On 84th Avenue, between 164th and 168th street, the Sri Chinmoy Marathon team sets up camp for the 11 runners circling this single block in the "Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race."

Go ahead, read the headline again. You weren’t mistaken: it's the "Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race."

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(AP)  TALENT, Ore. (AP) – Todd Ragsdale enjoyed a peppermint mineral foot soak while relaxing at home Monday. It was well deserved after running a world-record distance without shoes over the weekend. Between 8 a.m. Saturday and 8 a.m. Sunday, the 41-year-old logged 102 miles barefoot – 413 laps on the South Medford High School track.

Ragsdale made his run in the Relay For Life fundraiser for the American Cancer Society.

The run left Ragsdale's feet bruised, blistered and swollen, but he said it was well worth it.

___

Information from: CBS News

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Lou Gehrig's disease hasn't stopped law professor Steven Gey's lessons

By John Barry, Times Staff Writer

TALLAHASSEE — Steven Gey's law students kept their part of the deal. Last Saturday morning, they swam, biked and ran in a triathlon for Lou Gehrig's disease research. They raised $50,000 for the third straight year.

In late afternoon, about 50 students and former students waited for professor Gey to keep his end of the bargain. In a sense, they hoped for him to complete — against all previous odds — his own kind of marathon.

They waited on his patio, beer iced and ready. They had a birthday cake. The cake with garish red icing itself seemed outrageously miraculous, another lesson for all of them. Their professor wasn't supposed to have a 53rd birthday.

The famous Florida State University constitutional law expert is in the third year of terminal illness. That's as long as anyone usually lives after a Lou Gehrig's diagnosis like his.

In the last year, he has nearly starved and suffocated. He lost half his house to Tropical Storm Fay. He lost use of his hands and arms. He even lost his identity to credit thieves.

The students have always had a deal with Gey. If you care, if you try, he has promised them, I'll help you become the kind of lawyers you need to be.

Now here they were on his porch, waiting for him to deliver on another promise.

They're young, and they don't know limits. How much can they expect of a dying teacher?

• • •

Steven Gey is more famous for legal scholarship than for dying. As an American Civil Liberties Union attorney and FSU law professor, he ranks among the nation's top defenders of separation of church and state, of scientific inquiry, of free speech. (His free speech reputation was tarnished only once. He stopped a restaurant chain from singing Happy Birthday To You — a copyright infringement. He has never lived it down.)

He is also famous for turning generations of youths into attorneys and judges.

Last spring, Gey nearly died from malnutrition. He had to give up teaching. He felt bitterly disappointed that the Bush administration had limited embryonic stem cell research for eight years. He felt that the limits had robbed him personally of a possible cure, that the adversaries he had battled in court all his career had somehow beaten him in the end.

Last summer, while on a respirator and feeding tube, he rode out Tropical Storm Fay. It flooded all the bedrooms of his house.

Last Friday, Gey's doctor told him his life had reached "the bottom of the eighth inning."

But he writes. His hands don't work, so he writes with his foot, guiding a computer mouse with his toes. He has just completed two 150-page works of constitutional scholarship. They're headed for the publisher. He also has lived long enough to see a new president reverse the government's standing on embryonic stem cell research.

Barbara Leach, a former student who now practices labor law in Atlanta, was with him just after he got his late-inning diagnosis.

"Bottom of the eighth?" she exclaimed, sitting among his mountains of manuscripts. "Looks to me like you're in the top of the third."

• • •

Third-year law student David Gillis brought his mother, Cathy, to the triathlon for Gey. He's one of the students who brings food to the professor's house. Dave's turn is every other Thursday.

When he started bringing food, he knew Gey mostly by reputation. It made him nervous. "He's this rock star of the legal profession."

Gey told Dave he liked anything, he wasn't fussy. Dave brought his personal favorite: takeout meat loaf from Boston Market.

"You getting tired of meat loaf?" he'd ask.

"No," Gey answered, "Love the meat loaf!"

Two months went by. Finally, Dave heard from a "second party." The professor was really, really tired of meat loaf.

But in the course of those months, Dave's own life changed. His mother said he had chosen law school for the career and for the money. That was it.

