Personal Best
Staying a Step Ahead of Aging 
Filip Kwiatkowski for The New York Times
YOU know what is supposed to happen when you grow old. You will slow down, you will grow weak, your steps will become short and mincing, and you will lose your sense of balance. That’s what aging researchers consistently find, and it’s no surprise to most of us.
Readers' Comments
Share your thoughts on this article.But it is worth remembering that the people in those studies were sedentary, said Dr. Vonda Wright, a professor of orthopedics at the University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Wright, a 40-year-old runner, decided to study people who kept training as they got older or began competing in middle age. She wanted to know what happens to them and at what age does performance start to decline.
Their results are surprising, even to many of the researchers themselves. The investigators find that while you will slow down as you age, you may be able to stave off more of the deterioration than you thought. Researchers also report that people can start later in life — one man took up running at 62 and ran his first marathon, a year later, in 3 hours 25 minutes.
It’s a testament to how adaptable the human body is, researchers said, that people can start serious training at an older age and become highly competitive. It also is testament to their findings that some physiological factors needed for a good performance are not much affected by age.
Researchers say that you should be able to maintain your muscles as you age, including the muscle enzymes needed for good athletic performance, and you should be able to maintain your ability to exercise for long periods near your so-called lactic threshold, meaning you are near maximum effort.
But you have to know how to train, doing the right sort of exercise, and you must keep it up.
“Train hard and train often,” said Hirofumi Tanaka, a 41-year-old soccer player and exercise physiologist at the University of Texas.
Dr. Tanaka said he means doing things like regular interval training, repeatedly going all out, easing up, then going all out again. These workouts train your body to increase its oxygen consumption by allowing you to maintain an intense effort.
“One of the major determinants of endurance performance is oxygen consumption,” Dr. Tanaka said. “You have to make training as intense as you can.”
When you have to choose between hard and often, choose hard, said Steven Hawkins, an exercise physiologist at the University of Southern California.
“High performance is really determined more by intensity than volume,” he added. “Sometimes, when you’re older, something has to give. You can’t have both so you have to cut back on the volume. You need more rest days.”
Dr. Hawkins, who says he no longer runs competitively, adds that he tries to put his findings into practice. “I run a couple of times a week and I try to make it as fast as I can,” he said. “I’m not plodding along.”
He also has been amazed by some people who seem to defy the rules of aging, people he describes as “those rare birds who get faster.” Some subjects in Dr. Hawkins’s research study, which followed runners for nearly two decades, actually had better times when they were 60 than when they were 50.
“We really don’t know why,” Dr. Hawkins confessed. “Maybe they were training harder.”
Then there are people like the 62-year-old man who suddenly took up running and began running fast marathons. That man’s inspiration to become a runner, said James Hagberg, an exercise physiologist at the University of Maryland, was watching a lakefront marathon in Milwaukee. “He got all fired up,” Dr. Hagberg recalled.
And there are people like Imme Dyson, a 71-year-old runner who lives in Princeton, N.J. She took up running when she was 48 and loved it, she says, from the moment she put on a pair of running shoes. Her daughter, who had been a college triathlete, told her how to train.
“She said, ‘Mom, if your workout didn’t hurt, you didn’t work hard enough,’ ” Ms. Dyson said.
“Working consistently really is the recipe,” she said. And it has made a difference for her, allowing her to run races, from 5K to marathons, so fast that she is consistently among the best in the nation in her age group. She has run a 15K cross-country race in 1:19:08, a pace of 8:29 a mile. And she ran a 10K race in 51 minutes 50 seconds, a pace of 8:20 a mile.
Not every aging athlete does so well. But Dr. Hagberg found that studies of aging athletes sometimes were distorted because they included people who had cut back on or stopped training. That’s understandable; there is no reason, researchers say, to exhort everyone to maintain an intense effort decade after decade.
