L. Delp, and Alia J. Crum of Stanford University, suggests something astonishing; your performance in a race is more dependent on whether you think you have a variant of a gene that improves stamina than whether you actually have the gene.

The setup was simple.  They tested volunteers to determine which variant of a (real) gene called CREB-1 they had.  One version tends to increase endurance, and the other reduces it, so which variant you have determines how easily you tire.  They then split the entire group four ways; (1) those who have the high-endurance gene and are told they do; (2) those who have the high-endurance gene and are told they have the low-endurance variant; (3) those who have the low-endurance gene and are told they do; and (4) those who have the low-endurance gene and are told they have the high-endurance variant.

The results were unequivocal.  Those who were told they had the low-endurance variant of CREB-1 processed out carbon dioxide less efficiently, tired more quickly, ran more slowly, and gave up sooner than the ones who were told they had the high-endurance variant -- regardless of which variant they had.

Me at the end of a race in Montezuma, New York last year.  It was 95 F and about eight krillion percent humidity, and I definitely was not thinking, "I have excellent endurance and stamina."  My mindset was more, "I hope I can make it across the finish line before I die so at least I won't block the trail for the other runners."

The most amazing thing to me is the carbon dioxide part.  The rest of it I can attribute to attitude -- if I think I'm going to crap out more quickly because of some factor beyond my control, I'm likely to interpret all the stuff runners have to put up with -- the little aches and pains, shortness of breath, sweating, and heart pounding -- as evidence that I'm not going to be competitive no matter what I do.  It's easy to see someone paying unwarranted attention to what happens to all of us when we run, and giving up more quickly, if they figure that it's just their unfortunate genetic makeup causing it.

But the carbon dioxide part is fascinating, because that's not something under any sort of voluntary control.  It's hard to see how you could affect the rate at which carbon dioxide is cleared from the blood by some kind of power-of-positive-thinking phenomenon.  But that seems to be what happened.  "What people haven’t fully appreciated is that that information also puts you into a mindset: 'I’m at high risk or I'm protected,'" study co-author Alia Crum said.  "And that alone can have potent effects on physiology and motivation."

Of course, what I want to know is how.  How could simply thinking that you have good endurance change your physiology drastically enough to result in a measurable increase in speed and stamina?

And more to the point, how can I tap into that?

I've always been pretty dubious about the results of positive self-talk.  I mean, it's probably better than negative self-talk, but I've always thought it was only from the standpoint of making you a generally happier person.  (Not that this is inconsequential, mind you.)  But apparently athleticism has as much to do with mindset as it does with genes, and when elite athletes say that the only way to succeed is to believe you can, there might be something scientific to it after all.

But for me, it falls into the "Now that I know this, what do I do?" department.  I suppose I could try convincing myself that I'm fast and powerful and all the rest, but I have this sneaking suspicion my brain would be saying at the same time, "C'mon, you know that's not true," which would probably spoil the effect.  Or maybe I could have a genetic test for CREB-1 and have my wife lie to me about the results if it turns out I have the low-endurance variant.

Whatever I do, it's probably more important simply to keep training.  But maybe cursing myself when those young bucks zoom past me isn't the best approach -- maybe I should be thinking, "Next time, that'll be me."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Michio Kaku's The Physics of the Impossible.  Kaku takes a look at the science and technology that is usually considered to be in the realm of science fiction -- things like invisibility cloaks, replicators, matter transporters, faster-than-light travel, medical devices like Star Trek's "tricorders" -- and considers whether they're possible given what we know of scientific law, and if so, what it would take to develop them.  In his signature lucid, humorous style, Kaku differentiates between what's merely a matter of figuring out the technology (such as invisibility) and what's probably impossible in a a real and final sense (such as, sadly, faster-than-light travel).  It's a wonderful excursion into the power of the human imagination -- and the power to make at least some of it happen.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

A winning smile

I've been told I have "resting scowl face."  I can't tell you the number of times I've been walking down the hall in the school and a student has said, "Boy, you look pissed off," or at the very least, "He's on a mission."

It gets worse when I'm concentrating.  My wife has told me that when I'm performing with my band, I have a knitted brow and that my eyes look... "intense."

She always tries to phrase things kindly if she can.

The odd thing is that I honestly enjoy performing, so it's not that I'm having a bad time.  I have a hard time explaining why I do scowl so much of the time, because I'm really not an angry person.

Really.

On the other hand, I just realized I was scowling when I wrote that.

The reason all this comes up is some recent research into the connection between facial expressions and endurance while running. Noah E. Brick, Megan J. McElhinney, and Richard S. Metcalfe, in a paper called "The Effects of Facial Expression and Relaxation Cues on Movement Economy, Physiological, and Perceptual Responses During Running" that appeared in the Journal of the Psychology of Sport and Exercise last month, found that deliberately relaxing your facial muscles and smiling while on a run actually helps you to move with more economy, resulting in less discomfort and an overall improvement in performance.

As a runner, I found this fascinating.  I'm sure, given that I scowl a large percent of the time anyway, that I must look positively furious while I'm running.  I don't have much photographic evidence of that, however, because there's a natural tendency to mug for the camera when you pass a race photographer.  But I honestly can't imagine the smile lasting for much more than a second or two after the shutter clicks.

What is coolest about this is that the researchers didn't just ask runners for their perceptions before and after, they had them breathe through a mask that measured their oxygen uptake (a good measure of the efficiency of your muscles).  They had four groups -- one that maintained a neutral expression, one as genuine a smile as you can muster under those conditions, one that was instructed to scowl, and one that concentrated on relaxing their entire upper body.  (The last-mentioned group was instructed to pretend that "they were holding a crisp with both hands while they were running and trying not to break it.")

Okay, so maybe I don't scowl the whole time.

The results were astonishing.  The smiling group was 2.8% more efficient than the scowling group, and 2.2% better than the neutral group.  (The relaxed group fell in between the two.)  While this may not seem like much of an improvement, it's equivalent to six weeks of consistent jump training (plyometrics).  And, I might add, it's a hell of a lot more pleasant.  The authors write:

The improved RE [respiratory efficiency] is toward the lower end of the 2%–8% reported for short-term training modes (e.g., Moore, 2016) but is greater than the smallest worthwhile change for RE (2.2%–2.6%) suggested by Saunders, Pyne, Telford, and Hawley (2004).  As such, the improved RE can be considered a real and worthwhile change.  Furthermore, the lower VO2 when smiling is equivalent to the 2%–3% improvement noted by Turner, Owings, and Schwane (2003) following six-weeks of plyometric training in distance runners, and the 1.7%–2.1% observed by Barnes et al. (2013) after 13 weeks of heavy resistance training in male cross-country runners.

So I'm gonna try it.  My first race isn't for a couple of months, given that we're still in the third of the seasons in upstate New York's "four-season climate" (the four seasons are: Almost Winter, Winter, Still Fucking Winter, and Road Construction) and the roadsides are covered with a nice layer of dirty slush.  But I can always try it while I'm training on the treadmill at the gym, although it might make my gym buddy wonder what's wrong with me.

What I find most fascinating about this is to speculate about the cause.  You have to wonder if it's because our expressions are so tied to our emotions -- that perhaps wearing a scowl puts your body on alert for danger, resulting in a combination of discomfort and an increase in adrenaline and the stress hormone cortisol (which would boost the rate at which you burn fuel without necessarily giving you anything back in the form of speed or endurance).  That's all just guesswork, however.

In any case, it's worth a shot.  So if you see a skinny blond guy running down the road in upstate New York wearing a goofy grin, I'm not high, I'm just running an experiment.  Literally.