He got into Gey's constitutional law class. He admitted to Gey he was more interested in the lawyer trappings than in the law itself. Money's fine, the professor told him. "But where's your passion?"

Gey changed him. His mother could see it. He learned the impact that one lawyer could have. He felt part of something noble, he said. Gey changed her, too. At home in Sarasota she started mentoring.

"We've learned that's what life is about — passion," she said.

• • •

On Saturday afternoon, the students waited with cake and beer on Gey's porch. Gey had not been on his porch in months. But he had told them that if they could endure a triathlon, he could match them.

Inside the house, Gey took a deep breath and untethered his respirator. He swung his legs out of bed, steadied himself.

The double doors to the patio swung open.

Gey came through the doors, on his feet.

He walked a dozen steps across the deck to a chair.

Beers and tears flowed for two hours.

They sang Happy Birthday to You.

They told their professor: Sue us.

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Eddie Freas fights drug addiction by putting all his energy into training for triathlons.

He swam 2.4 miles. He biked 112 miles. He ran 26.2 miles. The Pennsville, New Jersey, resident found relief in triathlons.

 "I feel better when I'm working out," said Freas, 33. "It does wonders for the mind. The reason I started running — it was a switch that went off in my head. I started feeling positive and feeling great about myself."

Freas spent his youth in pursuit of drugs. At the age of 13, he snuck bottles of Amaretto and rum from his mother's liquor cabinet. He also developed a taste for marijuana and cocaine. By his senior year of high school, Freas was kicked off the wrestling and football teams after failing a drug test.

Then in 2007, after a three-day binge, "I came home and was crying," Freas said. "I was so depressed. I turned on the TV." The set was tuned to ESPN, which was airing a story about a former drug addict who competed in triathlons.

The program's subject was Todd Crandell, who had lost a college hockey scholarship because of a drug addiction. After 13 years of using drugs, Crandell started competing in Ironman races and championed finding positive ways to fight addiction through his program called Racing for Recovery.

"Having an athletic background, I was drawn to getting back in shape," Crandell said. "It makes you turn intellectually and spiritually fit. Exercise is essential. It decreases addiction, depression and you use it as part of the recovery."

Freas was entranced by the parallels.

"His whole story seemed like mine," Freas said. "That's why it hit me so much. It was my story but it happened to somebody else. I knew I had to get back into fitness."

He took a bus to Racing for Recovery's office in Sylvania, Ohio. There, Freas said he learned to "stay clean and use other things — fitness, instead of drugs." On his first day, Freas pushed himself to run 10 miles.

"It killed me," Freas said. "I was just motivated. I was sore for a week and I gradually got into it. As soon as I started including fitness into my everyday lifestyle, it made it so much easier. It kept me busy and because of the physical fitness, it was making me feel better about myself."

He pushed himself to run farther and raced in his first Ironman competition in 2008.

"It's different when you use drugs, you temporarily feel good and afterwards, you feel like doing more drugs," Freas said. "When you go for a long run and do physical fitness, you feel good doing it."

Research in animals and humans show that exercise can be a mild antidepressant.

"It isn't a huge surprise when you consider many positive effects exercise can have with regards to the brain chemistry: dopamine, serotonin, endorphin, epinephrine — these are all associated with mood altering effects," said Dr. Cedric Bryant, the chief science officer for the American Council on Exercise. "If they're able to get this natural high, through a natural endeavor such as exercise, it allows them to replace the means to achieve that high with a more positive approach."

One study showed that women trying to quit smoking were more successful when they exercised. And the National Institute on Drug Abuse held a conference last year to explore the possible role of physical activity in substance abuse prevention.

"The thought centers around the release of mood-altering brain chemical, mainly endorphins," Bryant said. "It gives you euphoria or what you call 'runner's high.' "

Crandell said some people who battle drug addiction "want something more than sitting in support groups filled with smoke, complaining about drinking."

"I've had some of my naysayers from other programs who say you've taken one addiction and replaced it for another," Crandell said. "I've taken addiction and put into a new focus that includes exercise. Exercise for me is essential to my recovery and well-being."

The purpose of Racing for Recovery is not to turn everyone into an athlete, but to focus on positive pursuits in a person's life.

"Whatever you lost during your addiction, that should be your Ironman, not just running," Crandell said. "If your goal is to become a teacher, let that be your Ironman."