Athletes would tell Dr. Hagberg that they had just lost their motivation. “Some of them would say: ‘Competition just doesn’t motivate me as much at 75. I’ve been doing it for 50 years,’ ” he said. “Others would say, ‘I just can’t keep it up any more.’ ”
But for those who still have the drive, the news that muscle mass and lactic threshold can be maintained is encouraging.
The reason people become slower, though, is that oxygen consumption declines with age.
In large part that is because, as has long been known, the maximum heart rate steadily falls by about seven to eight beats per minute per decade. It happens with or without training, in sedentary and in active people, Dr. Tanaka said, and no one knows why. But as a result, the heart cannot pump as much blood at maximum effort.
Dr. Michael Joyner, a 49-year-old exercise researcher at the Mayo Clinic who also is a competitive swimmer and a runner, added another factor: the lungs of older athletes cannot take in quite as much air.
With a slower heart rate and less oxygen in the lungs, less oxygen-rich blood gets to the muscles. In one study, Dr. Joyner found that highly trained athletes age 55 to 68 had 10 to 20 percent less blood flow to their legs than athletes in their 20s.
The older athletes in his group, though, were edging toward an age that often is a transition time in athletic performances, researchers are finding. For example, Dr. Wright and her colleague Dr. Brett Perricelli found that the performances of track athletes declined almost imperceptibly from year to year until their mid-60s, when the rate of decline picked up. At age 75, though, the athletes’ times fell, on average, by 7 percent.
The study, the results of which will appear in the March issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine, involved track and field athletes age 50 to 85 who were participants in the 2001 Senior Olympics and also examined the times for American record holders in track events.
But older athletes still can have spectacular performances, Dr. Tanaka notes.
For example, the world best marathon time for men 70 or older (2:54:05) was set by a 74-year-old. That is more than four minutes faster than the winning marathon time at the first modern Olympics, the 1896 Games in Athens.
Of course, such statistics are of little comfort to athletes who do not want to slow down at all. Dr. Hawkins said he and Robert A. Wiswell, the senior author on his nearly 20-year study of athletes, used to joke that they needed a sports psychologist rather than a sports physiologist on their study. The athletes, he explained, could not bear to think that they would stop setting personal records.
That’s an issue for Don Truex, a 70-year-old dentist in Santa Barbara, Calif, who can’t understand why he has slowed down in the last year. He just ran a 5K race in 23:45. It was an average pace of 7:38 a mile, 90 seconds slower than he wanted to run.
“I’ve consulted with my doctor and we think I may be overtraining,” Dr. Truex said. He’s going to continue running five days a week but cut back on his five days a week of cycling.
Slower times are even more of a concern for Dr. Truex’s friend Barry Erbsen, a 67-year-old dentist in Los Angeles.
Dr. Erbsen started running seriously around 40. His best time in a 10K race was 38 minutes, a pace of 6 minutes a mile. Next he started running marathons, going faster each time until he had completed several, including the Boston Marathon, in 3:07:00.
Then, Dr. Erbsen started to slow down. He ran a marathon a few years ago in 3:45:00. He completed his next one in 3:58:00.
That nearly four-hour marathon was his last, he said. Instead, Dr. Erbsen took up mountain biking. So far so good, he said. He’s having a lot of fun. And, he added, “I’m not getting too much slower.”
What's On My Other Blogs today: (click blog name to go there) = / 1.3rd Eye Blog / 2. Favorites Blog/ 3. Vita Excolatur (Living Well ...) Blog/ 4. Humor Me Blog/ 5. News and Current Events Blog/ 6. Consider This ... Blog/ 7. Consumer Warnings Blog/ 8. New Orleans Pentimento Blog/ 9. We Constant Gardeners Blog/ 10. Chaillot Family Blog/
How to Write a Field Guide When You Are a Young Naturalist
You can successfully write a field book as a young person provided that you believe you can. You don't need to be uniquely smart or determined to do this; any kid can do this. This article details the steps by which you can succeed in writing your own field guide as a kid or teenager.
