Keeping Active Pt. 1 - The Olympic Legacy

The leaves are gone, it is dark early in the evening, and cold has now given way to rain, and in other parts of the country, flooding. It is winter and the glory of the summer Olympics already seems an age ago. When you are hunkering down against the weather it is hard to remember the feelings of warmth an openness which characterised that time. The reviews of the year remind us what happened and show many glorious moments but the hoopla has now over and it is time to look what at what was promised as a legacy. No not whether West Ham take over the Olympic Stadium (an issue on which I have vanishingly small interest and absolutely no opinion) but whether the population will become more active and participate more in sports. The slogan was: "inspire a generation" and the hope was that a festival showing the limits of human physical performance would seize our imaginations and encourage us to do more ourselves.

I have always been sceptical as to whether watching elite sport spurs many people on. Supporting a team is as much about identity as anything else and ou only have to see the number of beer bellies wearing team shirts to know that not all spectators are as active as they might be. A problems is that top sportsmen are so much more capable than the average person they might be a different, but closely related, species (how can someone sustain 5min miles for 26 miles?). What they do is outside normal in all honesty we cannot say to ourselves “I can do that”, instead our response is “Wow!”. It is possible that instead of inspiring imitation all the exceptional performances reinforce the idea that sport is for other people. 

Running is the sport with the lowest barrier to entry: anybody can buy a pair of trainers and get going but I would guess the London Marathon is a far bigger inspiration for participation than Usain Bolt. Seeing people of all shapes, sizes, ages and abilities, who each in their own way achieve something personally significant does make you think: ”I could do that!”  We are all more likely to accept a challenge if we think it is achievable and when there are people we can realistically measure ourselves against. After that it is a ladder: if we find we have some talent then we compete against better people, and so on, and so on. What this requires is an infrastructure of grassroot clubs with the coaching to encourage us all to give of our best. This infrastructure is ultimately far more important than a huge festival (no matter how great it  might be)

Don’t get me wrong I thought the Olympics were brilliant and also important in an unexpected way: like nothing else in my lifetime it showed us we were a cosmopolitan nation with a sense of identity more vibrant than is usually allowed.  The efficiency of the building, planning, and running of the games combined with the high spirits of the helpers and good nature of spectators showed we are not a broken society. After so many generations of politicians and news commentators telling us that we are failing in every conceivable way and all is rubbish, it gave everyone heart to see this big thing being done well. Self esteem is not only important for individuals it is also important for nations and for this reason the Olympics were a wonderful thing but that was not their intended legacy.  There is a big difference between the short term emotional release and the day-to-day work of getting more people permanently active.

 Evidence from previous Olympics is not encouraging. Perhaps this time will be different but as I have already said mass participation in sport requires infrastructure: playing fields with changing facilities, running tracks, cycleways, all-weather tennis courts, outdoor gyms, gyms, parks, all of which have to be maintained as well as built.  Clubs and leagues have to be staffed, volunteers have to give of their time, knowledge and enthusiasm and dreams have to be kept alive. In the summer, in a beautiful Olympic Park, surrounded by happy people, dreams are easy. In winter on a badly drained, muddy field with no working showers in the changing rooms it is more difficult. 

Perhaps it is now time to put aside 2012 as a marvellous year of elite sport and look at how well the rest of us, the sub-prime physical specimens, are doing at keeping active.

Transforming the Ordinary

Picasso - The Old Guitarist, 1903
Source: www.pablopicasso.org

As is my habit I was reading the saturday paper at a cafe, with coffee and a bun. Sometimes I was drawn to an article and absorbed, other times I watched the crowds and listened to fragments of disconnected conversation. It was a day when everybody had a business face as they sorted out presents and got ready for christmas. Brows were furrowed, lips were pursed, discussion carried an edge. I sat and thought, as I often do, about how little people look around. This room, in this town centre, was full of people not interacting, all were within their own world, physically sharing a common space but looking inward. 

How do we all sense the world? All of use with our own concerns and experiences, doing the same sort of thing but are we seeing them in the same way? How many of each person’s thoughts are commonplace, hardly worth remarking upon, and how many exceptional? In this room what were the unusual insights I was missing?

These are questions I often ask myself, especially as I continue this blog about a common activity where there is little new to say. So many people run in a similar hobbyist way and so many experiences are similar, I sometimes wonder whether they are worth talking about. But (and this is my excuse) they are felt differently, not only from person to person but in the same person from time to time. One day the ordinary is just that - ordinary, but on others it is transformed. Super good days may be rare but when they happen they offer up moments of clarity and contentment that are almost magical.

I thought of this when I read the article by Giles Fraser, which quoted a poem by Wallace Stevens. As is his wont he took a theological message, whereas I take it as an affirmation of the way the ordinary can also be something else. Never mind music and the arts, we can also run to find those moments.

P.S. The poem is said to be a reaction to the Picasso painting, which may be true but for me a key word is “shearsman” which is used to describe a tailor, a craftsman. To me is is not a poem just about art, it is about any craft - the practice of any skill. In this respect running, if done seriously enough, is also a craft.

The Man With the Blue Guitar 

One
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said to him, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are.” 

Two
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.
If a serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar. 

Three
A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar. 