After Freas spent six months in Ohio, he returned to his hometown.

"I didn't want to come back home, because this was where I did all the dirt, all the partying and stuff," Freas said. "As time went on, I had to come back here. My life is turned around. I got to help people in my hometown."

Back in New Jersey, Freas helped train Dustin Deckard, 19, a former high school star wrestler, who is recovering from a four-year heroin addiction. Deckard wanted to get clean after a near-fatal overdose.

"I have to be clean the rest of my life," Deckard said. "Sometimes that overwhelms me. I just feel that sometimes it's not fair that other people can go out and have fun and drink and do whatever at a party. But me — if I do anything — it's off. I can't stop. I definitely have troubles with that."

Freas and Deckard have developed a brotherhood.

"I know how he was feeling, being down, not wanting to use drugs," Deckard said. "I just relate to him in every way. We both used. He's also into sports and into wrestling like I was. That's what's cool."

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If you want to stay young, lace up those sneakers and hit the pavement.

New research suggests regular running slows the effects of aging, according to a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Researchers tracked 500 older runners for more than two decades. What they found was that elderly joggers have fewer disabilities, remained fit for longer than non-runners and are half as likely to die early deaths.

“The study has a very pro-exercise message,” said Dr. James Fries, the study’s senior author, in a news release. “If you had to pick one thing to make people healthier as they age, it would be aerobic exercise.”

The new findings are published in the recent issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Click here to read more about this study.

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By Amy Norton

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Adults who are regularly active, whether through exercise or work, are less likely to develop a range of cancers, a new study suggests.

The study, which followed nearly 80,000 Japanese adults for up to a decade, found that regularly active men and women had lower risks of developing any type of cancer. When the researchers looked at specific types of cancer, they found that exercise was linked to lower risks of colon, liver, pancreatic and stomach cancers.

They also found that the protective effect was strongest among normal-weight men and women — supporting the theory that physical activity helps lower cancer risk at least partly through better weight control.

Dr. Manami Inoue and colleagues at Japan’s National Cancer Center, in Tokyo, report the findings in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The researchers followed cancer incidence rates among 79,771 men and women who were between the ages of 45 and 74 at the outset. Between 1995 and 1999, study participants were surveyed about their physical activity levels, diet and other lifestyle habits; the researchers then followed them through 2004, documenting more than 4,300 new cancer diagnoses.

Overall, according to the researchers, the risk of developing any cancer dipped slightly as participants’ activity levels climbed. On average, the most-active men were 13 percent less likely than the least active men to develop cancer; the most-active women had a 16 percent lower cancer risk than their sedentary counterparts.

The link held true when the researchers accounted for a range of other factors, including participants’ age, weight, smoking habits, daily calorie intake.

Physical activity was defined not only as leisure-time exercise, but also the amount of time participants typically spent walking, doing physical labor and housework.

"Our results suggest that increased daily total physical activity — not only exercise — may be beneficial in preventing the development of cancer among Japanese men and women," Inoue told Reuters Health.

The researcher also pointed out that Japan’s population is a relatively lean one and that the relationship between physical activity and lower cancer risk was weaker among overweight study participants.

It’s thought that exercise may help prevent cancer, in part, by controlling body fat. But physical activity also has other effects that could theoretically stave off cancer, Inoue and colleagues point out.

Exercise can, for example, stimulate immune system activity, one of the body’s natural defenses against cancer. It may also alter levels of certain hormones, including sex hormones and insulin-like growth factors, which can feed the growth and spread of tumors.

SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology, August 15, 2008.

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Source: New Scientist Health

THE benefits of exercise don’t stop when the running shoes come off. A new peek inside the muscles of resting athletes shows that they burn fuel even when their bodies don’t need the energy.

Endurance sports such as long-distance running are known to increase the number of mitochondria, the tiny engines inside cells that convert sugars and fats into ATP molecules, the cell’s energy carriers. This boosts the capacity of muscles to consume oxygen and work at higher power during exercise.

Now Douglas Befroy and his colleagues at Yale University say that the mitochondria in the muscles of men who run at least 4 hours a week consume 54 per cent more fuel at rest than those of men who don’t run (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0808889105). Yet the amount of ATP produced by the two sets of men was the same, indicating that when at rest the extra fuel was being "wasted", and turned into heat.

