Estimates vary, but if you do the math you have about 2.5 billion heartbeats available in your lifetime. Based on your current age, you can guess at how many of yours remain, give or take a few million.

You would be wrong if you said you didn’t want to use those heartbeats up in aerobic exercise. Fear not. Although your pulse, beats per minute, can easily double during exercise, doing the math shows that it is a good investment. Actually, the long term effect of aerobic work-outs (like running) is to slow the heart rate. You make the heart stronger and more efficient. It then has to work less often, slower pulse, to do the same amount of work.

Doing the math, a few hours a week of elevated metabolism results in hundreds of hours of easy work for the heart. Resting pulse rates for aerobically trained athletes are often in the 40s. That’s amazing leverage in the use of your lifetime of heartbeats!

It’s easy to do the numbers with the heart. But your muscles, lungs, circulation and the rest of your system enjoy similar benefits, except there is no way to quantify them. Runners know those benefits. Their life clock beats slowly and they feel better.

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Whether you run five miles a week or train for a marathon, you face the same issue. You are asking your body to do something it would rather not. At any level of training, as you run your body is learning stamina. Your muscles are learning to store more glycogen. There will be a direct relationship between the number of miles you run and your muscles ability to go the distance.

To me, stamina and endurance are not the same. It depends on the level of your training, of course, but at some point, at some distance, you will run out of fuel. As the glycogen levels decline, you will ask your body to keep going. Yes, you will use all of your stamina and you will need something more to finish the race or just to keep a training promise. When your body runs out of gas you can ask it to keep going, to use the last gallon.

When your legs and lungs are ready to quit, you need endurance, the ability to endure pain. Fortunately, as you train your body to go the distance, you are also conditioning your mind. You learn that going on won’t kill you. You are learning to endure.

Stamina=physical Endurance=mental

“Life is action and passion. It is required that you share the action and passion of your time, lest you be judged not to have lived.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Civil War Hero and Chief Justice of Supreme Court.

Clearly life is both. Passion without action is wasted. Action without passion is aimless wandering.

We don’t run because it is the passion of our time. We run because we find joy in using our bodies, we find solitude on the road and we get the benefits of more fitness and less fatness.

In my 20’s my friends and I spent as much time as possible at the beach. Lake Calhoun, in Minneapolis, is about 3 miles around. An elderly gentleman in great shape used to run around the lake. He was tan and healthy, but so old. Now, I estimate he was in his fifties. Back in those days, there were few recreational runners. If there were running events available to the general population, they were not publicized.

I began by thinking if that old man could run, so could I. Then, every fall I went into a hell bent program to get in shape for the downhill ski season. And if I wanted to be hired as a city firefighter I would have to pass an agility test. So my first runs, off and on, were around the beautiful city lakes in Minneapolis.

The hook was set a few years later in a citizen’s cross-country ski race. A local girl, about 14 years old, kicked snow in my face. That spring I started a running habit that I’ve never regretted.

I don’t know what the average cost of entering a marathon, or half marathon, is these days. I know the marathon I run each year has increased the entry fee by about 300% in less than twenty years.

As in any other business, costs go up and they have to be passed down to consumers. Running events have gotten so big that everything about them is big. Apparently there is no economy of scale in the promotion, advertising, security, facility rental, permits, staff, medical, legal, printing, mailing and all the other expenses of an event.

That leads me to the $100 T-shirt. My wife would gladly help me find a nice T-shirt for less than $10. And she wonders, correctly, why I can’t just run 26 miles on my own, without 7000 other people. She could also point out, with appropriate sarcasm, that I usually run for solitude.

Well, I train without 7000 people. I put on the miles on my own. And I do enjoy solitude. But ultimately, the marathon is the goal I work for. I could do it all without that goal. But I don’t want to!

I wear t-shirts a lot, all summer anyway, and I like to say I don’t wear one unless I ran the race or walked the walk. (Celiac walk, a fund raiser for Celiac disease research. Good t-shirts!)

The $100 hamburger is common in general aviation, flying small airplanes. The cost of firing up the bird and flying to a nearby airport for a meal far exceeds the value of the meal by itself. It is flying for fun that just happens to include a hamburger. These days, when a lift ticket at a ski area or a round of golf is nearly $100, I guess a marathon or two per year is not a waste of money.

And I get the neat T-shirt.

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I suppose I appreciate James Brooks because I am a Grandfather, a runner and a pilot.

Brooks is a WWII fighter pilot, double Ace, who flew 55 combat missions in a P-51 Mustang. Still running in his late eighties he and the P-51 are the subject of a great video, a Gray Eagles film by Chris Woods. View it at http://www.asb.tv/videos/view.php?v=1bf99434&br=500 (It is narrated by Peter Coyote)

This is a touching video about one of the remaining members of what has been called “the greatest generation.” It is about Brook’s relationship with his grandchildren, a reunion with other P-51 pilots and a his chance to fly “the greatest fighter aircraft” again, in his eighties.

It is easy for me to identify with flight footage shot over eastern Idaho in view of the Tetons. It’s where we recently enjoyed seven winters.

What is clear from the video is that, at his age, Major Brooks is still physically active and mentally sharp. We should all hope, as we age, to do as well.

