It’s frightening to imagine what feats the nation’s aging boomers might attempt now that Nolan Ryan has hurled a seventh no-hitter at the age of 44. Two grocery sacks at the same time? Midweek sex? This is, after all, the same impressionable generation that started jumping out windows when they saw Superman on TV in the mid ‘5Os. George Foreman, at 42 and 245 pounds, didn’t do much to minimize an outbreak of midlife machismo. He took Evander Holyfield to the limit several Friday nights back, and on Saturday thousands of wild-eyed men in khaki slacks trimmed the forsythia to a pathetic bristle. In their hearts, though, these same people know that Jim Palmer’s comeback could not survive spring training; that Bjorn Borg took a terrible licking in his first tournament since 1983, and that Mark Spitz, trying to recapture his 1972 Olympic glory, nearly capsized in the wake created by a couple of youngsters. The truth is, when it comes to the question of exactly when humans should consider themselves old, the sports pages lately have been sending out some maddeningly mixed messages.
The medical journals are something else again. Doctors and other researchers almost unanimously agree that people such as Ryan and Foreman are not freaks of nature but products of fitness regimens that most people can attempt in some modified form-and thus shining examples to us all. Says Dr. Neil Gordon, director of exercise physiology at the Institute for Aerobics Research (IAR) in Dallas: “If you want to know the bottom line, it’s yes. As a matter of fact, you can turn back the hands of time.”
Chronological age, the experts now tell us, is a mere technicality. A 60-year-old who smokes and drinks may be a lot older, for all practical purposes, than, say, 83 year-old Johnny Kelley of Cape Cod, who last month completed his 57th Boston Marathon and runs 50 miles a week. By the same token, some 40-and-older athletes can compete against 28-year-olds because they have lowered their “functional age” to roughly that of their opponents,
Like genius, functional youth is nine-tenths perspiration. For all his cheeseburger jokes, Foreman trained diligently for his title fight, running seven miles most days, sparring and lifting weights. Ryan, instead of celebrating what he matter-of-factly called his “most overpowering performance” last Wednesday (16 strikeouts and two walks), spent his usual postgame half hour calmly pedaling an exercise bike. Buta person interested in health, as opposed to headline-grabbing athletic performance, needn’t be all that dedicated. Peggy Fleming, a gold-medal winner in the ‘68 0lympics and now, at 42, a touring pro, keeps to 117 pounds by running or walking several times a week and lifting weights every other day. “I get my exercise done, and then I carry on with the rest of my life,” she says.
The word that keeps cropping up in the current thinking about exercise is “moderation.” Dr. Kenneth Cooper, who founded the IAR and first popularized the term aerobics, says that a half hour of running or brisk walking, three times a week, is enough to decrease the average person’s chances of dying from heart disease, cancer, stroke and other chief causes of death by about 50 percent. People can improve their race times by working out more, he says, but they will not significantly lessen the risk of dying prematurely.
The fastest route to self-destruction, though, is a sedentary lifestyle. It is now clear that exercise strengthens the heart and lungs, lowers blood pressure and cholesterol, thickens bones, tones muscles and may improve memory. Done consistently, it leads to lasting weight loss, if exercisers don’t greatly increase their caloric intake.
Women may benefit even more than men, since walking and running help reduce bone loss and prevent osteoporosis. Helen Klein, a 68-year-old great-grandmother from Rancho Cordova, Calif., who has more than 38 marathons and 58 even longer races to her credit, has, she says, twice as much calcium and minerals in her bones as most women her age. One recent study at the Harvard School of Public Health showed that women who exercised regularly from a young age were less likely to develop breast cancer. That may be because exercise helped the women remain lean, and obesity increases the risk of breast cancer. Exercise may also boost the human immune system. Researchers at St. Louis University recently found that the body’s production of cancer-fighting “killer cells” increased dramatically when people ran on a treadmill for six to 10 minutes.
As startling as the idea sounds, then, it is not the passage of years that causes people to age. “We now understand that what we have ascribed to aging is simply for the most part due to inactivity,” says Dr. Stanley Birge, director of the program on aging at Washington University in St. Louis. “If we don’t stress our skeleton, we’re going to lose it.” Of course, we’re going to lose it anyway at some point-and the grimly humorous thing about it is, that point may not be far from where it would have been if we’d sat around smoking cigars and scarfing up pork chops. “The human body, after all, has its limits,” says Cooper. “Eventually it just gives way to a kind of battle fatigue. What we’re talking about here is improving the quantity of life a little, and the quality of life a whole lot.”
So this is how it will end for the nation’s fitness buffs: not necessarily with a happy hundredth-birthday wish from Willard Scott, but with something the scientists call compressed morbidity (chart). What that means essentially is that instead of spending the last 10 or so years of your life increasingly dependent on others, you will, if you adhere to an exercise program, continue to lead a vibrant, active existence almost until the moment you drop contentedly off life’s graph. Ryan’s baseball career is turning out to be that kind of life in microcosm. One expects, one hopes, that his last pitch as a major leaguer, no matter when it comes, will be a humming, buzzing, beautiful strike three.