Because mitochondrial fuel-burning helps to clear out the cellular fats thought to contribute to insulin resistance, this finding suggests a way that training can help to protect against type 2 diabetes even when exercise is over.

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japanese marathon runner Keizo Yamada has hung up his sneakers at the grand old age of 81 — although he could be tempted back to run the odd half marathon.

Yamada, who represented Japan at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics and won the Boston Marathon the following year, said the time was right for him to "scale back" on his running.

"I’m not getting any younger so I won’t run any more 42-kilometre races," he told Sunday’s Sports Hochi newspaper, adding that he still jogs 20km daily.

"I will carry on running for fun to stay in shape."

Dubbed "Iron Man," Yamada ran three marathons this year, including his 19th appearance in Boston, and completed the Tokyo Marathon in a time of five hours, 34 minutes and 50 seconds.

He was one of the pioneers of Japanese marathon running, along with Shigeki Tanaka and Hideo Hamamura, who also won in Boston in 1951 and 1955 respectively.

Kokichi Tsuburaya put the sport on map in the Japan by taking bronze in the men’s marathon at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Japan’s women have had more success than their male counterparts in recent years, Naoko Takahashi capturing gold at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and Mizuki Noguchi winning the 2004 title in Athens.

(Reporting by Alastair Himmer)

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ScienceDaily (July 19, 2009 — While watching swimmers line up during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, former Olympic swimmer and NBC Sports commentator Rowdy Gaines quipped that swimmers keep getting bigger, with the shortest one in the current race towering over the average spectator.

What may have been seen as an off-hand remark turns out to illustrate a trend in human development — elite athletes are getting bigger and bigger.

What Gaines did not know was that a new theory by Duke University engineers has indeed showed that not only have Olympic swimmers and sprinters gotten bigger and faster over the past 100 years, but they have grown at a much faster rate than the normal population.

Futhermore, the researchers said, this pattern of growth can be predicted by the constructal theory, a Duke-inspired theory of design in nature that explains such diverse phenomena as river basin formation and the capillary structure of tree branches and roots. 

In a new analysis, Jordan Charles, an engineering student who graduated this spring, collected the heights and weights of the fastest swimmers (100 meters) and sprinters (100 meters) for world record winners since 1900. He then correlated the size growth of these athletes with their winning times.

"The trends revealed by our analysis suggest that speed records will continue to be dominated by heavier and taller athletes," said Charles, who worked with senior author Adrian Bejan, engineering professor who came up with the constructal theory 13 years ago. The results of their analysis were published online in the Journal of Experimental Biology. "We believe that this is due to the constructal rules of animal locomotion and not the contemporary increase in the average size of humans."

Specifically, while the average human has gained about 1.9 inches in height since 1900, Charles’ research showed that the fastest swimmers have grown 4.5 inches and the swiftest runners have grown 6.4 inches.

The theoretical rules of animal locomotion generally state that larger animals should move faster than smaller animals. In his contructal theory, Bejan linked all three forms of animal locomotion — running, swimming and flying. Bejan argues that the three forms of locomotion involve two basic forces: lifting weight vertically and overcoming drag horizontally. Therefore, they can be described by the same mathematical formulas.

Using these insights, the researchers can predict running speeds during the Greek or Roman empires, for example. In those days, obviously, time was not kept.

"In antiquity, body weights were roughly 70 percent less than they are today," Charles said. "Using our theory, a 100-meter dash that is won in 13 seconds would have taken about 14 seconds back then."

Charles, a varsity breaststroke swimmer during his time at Duke, said this new way of looking at locomotion and size validates a particular practice in swim training, though for a different reason. Swimmers are urged by their coaches to raise their body as far as they can out of the water with each stroke as a means of increasing their speed.

"It was thought that the swimmer would experience less friction drag in the air than in the water," Charles said. "However, when the body is higher above the water, it falls faster and more forward when it hits the water. The larger wave that occurs is faster and propels the body forward. A larger swimmer would get a heightened effect. Right advice, wrong reason."

In an almost whimsical corollary, the authors suggest that if athletes of all sizes are to compete in these kinds of events, weight classes might be needed.