[edit] Steps
- Decide you can do it. A lot of people think that a kid cannot write a real book but do not let that discourage you. As long as you can write and you set your mind to it, you can write a credible resource; age does not matter. In order to write the book, however, you do have to become somewhat of a field expert, so do not think this will be an easy project. Just know that it is possible.
- Find a passion. Your passion should be something you have an interest in and something that you have lots of access to (for example, the original book that inspired this article was about snakes). Choose something nearby where you live. Commit to success. That means, choose a subject that you know you will be able to find around you, something that is plausible to research and to find outdoors. The ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu said that the wise general never fights a battle unless he is already sure of his victory. Do not enter a project that you do not think you can complete.
- Write a list of objectives. The list should be composed of what you want your book to accomplish and what you want it to consist of. It helps to look at other books that are similar to what you will write; look at books of comparable size and depth, but about a different subject matter (like frogs instead of butterflies that you might like to write about). Some of them should be much bigger than your book and some of them should be just pamphlets. While looking at these books, you can agree and disagree with different aspects of them:
- Look for (and write down about each one) the strengths and weaknesses of those you examine.
- Try to figure out what each book is supposed to be used for. Some are for quickly identifying species, while others are meant to be used for research papers and the like. The different books probably have different target audiences too.
- Choose your target audience/market and put that on the top of your list, right under the topic that you are writing about.
- Think about if you want it to be big, small, pocket size, table size, expandable or complete.
- Write down all the qualities that your want your book to have and write down those qualities in the list. Here is an example list, which you can use if you want:
- small, accurate, easy to use, fun to read/use, help save the wildlife
- Make a list of resources also. For example:
- nature centers, zoos, books, internet, education centers near me, and teachers.
- Go through each one of your qualities and resources and fill in with the names of those that might help you to learn what you need to learn.
- Spend time getting to know whatever you chose. Spend time outdoors. Learn to love the outdoors. Get to know your home environment. Then focus on your topic (say, butterflies) and spend time outside with them (in a safe way). Look for them. Get books and read about them and you can also research online a little bit but make sure that the sites you use are credible. Keep track of every source that you use and what information you get from each source. Talk to experts if you can. Professional biologists and ecologists love it when kids show interest in their field and will go to great lengths to help you succeed. Be confident and show your interest and knowledge (without showing off) and they will really want to help you. Remember to stay organized throughout this process. Organization is absolutely vital to successfully completing any big project, especially like writing a book. Make sure everything is in neat, accurately labeled computer files so that you never have to search for anything you have done and everything is always at your command.
- Write the book. Make sure you have an outline before you start. Write an introduction, table of contents with the chapters or sections, and whatever other tables or charts you want. Write the book in sections, one by one. Before you write the actual paragraphs in the document, have each chapter and section labeled so that then you can just fill in the content. To take the snake as an example, you might have a chapter for each snake and in each chapter have sections called: Caution: Approaching and Handling, Abundance, Description, Lifestyle and Death etc. If you like this chapter format, you can use it, although there will be differences depending on the book subject. For example, if you do birds, you might want a section on the song that it sings. The order that you write the chapters does not matter, but write a section all at once, or over a brief period of days. Try to do all the sections for one species before moving on, or do all of one section in a row (like all of the descriptions). Keep your pattern but you can take breaks if you want between sections. Have patience (do not burn out) and try to be disciplined with yourself. Do not expect the book to write itself. It is normal to take almost two years to complete a book, even though it could have been written in a couple of months, because it is better to pace yourself and just do a section or two and then break for a month before doing another one. Writing a book does not, and should not, be a full time occupation. Write when you have free time, but make sure you are getting it done, do not put it off forever because then it will never happen.
- Take or find pictures. Field guides need to have pictures. As it is said, a picture is worth a thousand words. You can use illustrations, or photographs. Illustrations are much harder to use and not always as accurate, so unless you are very confident with your drawing or your illustrator, use a camera! Where a computer has a camera (such as XO's, new Macs), this can make it very easy. In most cases, color is better than black and white but not absolutely necessary. Some of the species you are looking for may be almost impossible to find. If this is the case, you can search for pictures online. Email the photographer who took the picture or group of pictures you are interested in using and ask if you can use it. Also ask your teacher in your school for help in getting you in contact with the photographer in question.
