My wife talked me into running a marathon this year.  As you know, a marathon is a running race that covers 26.2 miles and for many runners is the culminating event in a career of running.  I started training about 5 months ago and now I into my last week—the race is this Saturday.  The marathon I’ve chosen takes place in St. George, Utah and is a beautiful course that descends through the red rock country of the desert southwest.  I ran this particular race exactly 21 years ago and haven’t done it since.  Not learning my lesson from this first painful experience, I then ran several other marathons in different cities but stopped putting myself through this misery about 12 years ago.  My wife ran the Boston Marathon last spring (not long after knee surgery) and was such an inspiration to me that I agreed to sign up for one last race.

I still consider myself a youngish person, but if I compare myself to active professional athletes I come off looking like a wizened old geezer.  Most pro basketball and football players retire in their 30s, most tennis players hang up their racquets in their 20s, and nearly all gymnasts and figure skaters transition into “where-are-they-now?” status shortly after puberty.  Anomalies such as Brett Favre and Michael Jordan manage to drag themselves back for a “post-retirement” second act, and the mere fact that they can still walk makes the front page of the sports section.  In all these sports the athletes peak in their mid-twenties and quickly decline thereafter.

Running (and other endurance sports, ala Lance Armstrong’s return to a strong 3rd place in this year’s Tour de France) may be an exception to this.

Professor Dennis M. Bramble, a running expert from my alma mater University of Utah, poses a question (as cited in the immensely inspiring book “Born to Run”) that I find interesting:

“We monitored the results of the 2004 New York City Marathon and compared finishing times by age.  What we found is that starting at age nineteen, runners get faster every year until they hit their peak at twenty-seven.  After twenty-seven, they start to decline.  So here’s the question—how old are you when you’re back to running the same speed you did at nineteen?”

The answer he came up with is surprising: 64.  The decline in performance over forty-five years is so gradual that the sixty-four-year-old crowd can still compete with the nineteen-year-olds.

My own experience substantiates this.  Three weeks ago I ran a 10-mile road race here in Omaha.  About 150 people showed up—all of them fairly hard-core runners.  Of the thirteen runners who beat me only five were in age divisions younger than my own (40-45) and none were under the age of 32.  Finishing ahead of me were several runners older than I, including a 55-year-old man who bested my time by nearly 2 minutes.  Despite plenty of entrants in their twenties, only two finished in the top 25.

Last week I ran the Corporate Cup 10K (6.2 miles).  Again, I found that the majority of the best runners were over the age of 30 with plenty of top finishers in their forties and fifties.  The winner of this week’s Omaha marathon is 46 years old and a veteran of years of pounding the pavement.

Some of you may be familiar with an amateur runner by the name of George Sheehan who wrote the bestseller “Running and Being.”  Dr. Sheehan, a physician, took up distance running at the age of 45 and went on to great acclaim with his regular submissions to the magazine Runner’s World.  He was also pretty fast—he was the first person over the age of 50 to log a sub-five minute mile (4:47—something I’ve never been able to do)—and competed in countless marathons.  He was able to keep up his competitive 10-kilometer race pace until he was in his mid-sixties.  His key to success?: run, run, run.

This brings me to my point.  I believe your heart, lungs, and muscles are built to sustain amazing stretches of aerobic activity from childhood into old age.  Our problem is that we allow ourselves to slide into sedentary living somewhere in the third decade.  From that point our muscles fall into disuse and our joints deteriorate under the added weight of adipose; our vertebral disks suffer from lack of postural muscle tone; and our heart and lungs reward our physical complacency with poor performance.

Your body was made to move—your heart wants to beat hard, your legs want to burn under the stress of —and if you manage to keep moving throughout your life you will find that your slide into old age will be a far shallower slope.

I plan to keep these thoughts in mind as I drag myself through the final miles of my race this weekend.  I don’t imagine I’ll post a personal record but at the least I’m hoping to finish with a respectable time and beat a few nineteen-year-olds while I’m at it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. This is probably the product of a mild, outdoor-friendly summer here in Omaha that has allowed me and many others to spend more time staying active in the unseasonably cool breezes. I’ve also had the opportunity to engage in a couple of extraordinary summer activities that I’ve particularly enjoyed.