Four
Tom-tom c'est moi. The blue guitar
And I are one. The orchestra
Fills the high hall with shuffling men
High as the hall. The whirling noise
Of a multitude dwindles, all said,
To his breath that lies awake at night.
I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentarily declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.

Is Running Bad For Your Heart?

Now here’s a funny thing: I was about to write a few linked posts about the importance of exercise for health and the difficulties of changing habits and persuading  adults to make even a minimal effort, when I came across an article warning that exercise might have dangers. (Not that there's anything in it to change my plans as only good things can happen if someone moves from inert to 150 minutes a week). No the dangers are for those who are are worried about their health but for those who become intoxicated by the challenges, the idea of pushing back physical limits, and addicted to the feeling of being both physically empty and extremely satisfied.  Doing too much, or more specifically taking part in endurance events like marathons, triathlons, or ultramarathons might not actually be too healthy. There may be some unwanted adaptations to the heart and it is possible there is a dose effect so that just as too little exercise is bad for a body running too much might not be so good!

The origin of the concern was a paper has been published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings entitled ‘Potential adverse cardiovascular effects from excessive endurance exercise’ and many of you might not want to read any further than the title. Feel free to close your eyes, put your fingers in your ears, say “I am not listening!’ or ‘this cannot possibly be right because I don’t want to believe it’. If you write for a newspaper you can do this at slightly greater length. That’s OK as long as you are clear in your mind why you run and know that if you run for more than about 30 minutes a day you do so for reasons other than health.  However although we might want to continue doing what we do we should not treat unwelcome sounding research like and leave it unopened like an unwanted bank statement. We must face it dispassionately to see what the researchers actually say and be prepared to put aside our preconceptions. Before doing so though we can be strengthened by the thought that what is actually proved in any scientific papers is usually very specific within precisely defined limits which often do not bear the weight of the more generalised (and lurid) headlines.

So what to make of the Mayo paper?  Well from my lofty position of a non-expert it looks like a good survey of what is known about the effect of extreme exertion on the heart. It shows evidence that the hearts of highly trained athletes can enlarge and thicken in a way that would be seen as worrying for a normal person and there can also be scarring and other damage. However we don’t know enough about what that means for overall health and longevity, as the authors recognise in the abstract: 

However, this concept is still hypothetical and there is some inconsistency in the reported findings. Furthermore, lifelong vigorous exercisers generally have low mortality rates and excellent functional capacity.

Nevertheless there is enough in this paper to get one thinking. But it must be emphasised that the authors are not warning about exercise of itself, instead they are raising the question as to whether there can be too much of a good thing. They explicitly offer no excuse for the couch potato to remain inert as their opening sentences make clear:

Regular exercise is one of the cornerstones of therapeutic lifestyle changes for producing optimal cardiovascular (CV) and overall health. Physical exercise, though not a drug, possesses many traits of a powerful pharmacological agent. A routine of daily physical activity (PA) stimulates a number of beneficial physiologic changes in the body and can be highly effective for prevention and treatment of many of our most prevalent and pernicious chronic diseases, including coronary heart disease (CHD), hypertension, heart failure, obesity, depression, and diabetes mellitus.¹ People who exercise regularly have markedly lower rates of disability and a mean life expectancy that is 7 years longer than that of their physically inactive contemporaries.

The point needs to be emphasised because there is no way you want a simplified message that running is bad for your health to seep into the public consciousness. It shouldn’t from this paper, which is a restrained academic review that does not editorialise. However that is done by the authors in the BMJ journal Heart, where they are clearer in describing the effect of exercise as a U curve where too much high intensity work loses some of the gains of a more moderate regime. (It can be found here but unless you have a subscription or access from a library it is not worth the £24 they want to charge. Instead watch the TED talk that covers the same ground). 

The article has caused more controversy because it inspired the article in the Wall Street Journal I previously mentioned. As is common for newspapers the headline and opening paragraphs were overly alarming, even if there was more balance further down the piece (as is also common in newspapers). This has been a push back with some people to contest the conclusions (e.g. here and here) and a little flurry of concern.

My take (for what it’s worth - and that is very little because it is just the intuitive response of someone who runs about a bit) is that I am very ready to believe that there is a sweet spot for exercise to offer maximum health benefits, which might not accord with the amount of work needed to fulfil other ambitions. It is very likely that more might not mean better especially for those of us over 50. But I am not sure if I have to worry too much. I may be old but the amount of running I do faster than 8 min miles is vanishingly small. I, like most people, am probably well within the boundaries of exercise being a good thing. However the problem is we cannot precisely define where those boundaries are. Take for example easy exercise: apparently we can walk as much as we like without hitting  a point of diminishing returns but does that also apply to slow, low intensity running?  If so the majority people who run marathons have no worries because, from the middle to the back of the pack, the long slow running dominates training (and the race). For most people the debate about a U shaped exercise curve is irrelevant because we don’t run hard or fast enough to reach the bottom of the U. The people at risk are the seriously competitive and they are the very people whose motivation has nothing to do with wellbeing or health. But the amount of that risk, if at all, is not yet known. 

It is all neatly summed up in an article in Outside about the original Mayo review: “high-intensity, high-volume exercise is really, at this point, a black box in terms it what it does for you over the long haul.”