Running: The Fountain of Youth?

 From the book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, as I've previously shared:

"This is fascinating stuff," he said. "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?" . . .

" . . . It's sixty-four."

"Are you serious? That's a--" I scribbled out the math. "That's a forty-five-year difference. You're saying teenagers can't beat guys three times their age?"

"Isn't it amazing?" Bramble agreed. "Name any other field of athletic endeavor where sixty-four-year-olds are competing with nineteen-year-olds. Swimming? Boxing? Not even close. There's something really weird about us humans; we're not only really good at endurance running, we're really good at it for a remarkably long time. We're a machine built to run--and the machine never wears out."

You don't stop running because you get old, the Dipsea Demon always said. You get old because you stop running. . . . 

From a New York Times article today, Run to Stay Young:

Running may reverse aging in certain ways while walking does not, a noteworthy new study of active older people finds. . . .

As it turned out, the runners were better, more efficient walkers than the walkers. They required less energy to move at the same pace as the volunteers who only walked regularly.

In fact, when the researchers compared their older runners’ walking efficiency to that of young people, which had been measured in earlier experiments at the same lab, they found that 70-year-old runners had about the same walking efficiency as your typical sedentary college student. Old runners, it appeared, could walk with the pep of young people.

Older walkers, on the other hand, had about the same walking economy as people of the same age who were sedentary. In effect, walking did not prevent people from losing their ability to walk with ease.

More surprising to the researchers, the biomechanics of the runners and the walkers during walking were almost identical. Runners did not walk differently than regular walkers, in terms of how many steps they took or the length of their strides or other measures of the mechanics of their walking.

But something was different. . . .