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Training Science Podcast
Can Running Marathons Help You Age Better? Insights from Multi Marathoners with Leo Lundy and Prof Paul Laursen
01:00:26
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- [00:01]
A
This week on the Training Science podcast, we sit down with Leo Lundy, Ph.D. researcher from Trinity College Dublin and a man who has run over 400 marathons. His latest work asks a question most of us in endurance sport have never dared to ask. Does all that running actually make you healthier? The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on what you measure. VO2 max, longevity, aerobic fitness. Well, that data looks remarkable, but mental health, that's where it gets a little bit complicated. So this one is going to make you think differently about why you run and whether those reasons actually matter. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. So without further ado, I now bring you Leo Lundy. I'm here with Leo Lundy. Leo, welcome to the podcast.
- [00:45]
B
Hi Paul, how are you doing?
- [00:47]
A
Yeah, I'm great, thanks. Thanks so much for coming on today. What drew me to the work that you're doing, Leo, is I believe I saw a, a caption around the importance of, I guess, VO2 max on and longevity and how multi marathoners are potentially show evidence on, you know, improving health span as just a place to sort of start where I, where I came across your work and then I came to your website and I saw all the work that you've been doing on multi marathoning and multi marathoners in their life. Ultimately, I believe it's, you're really looking at what is a lifetime of marathon regular competing do to a variety of different aspects. You're so far down the line in this. So where did it all start for you, Leo, on this? And then we can start unraveling some of the work you've done.
- [01:52]
B
Paul? It's actually a bit more than that. I'm using multi marathoning and I'll get into the definition of what multi marathoners are in a few minutes as a cohort of high functioning people into later life. So as they go through the 50s, 60s and 70s, they're doing a lot of exercise and I wanted to explore that in multiple facets to see what good things were and what the bad things were so that we could get a holistic view on it. How I got into it in the first place was not unusual. I was Middle east, as you can see at the minute I'm over 60 years old and I'm not your typical student. And so I was middle aged now I wanted to get a bit fitter, so I signed up for a marathon. And that was back in May 2004. And then in 2005 I ran every marathon in Ireland. I'm speaking to you now from Ireland, it's actually in the middle of a heat wave, so we're struggling in 22 degrees at the minute out there and I don't think the country can actually cope with it. So I ran every marathon in Ireland and eventually that got more and more every year, the year afterwards I ran 10 and around 12 and then around 20, then around 30, then around 50. And in doing that I came across a lot of like minded souls who were doing something similar. And I actually half live in Ireland and I half lived in the UK and so I was fully integrated into the long distance marathoning world in Ireland and fully integrated into the city in the south of England as well. So I knew a lot of people and they had actually formed themselves into clubs. And what they did was they went around all of these events, they got to know each other and they celebrated each other's milestones and achievements and it was a wonderful community to be involved in. And those clubs around that time, which is what 22 years ago, started to get formalized and they come up with rules and verification services and community and social media and all the things that you actually would see from a normal running club, except that they were virtual. And outside of Ireland, outside of the uk, they started popping up around the world as well. And at this stage my research has found 35 of these clubs globally and then some of them are quite large. A question for you, Paul. Just to give you an idea of the kind of scale of this, how many people do you think around the world have run 100 marathons or more?
- [04:58]
A
Oh, that's a solid number. But let's see, I would guess let's say 100,000.
- [05:05]
B
Okay, well, firstly, there's no central registry of people who have done it. Yeah, you have to actually go off the membership numbers of the various different clubs around and it's not actually 100,000, it's near 20,000 have actually done it. And these clubs have actually got together and not only do they track the number of people who've done 100 marathons, they actually track the number of people have done 300 marathons. And there's a world ranking out there for that in this community as well. And that figure as of January of this year was around the 1200 mark. So 1200 people have won 300 marathons.
- [05:47]
A
Pretty solid. Pretty solid. I wasn't too far off, I guess I was maybe tenfold off.
