Not long ago, I was completing a Runner’s World feature article about lifetime running, the main topic of this book. I decided to do one last interview with Stanford arthritis expert James Fries, MD. His Runners Study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, has produced the most compelling evidence I know of for the benefits of lifetime running and fitness.

Fries’s report showed that runners lived about seven years longer than a matched control group with similar demographics and health insurance. Not only that, but the runners encountered common disabilities—like knee ailments and low-back pain—ten to sixteen years later in life than the controls. There was no downside to lifetime running. It produced nothing but winning outcomes.

As we were reviewing these points, Fries uttered several powerful sentences that I hadn’t heard before. Or maybe I simply hadn’t registered their import. “Aging begins when we are in our twenties,” he told me. “If you want to delay the aging process, that’s the time to begin running.” Or any time before late life.

Fries continued, “What you can’t do is wait until you are seventy and then begin taking Geritol or some other elixir. The damage has been done, and you can’t undo it. The runners in my study derived benefit from the cumulative effect of years and years of continuous exercise.”

In other words, life and running are not part-time sports. They demand full-time, across-the-decades attention.

The very next day I read an astonishing paper published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings in early 2017. It followed almost four thousand adults in their sixties and seventies. Some of the subjects in the journal study disregarded or overcame the obstacles they faced and continued a regular exercise program. They simply refused to quit. Others gave up and stopped. When the researchers compared the two groups, they found amazing differences.

Those who kept at it despite two or more chronic conditions enjoyed a 35 to 47 percent reduction in mortality compared to the nonexercisers with the same health issues. The authors concluded, “Physical activity produced beneficial effects in all individuals with any specific chronic conditions.”

Running and other endurance exercise seems to prevent almost everything bad. Or as Mayo Clinic endurance expert Michael Joyner, MD, puts it, “Regular exercise basically erases the effects of several serious conditions.”

  

Celebrate every season of your life: I won the Boston Marathon in 1968 when I was twenty-one years old, and have been getting slower every day since then. At over seventy, it now takes me almost twice as long to finish Boston. Or, for that matter, any run I undertake anywhere at any time. If I followed every piece of advice in this book’s “Getting Faster” section, I would still be slower in five years. No one outruns aging.

But that’s not the point. These days I’m not trying to win the Boston Marathon. I’m happy to be alive, healthy, and vigorous. Moving forward still excites me, no matter what the pace. As long as I’m still moving…well, that means I’m alive and well. Which is a beautiful thing.

  

Make your own rules: My friend Dave McGillivray is race director of the Boston Marathon, and has finished Boston himself forty-five years (and counting) in a row. Until a few years ago, he also used to run his age in miles on every birthday. He hit 60 miles on his sixtieth.

I called Dave the next day to congratulate him, but also with a few words of wisdom. “You can’t keep running your age,” I said. “Don’t hold yourself to an impossible standard. Be flexible.”

The next year Dave covered 61 miles. But this time he included a bit of swimming and a lot of bicycling. “This is my game,” Dave explained to friends. “I get to make the rules.” Proving he is as smart as he is fit and disciplined.

  

Dare greatly: In April 1910, President Teddy Roosevelt gave one of his most rousing speeches to a large crowd at the Sorbonne in Paris. “It is not the critic who counts,” Roosevelt said. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” Roosevelt added that victory is never assured. “At the worst, if he fails, [he] at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

I agree. Dare greatly, but also intelligently. Make your own rules, then stick with them.