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—I thought I was special. There was an ICD, an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator sewed into my chest. There I was, still running marathons. More than that, I was feeling great. We were In Duluth, Minnesota, at Grandma’s Marathon a few years ago.
—The weather was perfect and I was running with my youngest daughter, her first marathon. We weren’t making great time, but she had an IT band issue and it was about my 17th marathon. I had nothing to prove. I was making jokes to ease her pain. I knew that an Elvis impersonator would be at about mile 18. I told her we would run until we saw Elvis, then we could walk for a while.
—Funny thing happened at a potty stop. Waiting in line, I started talking with another runner (about my age.) As we started edging around health issues and I was getting ready to mention my ICD, he told me about his heart transplant. Heart transplant? I thought it was enough to run with an ICD, to back up my cardiac rhythm.
—This guy had traded in his heart for someone else’s and he was still running marathons.
—Unfortunately, I never got his name or bib number. I would love to know how he finished. He and my daughter made me proud that day. She endured and so did he.

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—Jack Rabbit Johannsen was a skier. He can be credited, in fact, for bringing the sport to the U.S. and Canada. As a boy in Norway he competed in downhill, cross-country and jumping. His lifetime of skiing accomplishments put him in the Canadian Ski Hall of Fame.
—Although he was a pioneer in downhill skiing as well, his strong preference was for what we now call Nordic skiing. He pioneered hundreds of miles of trails in eastern Canada. Most remarkable, he kept doing it almost until his death at age 111. At 92 he completed a 190k cross country ski marathon with his family. I first saw a picture of him skiing at the age of 106.
—His genes accounted for his longevity, certainly. But his long miles of trail skiing, even at an advanced age, must have left his heart and lungs in great condition. I don’t know how he stayed in shape in the summer. I would like to think he was a runner, but the truth is, there were very few recreational runners only a few decades ago.
—There is little doubt that cross-country skiing, which uses the legs and the upper body, is better aerobic exercise than running. Unfortunately, it requires snow, and compared to running it is equipment intensive.
—We can run whether it snows or not, and just about any time and place. That’s an advantage. What Jack Rabbit teaches us though, is that age is no excuse for not working out. In fact if we desire longer lives with better quality of life as we age, we should keep cross-country skiing. Or running.

—A great article about Jack Rabbit Johannsen (1875-1987) is at
http://laurentian.quebecheritageweb.com/article_details.aspx?

And remember, take a break read “The Milk Market” See reviews, a short summary, buy in print or ebook at http://www.themilkmarket.com

Your comments are always welcome. Email dennis@themilkmarket.com

—Let’s see: You ate like a pig—-You drank like a fish—You smoked like a chimney!
Exercise? You said “Sounds like work to me!” By the way, what happened to your health?

—It’s hard to understand why so many people can’t see how important it is to exercise. I don’t care what you do, but run, bike, walk, yoga, jazzercise or aerobics. Do anything that gets the blood moving, the heart pumping and the lungs expanded.

—The news today is of a study done at Duke University, reported by the American Heart Assn. Heart attack survivors who stayed in rehab (exercise) had a dramatically reduced risk of stroke or heart attack compared to those who quit.

—The body is made to work. Runners know. Beginning runners, feeling the aches and pains, might have a harder time but they will soon enough feel the benefits.
—Anyway, the message seems clear. Hit the road!

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Tired of the “same old, same old?” Read a thriller, “The Milk Market”
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Here’s the difference:
—BEFORE THE RUN–As I’ve written before, often it’s about the attitude at the start. Joy and gratitude help!
—DURING THE RUN–How I feel during the run is the result of a good warmup and proper stretching. Dressing right for the weather and being properly hydrated (instead of overwatered.) And for me, very little in the stomach.
—AFTER THE RUN–According to Dr. Steven Jonas in the Merck Manual of Medical Information, there are two possible types of muscle discomfort after exercise.
—–Desirable: delayed onset muscle soreness (doesn’t start until hours after intense exercise) Usually affects both sides of the body equally, more or less. Goes away after 48 hours. Feels better after the warm up for the next workout.
—–Undesirable muscle discomfort: injury, usually felt soon after it occurs, is worse on one side of the body, does not disappear after 48 hours and becomes more severe when exercise is resumed.

—Novice runners often interpret all muscle discomfort, even good discomfort, as a sign of injury.
—Experienced runners often advise “running through” or ignoring the pain. But that only works if the “injury” is delayed onset muscle soreness. A real injury may stop you in your tracks and trying to “run through” it will not work. Keep going, but if it doesn’t go away in a short time, it is a real injury. Fortunately, you won’t usually do any more damage trying to “run through” the pain.
—For some, a true injury is an opportunity to quit running. For the dedicated among us, it is motivation to proactively rehab the injury and to take greater care in the future with stretching and warmup.

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—So, is it enough to just keep doing the same thing day in day out, year after year? There is comfort in routine. (Unless you are overcome with boredom.)
—In my experience, you need to be seeking constant improvement just to maintain your fitness.
—As you age, if you are satisfied with the same old route, the same old pace, you will gradually lose your edge. I am not suggesting that your goal should be winning races, but if you keep pushing yourself, incrementally, to run farther, faster, better, you will at least maintain. At a minimum, maintenance should be your goal. And I hope you can do even better.
—How about a New Year’s resolution? Resolution means Resolve. By this time next year try to be a better runner than you are today. Aspire! Resolve!