I find it funny sometimes how people are so up-front about their biases. Do a quick search in strength-training oriented sites and you'll find all kinds of studies and theories denouncing the value of steady-state training, as if there were a conspiracy afoot (by Nike? by the National Society of Orthopedic Surgeons?) to force us all to run, get fat, and get injured. For Pete's sake, if you hate running, don't do it. If you hate anything steady-state, skip it. But don't let your bias run amok and insist that because you don't happen to like strapping on the running shoes and hitting the pavement that NO ONE ELSE SHOULD.

End of rant. I was recently forwarded this article, in the New York TImes, and I have to say I find it refreshing to see a little balance for all the anti-running sentiment running amok in our little world of fitness-related media. Essentially it says that running--lots of it--appears to keep your cells young:

Recently, scientists in Germany gathered several groups of men and women to look at their cells’ life spans. Some of them were young and sedentary, others middle-aged and sedentary. Two other groups were, to put it mildly, active. The first of these consisted of professional runners in their 20s, most of them on the national track-and-field team, training about 45 miles per week. The last were serious, middle-aged longtime runners, with an average age of 51 and a typical training regimen of 50 miles per week, putting those young 45-mile-per-week sluggards to shame.

From the first, the scientists noted one aspect of their older runners. It ‘‘was striking,’’ recalls Dr. Christian Werner, an internal-medicine resident at Saarland University Clinic in Homburg, ‘‘to see in our study that many of the middle-aged athletes looked much younger than sedentary control subjects of the same age.’’

Even more striking was what was going on beneath those deceptively youthful surfaces. When the scientists examined white blood cells from each of their subjects, they found that the cells in both the active and slothful young adults had similar-size telomeres.

Here the article gets a little geek-techie, basically describing how telomere-length is like tree-rings: a good indication of a cell's age. The shorter the telomere, the closer the cell is to dying. In the words of the authors, "In general, the shorter the telomere, the functionally older and more tired the cell."

Onward:

It’s not surprising...that the young subjects’ telomeres were about the same length, whether they ran exhaustively or sat around all day. None of them had been on earth long enough for multiple cell divisions to have snipped away at their telomeres...

When the researchers measured telomeres in the middle-aged subjects, however, the situation was quite different. The sedentary older subjects had telomeres that were on average 40 percent shorter than in the sedentary young subjects, suggesting that the older subjects’ cells were, like them, aging. The runners, on the other hand, had remarkably youthful telomeres, a bit shorter than those in the young runners, but only by about 10 percent. In general, telomere loss was reduced by approximately 75 percent in the aging runners. Or, to put it more succinctly, exercise, Dr. Werner says, ‘‘at the molecular level has an anti-aging effect."

 Now, the question is, would something similar have been found had they studied lifelong strength-training types? Or is this anti-aging effect unique to oodles of long-distance running?

Don't know--and neither do the researchers--but you can bet that the musclehead sites will soon be lighting up with some good pet theories on this. As will the slow-twitch ones.