This last week I took a trip to the high mountains of Colorado with my brother for a few days of biking and hiking. The landscape around Breckenridge is absolutely breathtaking, both figuratively and literally. At over 9,000 feet the air on Main Street is thin enough that an “oxygen bar” recently popped up between the souvenir shops and outdoor outlets. The mountain bike trails routinely rise to over 11,000 feet and pose a challenge to even the most ardent cycling enthusiasts. The highlight of my trip was our ascent to the top of one of Colorado’s “fourteeners.” Quandary Peak is one of the higher mountains in the state at about 14,200 feet but represents one of the relatively easier ascents and is well suited as a day hike for non-mountaineering mortals like me. The last thousand feet of the climb had me gasping for air and seeking out every oxygen molecule my lungs could find. At the top we were treated to a couple of mountain goats effortlessly bounding from rock to rock like kids on a playground.

As I sat at the top of the world gnawing on my flattened peanut butter and jelly sandwich I thought about how fortunate I am to be able to witness the extraordinary vistas and revel in the triumph of a thigh-searing climb. Of course, I wasn’t the only one resting among the rocks of the peak—since Quandary is a non-technical ascent many others were up there to lay claim to victory over one of the famed fourteeners. There were men, women, children, grandparents and pooches up there, all panting away in the thin air. The only thing we all had in common was the ability to keep putting one foot in front of the other up the craggy climb. Most didn’t look like athletes, just people who’d kept themselves active enough to spend a day pretending to be Sir Edmund Hillary.

On one of my bike rides I met an older man, probably in his late sixties, who was furiously pedaling up a rocky trail near the top of one of the more challenging climbs. He and I chatted for a while as we caught our breath and I couldn’t help noticing his thin frame and muscular, sinewy legs. He told me he rides a couple of times a week and has done so for decades. I let him take off in front of me because I didn’t want to risk having the septuagenarian overtake me farther up the trail.

Earlier in the week I had the opportunity to ride the first day of RAGBRAI (which, if you’ve never heard of this, is the “Sturgis” of the bicycling world, a massive migration of cyclists across the state of Iowa). I don’t know the exact number, but I imagine there were at least ten thousand people of all makes and models pedaling the fifty-some miles from Council Bluffs to Red Oak during the first stage. Again, I was impressed by the number of AARP members who managed to breeze through the course.

It got me wondering. How much work does it take to keep yourself fit enough to be able to take a bike ride in the mountains or climb a peak after you retire? What do you need to do on a daily basis to be able to enjoy the thrills of outdoor life even when you are in your Medicare years?

I’ve long believed that the way you feel when you are 70 or 80 depends on decisions you make when you are 30 or 40. If you start letting yourself slip in your thirties it’ll take a Herculean effort to whip your sagging body back into shape twenty years later. The natural tendency for the human machine is to deteriorate with each year past the age of about 35. At that point your body is a lot like a person on a downward escalator—if he puts in no effort and stands still he’ll gradually descend.

But premature decay isn’t inevitable. Numerous studies have proven that the human body can retain its performance for decades past its prime, but only with constant, vigorous activity. If you create and sustain habits at age 30 you stand a pretty good chance of keeping up with your grandchildren years later, even if it’s to the top of a mountain peak. And it doesn’t take all that much—a couple hours a week of aerobic activity will get you there.

As a kid I lived in Utah at the base of an 11,700-ft. mountain I used to hike nearly every summer. The climb up Mt. Timpanogos covers about 7 miles and 3,200 feet of ascent. Once, at the top, I met a man in his late eighties who told me that he had climbed the mountain every summer since he was ten years old with the exception of a couple of years during WWII. I was amazed then, and even more amazed now.

Older people who have kept themselves fit are my idols and I want to follow their lead by not giving in to age before I have to. I want to keep marching up that down-going escalator as long as my legs will allow and not miss out on the adventures of the world just because I can’t get my body to cooperate. But to do that twenty years from now I’ve got to start today.