Nonagenarian Athletes

[Guest guest]

The Incredible Flying Nonagenarian

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/magazine/28athletes-t.html?_r=1

........Masters competitions usually begin at 35 years, and include many in their

60s, 70s and 80s (and a few, like Kotelko, in their 90s, and one or two over

100). Of the thousands who descended on Lahti, hundreds were older than 75. And

the one getting all the attention was Kotelko. She is considered one of the

world's greatest athletes, holding 23 world records, 17 in her current age

category, 90 to 95.

" We have in masters track `hard' records and `soft' records, " says Ken Stone,

editor of masterstrack.com — the main news source of the growing masters

athletic circuit. " Soft records are like low-hanging fruit, " where there are so

few competitors, you're immortalized just for showing up. But Stone doesn't

consider Kotelko's records soft, because her performances are remarkable in

their own right. At last fall's Lahti championship, Kotelko threw a javelin more

than 20 feet farther than her nearest age-group rival. At the World Masters

Games in Sydney, Kotelko's time in the 100 meters — 23.95 seconds — was faster

than that of some finalists in the 80-to-84-year category, two brackets down.

World Masters Athletics, the governing body of masters track, uses " age-graded "

tables developed by statisticians to create a kind of standard score, expressed

as a percentage, for any athletic feat. The world record for any given event

would theoretically be assigned 100 percent. But a number of Kotelko's marks —

in shot put, high jump, 100-meter dash — top 100 percent. (Because there are so

few competitors over 90, age-graded scores are still guesswork.)

In Lahti, watching Kotelko run fast enough that the wind blew her hair back a

bit, Taivassalo was awed on a personal level (she's a runner) and tantalized on

a professional one. She hoped to start a database of athletes over 85, testing

various physiological parameters.

Scientifically, this is mostly virgin ground. The cohort of people 85 and older

— the fastest-growing segment of the population, as it happens — is increasingly

being studied for longevity clues. But so far the focus has mostly been on their

lives: the foods they eat, the air they breathe, the social networks they

maintain and, in a few recently published studies, their genomes. Data on the

long-term effects of exercise is only just starting to trickle in, as the

children of the fitness revolution of the '70s grow old.

Though the world of masters track offers a compelling research pool, Taivassalo

may seem like an unlikely scientist to be involved. Her area of expertise is

mitochondrial research; she examines what happens to the body when mitochondria,

the cell's power plants, are faulty. Her subjects are typically young people who

come into the lab with neuromuscular disorders that are only going to get worse.

(Because muscle cells require so much energy, they're hit hard when mitochondria

go down.) Some researchers now see aging itself as a kind of mitochondrial

disease. Defective mitochondria appear as we get older, and these researchers

say that they rob us of endurance, strength and function. There's evidence that

for young patients with mitochondrial disease, exercise is a potent tool,

slowing the symptoms. If that's true, then exercise could also potentially be a

kind of elixir of youth, combating the ravages of aging far more than we

thought.

" There's a slide I show in my physical-activity-and-aging class, " Taivassalo

says. " You see a shirtless fellow holding barbells, but I cover his face. I ask

the students how old they think he is. I mean, he could be 25. He's just ripped.

Turns out he's 67. And then in the next slide there's the same man at 78, in the

same pose. It's very clear he's lost almost half of his muscle mass, even though

he's continued to work out. So there's something going on. " But no one knows

exactly what. Muscle fibers ought in theory to keep responding to training. But

they don't. Something is applying the brakes.

And then there is Olga Kotelko, who further complicates the picture, but in a

scientifically productive way. She seems not to be aging all that quickly.

" Given her rather impressive retention of muscle mass, " says Russ Hepple, a

University of Calgary physiologist and an expert in aging muscle, " one would

guess that she has some kind of resistance. " In investigating that resistance,

the researchers are hoping to better understand how to stall the natural

processes of aging. ..........

EXERCISE HAS BEEN shown to add between six and seven years to a life span (and

improve the quality of life in countless ways). Any doctor who didn't recommend

exercise would be immediately suspect. But for most seniors, that prescription

is likely to be something like a daily walk or Aquafit. It's not quarter-mile

timed intervals or lung-busting fartleks. There's more than a little suffering

in the difference.

Here, though, is the radical proposition that's starting to gain currency among

researchers studying masters athletes: what if intense training does something

that allows the body to regenerate itself? Two recent studies involving

middle-aged runners suggest that the serious mileage they were putting in, over

years and years, had protected them at the chromosomal level. It appears that

exercise may stimulate the production of telomerase, an enzyme that maintains

and repairs the little caps on the ends of chromosomes that keep genetic

information intact when cells divide. That may explain why older athletes aren't

just more cardiovascularly fit than their sedentary counterparts — they are more

free of age-related illness in general.

Exactly how exercise affects older people is complicated. On one level, exercise

is a flat-out insult to the body. Downhill running tears quadriceps muscles as

reliably as an injection of snake venom. All kinds of free radicals and other

toxins are let loose. But the damage also triggers the production of

antioxidants that boost the health of the body generally. So when you see a

track athlete who looks as if that last 1,500-meter race damn near killed him,

you're right. It might have made him stronger in the deal.

