DAA Industry Opt Out

Americans are obsessed with aging. Or, more accurately, with avoiding it. Between the wrinkle-zapping skin creams, Botox and chin tucks, and “rejuvenation” supplements, the business of anti-aging has grown into a more than $250 billion-with-a-capital-B global industry, and it’s projected to top $330B in the next three years.

Silicon Valley is happy to oblige. Corporations have recently entered the age-prevention market with gusto—Unity Biotechnology, Elysium, and Google’s Calico have invested hundreds of millions into R&D of therapeutics and medicines that work to mitigate or even reverse the effects of growing old. While a magic-bullet pill has yet to appear, the researchers are feeling bullish. “We believe that age can be solved,” says Sofiya Milman, M.D., the director of human longevity studies at the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “We don’t think that people will be immortal, but we do believe that you can certainly delay diseases and dysfunction that come with aging.”

Here’s the funny thing: We already have something that can ward off disease and prevent, even reverse, the telltale signs of age. In fact, look at the Venn diagram of what a hypothetical anti-aging pill would accomplish and what this existing tool already does for the body, and you’ve got two circles nearly overlapped. You don’t need to be a biohacker or billionaire to tap into this fountain of youth. Just lace up your sneakers and go.

RELATED: GOOD NEWS FOR OLD, NEW RUNNERS

Running, according to nearly a dozen of the nation’s top longevity researchers and decades of study, is and always has been one of the best age-preventers. Yes, we all know on some level that running is good for us. It helps control weight, strengthens the heart and lungs, gives us the best kind of feel-good high. But look specifically at what it can do for us as we age—and how it can pre emptively combat some of the most common age-related diseases and ailments—and it’s clear that running is as close to a miracle drug as we’ve got. And it’s not just that our favorite sport can tack years onto our lives—a full three, if you recall that landmark study published in Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases last March—it’s that it can add more life in our years. Run, and your health, energy, and quality of life are superior in ways both subtle and absolutely vital. Living to 100 is meaningless without that.

WE WERE ALL BORN TO RUN

Look to our ancient ancestors, and it makes sense why running is a natural life-extender. For about 2 million years, the activity was integral to our survival. “Our bodies adapted to running because we had to do it to get food,” explains David Raichlen, Ph.D., an anthropologist who studies runners and the evolutionary history of exercise at the University of Arizona. The need to constantly be on the move caused our hearts to enlarge, our capillaries to grow, Raichlen says. In a fascinating 2014 paper in Trends in Neurosciences, he lays out how running allowed Homo sapiens to reach old age. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors had two copies of a genotype that greatly increases the risk of Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease. Yet during this time, humans began living much longer than other mammals. Raichlen believes that’s primarily because we were constantly running—for our food, from our food—which minimized the chances of developing these diseases, despite having the high-risk genes. He also doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that today, as our species’ time spent running (or doing any activity) plummets, our chronic disease risk skyrockets. “I tend to think that exercise explains quite a bit about why we are the way we are today,” he says. Put another way: Not running actually goes against our own evolutionary history.

Sabastian Sawe Dominates 2025 London Marathon

Put your palm up to the left side of your chest. Feel that strong beat? That’s the biggest age-beating benefit your run is giving you. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, killing more Americans than all types of cancer combined. As we age, our arteries stiffen; they can't widen as well to accommodate an increase in bloodflow, and this is particularly true in the aorta, the artery leading from the heart, and in the carotid arteries, which run from chest to head. When these insidious changes happen, major cardiac events aren’t far behind. “We now know that cognitive decline with aging and disease are significantly due to decline in artery function and health,” says Douglas Seals, Ph.D., a distinguished professor of integrative physiology who studies vascular aging at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Your tendency to become more prone to diabetes with aging is affected and highly correlated with vascular health and function. Even kidney disease is closely linked to the health of your arteries.”

BUILDING & PRESERVING STRENGTH

POWERING YOUR INTERNAL ENGINE brain Races - Places, From heart to muscles to the and for almost any amount of time turns the body into a more efficient version of itself. “If you could put the effects into a pill, it would be a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company,” says exercise historian David Raichlen, Ph.D.