"In the future, the fastest athletes can be predicted to be heavier and taller," Bejan said. "If the winners’ podium is to include athletes of all sizes, then speed competitions might have to be divided into weight categories. Larger athletes lift, push and punch harder than smaller athletes, and this led to the establishment of weight classes in certain sports, like boxing, wrestling or weight-lifting.

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The genesis of much of the ab work we do these days probably lies in the work done in an Australian physiotherapy lab during the mid-1990s. Researchers there, hoping to elucidate the underlying cause of back pain, attached electrodes to people’s midsections and directed them to rapidly raise and lower their arms, like the alarmist robot in “Lost in Space.”

In those with healthy backs, the scientists found, a deep abdominal muscle tensed several milliseconds before the arms rose. The brain apparently alerted the muscle, the transversus abdominis, to brace the spine in advance of movement. In those with back pain, however, the transversus abdominis didn’t fire early. The spine wasn’t ready for the flailing. It wobbled and ached. Perhaps, the researchers theorized, increasing abdominal strength could ease back pain. The lab worked with patients in pain to isolate and strengthen that particular deep muscle, in part by sucking in their guts during exercises. The results, though mixed, showed some promise against sore backs.

From that highly technical foray into rehabilitative medicine, a booming industry of fitness classes was born. “The idea leaked” into gyms and Pilates classes that core health was “all about the transversus abdominis,” Thomas Nesser, an associate professor of physical education at Indiana State University who has studied core fitness, told me recently. Personal trainers began directing clients to pull in their belly buttons during crunches on Swiss balls or to press their backs against the floor during sit-ups, deeply hollowing their stomachs, then curl up one spinal segment at a time. “People are now spending hours trying to strengthen” their deep ab muscles, Nesser said.

But there’s growing dissent among sports scientists about whether all of this attention to the deep abdominal muscles actually gives you a more powerful core and a stronger back and whether it’s even safe. A provocative article published in the The British Journal of Sports Medicine last year asserted that some of the key findings from the first Australian study of back pain might be wrong. Moreover, even if they were true for some people in pain, the results might not apply to the generally healthy and fit, whose trunk muscles weren’t misfiring in the first place.

“There’s so much mythology out there about the core,” maintains Stuart McGill, a highly regarded professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo in Canada and a back-pain clinician who has been crusading against ab exercises that require hollowing your belly. “The idea has reached trainers and through them the public that the core means only the abs. There’s no science behind that idea.” (McGill’s website is backfitpro.com.)

The “core” remains a somewhat nebulous concept; but most researchers consider it the corset of muscles and connective tissue that encircle and hold the spine in place. If your core is stable, your spine remains upright while your body swivels around it. But, McGill says, the muscles forming the core must be balanced to allow the spine to bear large loads. If you concentrate on strengthening only one set of muscles within the core, you can destabilize your spine by pulling it out of alignment. Think of the spine as a fishing rod supported by muscular guy wires. If all of the wires are tensed equally, the rod stays straight. “If you pull the wires closer to the spine,” McGill says, as you do when you pull in your stomach while trying to isolate the transversus abdominis, “what happens?” The rod buckles. So, too, he said, can your spine if you overly focus on the deep abdominal muscles. “In research at our lab,” he went on to say, “the amount of load that the spine can bear without injury was greatly reduced when subjects pulled in their belly buttons” during crunches and other exercises.

Instead, he suggests, a core exercise program should emphasize all of the major muscles that girdle the spine, including but not concentrating on the abs. Side plank (lie on your side and raise your upper body) and the “bird dog” (in which, from all fours, you raise an alternate arm and leg) exercise the important muscles embedded along the back and sides of the core. As for the abdominals, no sit-ups, McGill said; they place devastating loads on the disks. An approved crunch begins with you lying down, one knee bent, and hands positioned beneath your lower back for support. “Do not hollow your stomach or press your back against the floor,” McGill says. Gently lift your head and shoulders, hold briefly and relax back down. These three exercises, done regularly, McGill said, can provide well-rounded, thorough core stability. And they avoid the pitfalls of the all-abs core routine. “I see too many people,” McGill told me with a sigh, “who have six-pack abs and a ruined back.”

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