I just spent a couple of days of rest in Colorado early this week, and surprise-visited a friend of mine who was turning 40. Good fun.

While there, I had occasion to visit the home of his brother, ultra-marathoner Adam Chase. I sometimes consider myself "obsessed" with exercise because if I don't get my full 6 hours of exercise a week, plus a healthy amount of additional time spent on my feet during a given week, I get surly and hard to be around. (I should say even more hard to be around.)

Chase puts me, and pretty much everyone else I know to shame: he does two workouts a day, lasting at LEAST an hour; he sleeps in an oxygen-deprivation tent; his front hallway is LITERALLY filled with hundreds of pairs of athletic shoes; his closet full of jerseys and sports gear; his dresser literally PILED with placing and finishing medals from various races.

Adam's a great guy, but man, is he over-the-top into working out.

Inevitably, however, I find something perversely admirable in this kind of dedication--he does what he does consummately, and indeed, as an ultra-marathoner, he's world-class. So an inkling occurs to me--shouldn't I be working out that hard? Shouldn't I spend more time pounding away?

But the answer quickly comes to me: no, I shouldn't. I shouldn't because for me, as obsessed with exercise as I am and as important as it is to me to be in shape, exercise still should be something to enhance the rest of my life; to make me better as a writer, actor, artist, businessman, father, husband, friend; it shouldn't pre-empt those other things. It should make my quality of life better.

Now, does that mean that now and then it can't take a central role for awhile, like when I'm pursuing a performance goal, like a better time in a triathlon or a heavier lift or a higher rank in the martial arts? Absolutely not; it's going to move in and out of sharp focus while always being a strong force for good in my life.

In a recent video, pro strongman Elliot Hulse spoke to this same tension--between the pursuit of excellence as an athlete and the many other pulls on one's focus and attention. I watched this video and felt a definite resonance.

Almost in answer, however, Mike Boyle wrote this nice post recently which makes the point that time spent exercising isn't correlated with longevity; only the ability to work hard:

The truth is that exercise needs to be smart and safe. but it also needs to be hard if possible. Very little in life was ever achieved without hard work. Fitness is clearly not the exception. Some doctors try to say gardening qualifies as exercise. Ask yourself this question. "How is kneeling in dirt exercise?" Others say walking is great exercise. The truth is that something is always better than nothing, but why aim so low? The reality is that we should be exercising as hard as we are physically able...The New England Journal of Medicine (Volume 346:852-854 March 14, 2002) published a study and an editorial titled "Survival of the Fittest" that said "...the peak estimated exercise capacity achieved during the test (graded exercise treadmill) was the strongest predictor of the risk of death among patients with cardiovascular disease and among patients without cardiovascular disease." The study went on to say, "Greater fitness results in longer survival."  The study said nothing about duration or frequency, it only mentioned performance. The people that lived the longest were not the ones that exercised the most frequently. They were the ones who lasted the longest on the treadmill test. The key variable that related to life expectancy was fitness, not total time or number of days per week. Those that were able to exercise the hardest lived the longest. Think about that next time you take a walk or work in the garden. If that is all you can do, fine. However, healthy people need hard work.

So unless you WANT to be an ultramarathoner, you don't need to work out for a long time, or even overly frequently. But when you do work out--assuming you're healthy--it needs to be HARD. Makes for a decent formula, though: shorter, less frequent workouts, long on intensity and hard work lead to better health, greater longevity, and, I might add, a richer life outside of the gym.