- [05:53]
B
You weren't millions, but it was definitely in the tens of thousands. And I guess these clubs are what gained my interest and what these clubs, what I've been engaged in over the last 20 or so years. And I want to give something back to these clubs as well. And this is my way of actually doing that. And so what I intended to do and what I started off doing was I wanted to document the sport. And I was very fortunate in that I had a few contacts in academia and my career was naturally coming to an end anyway, so I was looking for something else to do. So I persuaded Trinity College here in Dublin that I had this wonderful project that this wonderful cohort done, that I wanted to document it. And fortunately that they came on side with me and developed an academic framework around this project within said a PhD framework. So I, I got into the Trinity about four years ago and have been studying multi marathoners ever since. And what I really wanted to do was to produce this documentation of the sport in the form of academic papers. The most important thing for me was it was peer reviewed in that I wasn't doing this on my own, that I was having lots of people coming in over my shoulder looking to see, yes, that's good, you should go this way, you should maybe go that way. And I felt that was vindicated. And I have a good number of publications at this stage inside the cohort. And I feel four years on and I'm getting very near the end of the PhD at this stage that I have delivered a documentation of the sport to the sport and that includes a lot of different facets and we can get into them in a lot more detail. You mentioned VO2 max. I wanted to look at the physiology of these people just to give you an idea of who they are and what they are. You're talking about males and females, male driven, which is not a surprise. In the endurance running community they are predominantly males driven and we're finding about 60% males and 40% females in the multi marathon community. No, it's not that bad. But the surprising thing is the variability of that by country. These marathon clubs tend to be either regionalized or by country. So for example in the North America has one club which covers Canada, the US and South America as well, and that's been taken up by Marathon Mini X, which is a famous club over there. They maintain that and they certainly have a large number of people that have done 100 marathons or more. I think it's around the 1500 mark. Other big ones would be Japan, all the big ones would be Germany, Finland, which is a bit of a left field, but they have over a thousand multi marathoners in Finland. And one of the interesting facts is they're all large population countries. And when you actually break it down per capita, it actually gives you an idea of how popular this is in some countries. And that map changes quite a lot. And Denmark actually comes out as number one of the most per capita. And the other countries in there would be Ireland. We're coming in at number three globally. And Finland are there and Estonia are there and the UK are there and Germany are there. So they're all the most popular ones per capita. The interesting thing of that is seems to be a focus in northern Europe and in particular there seems to be a focus in the Nordic and Baltic countries as well where this is most popular. And what I find surprising about that is somewhere like Norway or Sweden or Estonia or Finland, they have very harsh winters and you would think that they don't have the time or in the year it's actually marathon season. But they're innovative and they actually have indoor marathons during the winter. A good example would be Helsinki, which has a lovely facility just outside in Espu I think it is. It's in the outskirts of Helsinki and they have a 200 meter track indoors and they run weekly marathons around the 200 meter track and it's very well supported and that's how they get their numbers up.
- [10:44]
A
Amazing. Well, let's start Leo, with where I came to, you know, finding you is with that study that really was associating this garment derived VO2 max estimate. Right. And all cause mortality. Because you're, you're bringing up a really important point here. You're talking about all these different cultures and, and countries and the like the good news here because you know you're all of your research and whatnot that you're doing, it's not all, it's not all great news across, across the board and all the research that you're doing, but this is, this one is, is pretty good news. If you're a, if you're a multi marathoner or at least if you are focusing on your VO2 max and this again Garmin derived all the limitations we know. But if you're part, if you're into that culture and performing a lot of activity and that is supporting your multi marathon endeavors, you're tending to have a lower all cause mortality. And this is published in a Nature journal. Which one was it? Yeah, scientific report. So top journal. So very, very cool.
- [12:03]
B
Yeah. Well just give you a bit of background of that particular study. One of the aims that they wanted out of the Whole program was to promote the positive things about multi marathoning so that we can actually get more people into multi marathoning. And the other thing was not to ignore the risks that appear as well and possibly put mitigations in place for those. And certainly when we got to the VO2 max or physiology in general, we find that it was a good news story. So what we did in this particular study is we asked multi marathoners to self report their VO2 max statistics. And it wasn't just from Garmin, it was from Garmin or Polar or course, or whichever one of the wearables that actually does provide this statistic. And we would be correlated that up and compared it against a well known VO2 max normative database, which was the friend database, which was predominantly out of the US which actually had by gender and by age what the normal VO2 max you'd expect from the general public. So we took the 50th percentile of that data, which represented the normative normal person of that age. And we also took the 95th percentile of that normative database which would represent the very high functioning person in that age group. And we compared what we find in the multi marathon community to what was in the normative database. And the news was very encouraging in that across all genders, across all age groups, and we're Talking about from 30 year olds, 40 year olds, 50 year olds, 60 year olds, 70 year olds, 80 year olds, and even projecting into 90 year olds that it was significantly higher than the normative figure across the board. So they were higher. And that's not a big surprise given that they're running marathons. And just to give you that idea of the frequency here, 80% of multi marathoners would run a marathon a month, about 12% run a marathon a week. So, you know, it's very high frequency marathon running in that regard. So the fact that they're higher VO2 max was no surprise. But what was interesting was when you took the 95th percentile, which was the real higher level in the normative database, it tracked it very closely. And we actually had three or four age group gender groupings exceeded the 95th percentile as well. So they would have been in the top 3% of their age group in that regard.