- Cite your sources, write your acknowledgements, write the introduction, give credit where credit is due and write a short biography of yourself. Cite all of your sources, both of information and photographers. Make sure that each photograph that you use is labeled with the photographer's name (this might be you in some cases).
- Write an acknowledgement section in order to thank everyone who helped you along the way (if your family was a big supporter, thank them all in the introduction to the book). Write your bibliography using proper format. One place to start is the US MLA format found at http://palomar.edu/dsps/actc/mla/ but any good format that your teachers recommend or that you used during your research will work.
- Write an introduction that explains the purpose of your book and what you intend for it to accomplish.
- Lastly, write a brief biography about yourself and your project.
- Put the whole book together into a file in the correct format. This step is pretty self-explanatory. Put the book together into a file that is neat and in a nice format and labeled, ready for production.
- Submit the book to a publisher. You need to use a publisher to get your book printed. You can find out about publishing companies by talking to various experts, talking to your teachers, and if you are part of the OLPC project, talking to any OLPC people that you may meet. Once the layout and design people and the publishers have your book, it could take up to a couple of years for them to get around to publishing it. This is because they have so many books to get through. Do not be discouraged. Your work is over. During this time you do not have to do anything at all except wait to see your book get published. If they decide not to publish it, then take their reasons; maybe you need to change something. Do whatever changes you deem necessary and then submit it again to the same, or a different publishing company. The bulk of your work will already be in the past by then.
- Enjoy the aftermath, forever. Years after publishing, you will still get pleasure from your book. Good things come from writing and publishing a book. You will learn about an interesting subject. You will have learned all about how to write a book. You will have the respect of your peers, family and teachers alike. You may be able to sell your book for money. You will have helped educate people about nature, so that maybe they will be more careful about wrecking our precious and fragile environment. If you want to go to a university, they will be impressed by your hard work, because it shows that you are able to achieve long term projects. If there is an interesting, beautiful or rare species in your areas, tourists, especially scientists, will come to see it. All of these good things might come true for you too if you write a book on some kind of plant or animal where you live. You get to meet a lot of new people from the international science community that you would not have met otherwise and they might want your help, advice, and involvement in other awesome projects. These things can easily happen for you, even years after publication.
[edit] Tips
- You can also search for photos and illustrations that are in the "public domain". These are pictures that do not have any copyright and can be used freely.
- Even though this article is about biology, you might decide to do something else, take on another project. For example, you might decide that the city you live in has a special, unique way that it makes paper, or pottery, or jewelry. Sometimes, it might be possible to create a book that highlights your city, and what is unique about it. This helps to save the history of your community, and may help it economically. With your writing, it might be possible that the rest of the world might see your city, and all because of the project that you began.
- The environment and the species in this world can be helped by us. But for that to happen, we have to know where they are. Toward that help, you can play an important role. There are many ways that your work might help your city and the species around you. For example, there are many areas in the world where the people began to protect the environment and the species and now those places are economically supported by the tourists and scientists coming to see that phenomenon. It is also possible that your work may lead to an economic discovery that could help the species and the community. For example, a particular plant may contain medicinal properties.
[edit] Warnings
- Remember, never take someone else's work and claim that it is your own. If you research in a book, then use the information but change the words, say it in your own language, and combine it with different books all into one. In your bibliography in the end you will give those other authors credit. This is called developing a secondary source, with those other books being primary sources. Taking another person's work is plagiarism, which is not thought too highly of in any sectors and in fact it is an offense.
[edit] Things You'll Need
- Reference books
- Laptop / computer to keep track of everything and to write your book
- Camera (in computer or separate); or access to an illustrator
[edit] Sources and Citations
- Misha Herscu, (2007), For the OLPC Student: 10 Easy Steps to Writing a Field Gide and Why You Should Do It, By a Kid Just Like You. Original source of article. Shared with permission.
