Did Fauja Singh just taunt India’s PM?
Fauja Singh, the world’s only 101-year-old marathoner, has said he’ll hang up his sneakers next month. At this point, some men might start organizing their ribbons and trophies, or writing notes to supporters, or staring out over a brightly lit city from a high balcony. Reflecting. Or, like Singh, they might use that last month...
Science struggles to grasp your love handles
You think you know what’s fat, don’t you? It’s defined by pounds, or body-mass index, or how much roly-poly flesh you can pinch between your thumb and forefinger. (Try this only on yourself.) You know fat when you see it. And you can measure it, objectively. Right? And way too many people are way too...
Afternoon workouts work best. Maybe.
The popular press has a wealth of information on fitness. But if you are over 50, your reading will often leave you feeling confused or unsure. This is because so many studies focus on younger people and you know better than to generalize. Good health and fitness guidance for a 12-year-old might not true for...
Stop loving your couch
The time between Christmas and News Years is, unofficially, the National Sweatpants Week. A time for long breakfasts that fade into lunch, naps, hanging out, informal family gatherings–all activities that can be undertaken and are perhaps best undertaken while wearing sweatpants. But now it’s over. You know you need to get off the couch....
In biking as in life, listen to the women
And then give them what they want. That’s one conclusion found in City Cycling (MIT Press 2012), which the Rutgers Focus calls “a guide to the urban cycling renaissance underway in most countries of the western industrialized world.” The book, co-edited by professors John Pucher (from Rutgers ) and Ralph Buehler (Virginia Tech), contains...
What does “Age Against the Machine” mean?
CNN is running a collection of articles about Baby Boomers. They are calling it “Boomers: Age Against the Machine.” We assume it’s a play on the name of the rap metal band Rage Against the Machine, a group that formed in the early 1990s, which is long after most Boomers stopped paying attention to new...
How much T is enough?
This is a story about sex, drugs and sports—things we love to talk about. And, for extra spice, porn and cancer. Pharmaceutical companies are aggressively marketing drugs to combat low testosterone—“low T’ in the ads—in older men, and they are doing it with the same enthusiasm (and big budgets) that they market rejuvenating creams and...
Fitness can compress your inevitable debility. Yay.
If you turned 65 in the middle of the last century—in 1950—you could expect 13.1 years more of life if you were a man and 16.2 years if you were a woman. If you turned 65 in 2007, your remaining life expectancy was 17.2 (male) and 19.9 (female) years. So, in theory, that’s about four...
“Ageless athlete” profiles: inspiring or just sort of irritating?
You have emotions that arise so naturally, so spontaneously that they seem pure and unassailable and right. Justified. Nothing to be ashamed of. But life is rarely that clean and neat for very long. Sometimes emotions are strong and automatic and still you suspect that they are, well, suspect. You’re confused by how you feel,...
Flabby old heart no impediment to wrecking knees, hips
“We always worry about marathoners who are sort of dropping dead, if you will, and having a heart attack during the marathon,” says Dr. Davinder Jassal as he explains the purpose of his recent study and, simultaneously, gives us our favorite quote of the month. Jassal (an associate professor of medicine, radiology and physiology at...
Older and active: no one knows what you should eat
Older people—including very fit and active older people—will sometimes stand in front of a mirror and say, What the hell? When did that happen? And what do I do about it? The problem is this: you never thought about what you ate. In your youth, you were burning calories like a madman or madwoman and...
Fitness is the big have
If it seems to you that everything breaks down into haves and have-nots, you are as smart as you think you are. It’s a barbell world. You are at one end or the other. The middle class that connects the two extremes grows thinner and bends under the stress until it adopts a parabolic shape...