- [15:03]
A
So super high VO2 max, is that what you're saying in that super high
- [15:07]
B
VO2 max pretty much across the board and not only super high at the top end.
- [15:14]
A
Yeah, superior.
- [15:16]
B
Superior. And even I've come across some weird anomalies. You know, you're Talking about a 70 year old with a 56 or a 60 VO2 max, which is extraordinary, really.
- [15:31]
A
Yeah, we've had Baz Van Hooren on the podcast and he's brought in some of his, you know, mentioned his world, world record, you know, 70 year olds. Incredible. What, what is actually possible at the, these, these higher chronological ages. Right. And it's chronological versus biological age is, is really the, the interesting, interesting thing here is are we almost changing the person's biological age somewhat by, through an epigenetic type, you know, signal?
- [16:04]
B
I think there's no question there, there's adaptions happening because of the high training load. That's actually happening. And we're just talking about physiology here as well. We'll get on later on to talk about, you know, with cognitive performance and psychological performance as well, but certainly physiology. We're absolutely talking about it in terms of all cause mortality. That was a natural progression from the VO2 Max figures and that we were able to map on all cause mortality by a factor of, I think it was 3.7 per year per VO2 max digit that all cause mortality improved. And we find that it was, it was good. You're talking about maybe a 30% improvement in all cause mortality. And that gap got bigger as the age groups went up. And we find in particular older women, it was more prominent. So women in their 70s and 80s had the highest level of all cause mortality improvement overall. More so than men. And men was good. So that was a good story that came out and it's certainly one that we'll be promoting with inside the multi marathon community by way of recruitment. It's a good message as you get older. This cohort is bucking the trend in terms of cardiovascular fitness and bucking the trend in terms of all cause mortality. But what I'm not saying, Paul, is that everybody has to run 100 marathons to get this benefit. I think the benefit really comes from sustained participation over the years and long term sustained participation in that this is a cumulative effect over years that eventually gets to a stage where the curves of natural decline are becoming less steep. Yeah, and natural decline still happens, there's no question about that. As you get older, your VO2 max does still drop, but it's not dropping as much as juice soap in the general public for sure.
- [18:31]
A
Yep, I couldn't agree more. Hey, coaches and sports scientists, let's be honest, you're probably drowning in data right now. GPS heart rate force plates, blood markers, and you're still probably not even sure if your players are actually Ready or not. That's because more data. It doesn't fix anything if you don't have a system to make sense of it. My buddy Martin Scheidt has been solving this exact problem for well over 15 years at all the big name clubs. His brand new course at Hitscience gives you that system. Load and response monitoring in elite football is now live and walks you through how to separate neuromuscular from metabolic load, what GPS actually tells you about the load and where it completely falls short as well as how to build real feedback loops between the the dose and the response. Now this isn't the 2019 version warmed up. It's a full and complete rebuild. New tech, new research, real examples from elite clubs across Europe and the Middle East. You get lifetime access, full handouts, a hit science certificate and CEUs all for just $2.99. So stop stacking dashboards and start making decisions. Head on over to Hitscience and enroll and we'll see you on the inside. Hey everyone, just want to let you know about something cool we've built into Athletica. It's called Athletica U. So this isn't another training app. Add on. It's a structured education series designed to give athletes, coaches and practitioners a shared foundation in endurance training principles. In our Certificate 1 Foundations course, we walk you through the essentials. Base training, build training, balancing volume and intensity, fueling and hydration recovery and how to interpret your own training data. So what makes this different is the integration in each principle. You'll learn how to get experience directly through your athletic appliance. It's science and practice training as both the classroom and the lab because we all learn best by feeling and doing. So if you're interested in how we can better scale best practice coaching and bridge science with applied sport, you'll want to take a look. You'll find everything over at Athletica AI. We'll see you there. And I would just kind of say not necessarily you know, competing per se, but the, the frequency and the consistency of the training throughout the lifestyle lifespan. I look at myself, I'm not competing anymore. I'm certainly in a similar realm as your, your cohort as a multi ironman so many, many ironmans, many, many triathlons, many marathons but. And then not doing it anymore. But I've been in, I'm in such a habit of training I can't go through a day without consistently training. And I think it' signal however you're going to do that throughout your lifespan seems to be something that is going to help your body, your system, your cells, to keep them young for long.