Mind: Runners have a higher concentration and greater volume of gray matter, which means better memory, quicker recall, and generally feeling sharper and a lot freaking smarter. Run through complex environments—a busy city or a rocky trail—and you also strengthen the brain in ways that positively affect planning, multitasking, self-awareness, and motor control.

Heart: Aerobic exercise restores elasticity to arteries, allowing them to behave years younger. This helps decrease the likelihood of kidney disease, diabetes, Here’s When You’re Most and Least Likely to Have a Heart Attack.

Immune System: Ever notice you don’t get colds and flu as often as nonrunner friends? Not a coincidence. Regular running is linked to a stronger immune system, and it may even prevent agerelated deterioration.

YOUR BODY ON RUNNING VO2 max, or the maximum amount of oxygen you can use during exercise, naturally drops; this jacks up risks of chronic illnesses. One of the best ways to keep VO2 max high is periodically pushing your heart and lungs with running intervals.

RELATED: Nutrition - Weight Loss?

Well-Being: Running, whether it’s via a run crew or at a local race, can help you create essential social connections. That’s more important than ever. Last year, former United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, M.D., called loneliness “an epidemic” for adults today.

Muscles: As you heft your body weight with each step, you’re preserving muscle and bone strength—a huge component of staying young.

Run regularly, and you may safeguard yourself from all of this, according to Seals. Running not only maintains artery dilation and elasticity, it actually restores youth and vigor to the vessels. Take your first step, and all your muscles—quads, calves, glutes, even your lats, shoulders, and biceps—demand more oxygen. To feed them, you suck in air, your heart beats faster, and it pumps that oxygenated blood through the arteries and to every muscle fiber. This process is more than just a delivery mechanism; it is silently and invisibly keeping the arteries strong and healthy. And it means that no matter who you are—a 40-something joining a run crew or a retiree chasing grand-kids—you’re transforming your heart into a younger version of itself. What’s more, science shows that when your arteries are healthy, everything outside the cardiovascular system is usually in good shape, too.

That’s why Seals, who also codirects the University of Colorado’s community outreach program the Healthy Aging Project, counts exercise like running as the It Factor for staying young. “It is the single most important thing—more important than healthy diet, more important than reducing stress.”

POWERING YOUR INTERNAL ENGINE

There’s another mysterious barometer to gauge our age, a single measurement that acts as a portal through which we can determine our health span: VO2 max, or the maximum amount of oxygen you can use during exercise. VO2 max is likely the last thing you think about when you run, and really, all you need to know about it is that the more often you push yourself—doing intervals, in particular—the more your VO2 max goes up. This is good for reasons besides setting a marathon PR. “The body somehow associates low maximal oxygen consumption to chronic disease,” says Frank W. Booth, Ph.D., a professor of physiology at the University of Missouri who studies the relationship between fitness and disease. “Once your VO2 max falls below a certain value—and no one understands why—then chronic diseases skyrocket.”

The good news: It doesn’t take much to keep VO2 max at an optimal level. Doing short intervals where you push yourself at 85 to 90 percent of your maximum effort, once or twice a week, is enough to maintain a high number. “It is one of the more malleable characteristics of aging,” says Booth, “and you want to fight like hell to keep your VO2 max from falling if you want to keep your health span.”

POWERING YOUR INTERNAL ENGINE

Sure, you can work your heart and raise VO2 max on the bike, in the pool, hell, on a hike with the dog. What makes running special, according to scientists, lies within your head. As University of North Carolina researchers put it, runners literally have a “younger-appearing brain.” Even more incredible: In 2016, researchers at the University of Arizona found that running can change the brain in many of the same ways that activities requiring fine motor skills do, like racquet sports or playing an instrument. This was surprising, say lead researchers Raichlen and Gene Alexander, Ph.D., because conventional logic says that running is anything but mentally taxing—put one foot in front of the other and try not to trip. “Running is actually a pretty cognitively demanding sport,” says Raichlen. “You just don’t realize it.” The root in the middle of the trail, the stoplight that's about to turn red, your dog zigzagging on the leash ahead of you—these are all challenges you have to navigate on a second-by-second basis.

Look back again to our forebears, and you find the evolutionary explanation for this. “As hunter-gatherers, we moved quickly around the landscape, but we’d also have to remember where we were going, use spatial navigation, and executive functions like planning and decision-making,” explains Raichlen. “We think those cognitive skills got linked to exercise through evolutionary processes.”