Exercise training helps stop muscle strength and endurance from slipping away.

But it seems to also do something else, maintains Mark Tarnopolsky, a professor

of pediatrics and medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (who also

happens to be a top-ranked trail runner). Resistance exercise in particular

seems to activate a muscle stem cell called a satellite cell. With the infusion

of these squeaky-clean cells into the system, the mitochondria seem to

rejuvenate. (The phenomenon has been called " gene shifting. " ) If Tarnopolsky is

right, exercise in older adults can roll back the odometer. After six months of

twice weekly strength exercise training, he has shown, the biochemical,

physiological and genetic signature of older muscle is " turned back " nearly 15

or 20 years.

Whether we are doing really old folks any favors by prescribing commando-grade

training, well, " that's the million-dollar question, " Hepple says. " Olga can

obviously handle it. But most people aren't Olga. " In general, kidneys and other

organs tend to have trouble managing the enzymes and byproducts produced when

muscle breaks down. Inflammation, which produces that good kind of soreness

weekend warriors are familiar with, " also damages a lot of healthy tissue around

it, " notes Li Li Ji, an exercise physiologist at the University of Wisconsin,

Madison. " That's why I usually discourage older people from being too

ambitious. "

Kotelko herself speaks often of the perils of getting carried away. " If you

undertrain, you might not finish, " she says. " If you overtrain, you might not

start. " But there's some evidence that, in trying to find the sweet spot between

staying in race shape and avoiding the medical tent, a lot of seniors athletes

aren't training hard enough — or at least, aren't training the right way to

maximally exploit what their body can still do.

Recently, Trappe, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball

State University in Muncie, Ind., published a study on weightlessness and

exercise in The Journal of Applied Physiology. Using M.R.I. and biopsy data from

NASA, he looked at the exercise program of nine astronauts from the

International Space Station. In many ways, an astronaut in zero gravity is

undergoing an experiment in accelerated aging — muscles atrophy, bone-density

declines. That's what these astronauts were finding too, even though they were

using a treadmill, a stationary bike and a resistance machine.

Trappe concluded the regime wasn't nearly hard-core enough. His prescription for

NASA: heavier loads and explosive movements. " It's pretty clear that intensity

wins up there, " he says. " And I would predict this to be the case as we age.

Part of the challenge is the mind-set or dogma that we need to slow down as we

get older. " For example, the belief that aging joints and tendons can't take

real weight-training is dead wrong; real weight-training is what might just save

them. Seniors can work out less frequently, Trappe reckons, as long as they

really bring it when they do.

Kotelko used to train like that — spurred on by her severe Hungarian coach.

Strangely though, since easing off the throttle the last few years, she's

getting some of the best results of her life. It's hard to know what to conclude

from that, except perhaps that the gene-shifting theory is true, and Kotelko is

still enjoying the compound interest from that earlier sweat equity. " What I do

now seems adequate, " she reasons. " It must be. I keep getting world records. "

Motivation may ultimately be the issue. Finding reasons to keep exercising is a

universal challenge. Even rats seem to bristle, eventually, at voluntary

exercise, studies suggest. Young rats seem intrinsically driven to run on the

wheels you put in their cages. But one day those wheels just stop turning. The

aging athlete must manufacture strategies to keep pushing in the face of plenty

of perfectly rational reasons not to: things hurt, you've achieved a lot of your

goals and the friends you used to do it for and with are disappearing.

But competition can spur people on. " Maintaining your own records in the face of

your supposed decline, providing evidence that you're delaying the effects of

aging — these are strong motives, " says Bradley Young, a kinesiology and sports

psychology professor at the University of Ottawa. Young studies the factors that

make track athletes want to continue competing into old age. A big one is

training partners and family — both the encouragement they offer, and the guilt

you'd feel letting them down if you quit. But the strongest motivating driver,

Young found, was one's spouse.

In this way, too, Kotelko is unique. She has no husband, and though she does

have some family — her daughter Lynda and son-in-law , with whom she

lives in Vancouver — they are not involved in her training.

This is the other story of the future of aging. When the efforts of medical

science converge to simply prolong existence, you envision Updike's golfer

Farrell, poking his way " down the sloping dogleg of decrepitude. " But scientists

like Taivassalo and Hepple have a different goal, and exercise — elixir not so

much of extended life as extended youthfulness — may be the key to reaching it.

Fries, an emeritus professor at Stanford School of Medicine, coined the

working buzz phrase: " compression of morbidity. " You simply erase chronic

illness and infirmity from the first, say, 95 percent of your life. " So you're

healthy, healthy, healthy, and then at some point you kick the bucket, "

Tarnopolsky says. " It's like the Neil Young song: better to burn out than to

rust. " You get a normal life span, but in Olga years. Who wouldn't take it?

=================

Carruthers

Wakefield, UK