RUNNING VS. EVERYTHING ELSE

Your body doesn't distinguish one type of aerobic activity from another—your heart, for example, doesn’t know the difference between a bike ride that gets your pulse up to 150 and a run that does the same. Still, there are reasons why running is the top form of exercise to keep the muscles and mind young. And they’re best illustrated in this massive 2017 international study:

Researchers examined more than 55,000 men and women between the ages of 18 and 100 and determined that regardless of how old you are, whether you’re male or female, how much booze you drink, or whether you’ve ever exercised before, if you start running just one to two hours per week, you can slash your risk of cardiovascular-related death by 45 to 70 percent and your chances of dying from cancer by 30 to 50 percent. The clincher: Researchers discovered that runners lived far longer than those who exercised regularly but didn’t run. Take that, cyclists.

Half Marathon Training?

That’s the million-dollar question, and the one researchers say they get the most often. Everyone wants to know the minimum they can get away with and still reap the benefits—the optimal dose, if you will. While there is nuance to that answer (for example, the type and amount of running you need to improve vascular health is different than what you need to increase VO2 max), the overwhelming consensus is “not that much.” “I think what people don’t realize is you get a huge fraction of the benefits from relatively modest amounts of running per day—just a few miles,” says Michael Joyner, M.D., a physician and researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and one of the world's leading experts on human performance and age. In their broad 2017 epidemiological study on running, exercise epidemiologist Duck-chul Lee, Ph.D., and cardiologist Carl Lavie, M.D., found that running just two and a half total hours per week is enough to reap all its youth-promoting benefits. “Compared to not running, any running is good,” adds Lee. And the good news for those logging three-plus hours a week is that, while you don’t get exponentially more benefits the more you run, you also won’t be hurting your health, as some experts had warned in the past.

BUILDING & PRESERVING STRENGTH

Take one glance at the gams of the elites lining up at a marathon, and you know running carves lean muscle. But the most significant impact it has isn’t on aesthetics, but what it does internally, on a cellular level. Just as it does for arteries, running is believed to restore and rejuvenate mitochondria, the powerhouses of each cell; this means muscle fibers can generate energy more efficiently to contract.

That’s key, because as you age, your mitochondria naturally become less effective at generating that chemical energy. “Essentially oxygen leaks across the inner membrane of the mitochondria, requiring your muscles to use more oxygen,” says Justus Ortega, Ph.D., a professor of kinesiology and the director of the Biomechanics Lab at Humboldt State University. ”What’s really interesting about running is that it seems the vigorous nature stimulates the repair of mitochondria, and allows them to generate energy as efficiently as younger adults.” Ortega and his University of Colorado team documented evidence of this in a 2014 study that found older runners not only have better mitochondrial health, they’re also highly efficient runners.

“Running allows your muscles to behave like much more youthful muscles,” Ortega says. “It’s this crazy trickle-down effect. If you’re able to keep your mitochondria in a more healthy state through running, that allows you to be more active in all the other aspects of your life, and that can help to stave off all the things that we typically see with aging--heart disease, diabetes, obesity, bone loss.”

GOOD NEWS FOR OLD, NEW RUNNERS

When it comes to heart health, brain benefits, and overall age-related disease prevention, runners see positive results no matter what age they pick up the sport. In fact, says Mayo Clinic physician Michael Joyner, M.D., you'll see the most benefit from running between roughly 45 and 60 years old, when lifestyle-related diseases really emerge and accelerate.

RELATED: DAA Industry Opt Out

And therein lies the magic: While running itself can produce immediate and lasting changes that make the body “younger,” it’s this ripple effect that researchers point to as the sport’s most important quality. Having the strength, vigor, and energy to do anything you want—that’s what gives running its value. As a society, we are desperate to find elixirs and quick fixes that will give us just that, but running—the sport you love that you thought was simply justifying an order of large fries—has all along been providing the cure. “Running is not just about muscle efficiency or benefits to your bones or heart,” says Ortega, who is 45 years old and has been running for the last 25. “What I found incredibly rewarding was the social benefits of meeting different people, the emotional benefits of how it made me feel, the opportunity to see wildernesses all over our country that I probably would never have seen. You couldn’t put enough pills together to have that happen.”

News