- [21:14]
B
I think one of the key things we find as well was how motivation changes as you get older as well. There's no question, particularly for men in younger age groups, competition, performance, performance improvement is probably the highest motivation that they', is. But that drops off as the decades roll in. And certainly when you're in your 50s, 60s and 70s, or even 80s, it drops to not performance, but completing. And also things like social network and travel and friendships and all of that kick in as higher motivation factors than performance, but at the same, maintaining a cardiovascular reserve that's built up and you're getting all the benefits of that. I always love and hate at the same time the graph of life markers as you get older. I'm talking here about things like physiology, I'm talking things like cognitive decline, I'm talking about things like psychological stability, and they tend to peak when you're 30. And then it's a long slippery slope to death or dependency. And really what we should be trying to do is to try and make the slope of all of those markers as shallow as possible so that we can avoid dependency as long as possible, because we are getting older, we are living longer, and we have to keep that at bay as long as we can. And this is absolutely one way of doing it.
- [22:58]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Fantastic. So obviously we can be very, I think, you know, clear listeners, I'm probably just shaking their head going, yeah, come on. We know exercise works, consistent exercise works. It's probably no surprising that, you know, these guys had higher, higher VO2 maxes, higher predictions of, you know, low all cause mortality. Great. But is the news all perfect or, you know, where do we go next? Do we go, do we go into some of the psychological indices or some of the negative. Where do we move now?
- [23:34]
B
I would start very much at the kind of participation metrics to start off with. It's not all super good news in the metrics as well. Some of the good news is that 93% of multimatters think it's good for their mental health. And we'll explain. I'll break that down in a little bit as well. We did find a very high percentage using painkiller strategies throughout the running career. Interesting analgesics. And we're talking 50% using painkiller strategies for during and after races. And that's not good.
- [24:19]
A
No, in various different things, right?
- [24:22]
B
Yes, yeah, exactly. And I, I think the message has to be got out there saying, you know, it's not Good, but it's really not good. And it needs to, it needs to stop.
- [24:32]
A
I mean that what percent, what percent we're using?
- [24:35]
B
We're talking over 50%.
- [24:37]
A
Wow. So that means 50% basically do that. They do this. They believe it's good, but they do it in pain.
- [24:44]
B
Half of them, well, they know it's bad for them. There's no ignorance out here. They know what's bad for them, but they're ignoring the advice. That's not good. Another thing we find that wasn't good. As part of our human performance lab here, we insist that anybody who goes on a graduated exercise test takes a pre vigorous exercise screening questionnaire. The one that we like is the PAR Q test and they have to pass that before the ethics would allow them to actually get on a treadmill. So we embedded the PARQ test into one of the questionnaires that we stuck out there and it was quite shocking. The results that come back and these that are people that are working at a very high end of physical activity as they get older. We find that 57%, that's 55, 7% would have failed one of the Parq initial screening questions and would have required a referral to a doctor to actually mean that they would need some kind of medical supervision. Now we're talking things like 10% had diagnosed cardiac issues, 15% had diagnosed hypertension, high blood pressure. There was 30% had bone and tendon issues that would have got worse with continued running. And these were. They've not been checked by anybody. So people just rock up and run and they're not under any medical supervision. And then I think that that's important. Now these are just diagnosed ones. It's not even the undiagnosed ones, which we really don't know what's actually there. And there's some sad stories around that. I'm sure in the triathlon world you come across sad stories all the time. But in my running career, I've had 10 men die in races that I've been involved in and they're normally 40 year olds and they're normally cardiac issues.
- [26:50]
A
Yeah.
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B
And that's not being addressed at all.
- [26:55]
A
Yep.
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B
It's not being picked up, but it's not being addressed by the governing bodies ever.
- [26:58]
A
Yeah, it's so interesting. So I've been involved with, you know, Dr. Phil Maftone and we've published a lot on athletes. They can be fit, but fit doesn't necessarily mean healthy. And your data, there were 57% wouldn't have necessarily passed a par Q or would require medical consult on it kind of supports that premise. So, yeah, I don't know what to say about it, but just I guess we started the whole, the first study where seemingly that if you do multi marathoners, you're healthy and you're going to live longer, but not necessarily now you're presenting data saying, well, actually there's a lot of unhealthy marathoners that are in that cohort as well.
- [27:48]
B
There is. And I guess one of my aims of the project is to identify these vulnerabilities and risk groups and suggest mediations that could be put in place to address them as well. And that's one of the study elements that I've actually focused on as well in terms of policy recommendations going forward. Nice to move on to something. Another area that there's good and bad news as well would be. And I looked at the personality types that are attracted to the sport, which is very interesting.
- [28:22]
A
Here we go. This is you and me, Leo.
- [28:25]
B
I am, I am that man.
- [28:27]
A
I know. I probably am too.
- [28:31]
B
Can you tell me after I tell you what the results are. The first one is conscientiousness, in that they're very conscientious. They love to follow rules, they love to have plans and they love to execute on plans. I find a very high number of serving military, ex military police, ex police in the multi marathon community, which kind of maps onto that type of personality trait as well. I find that they're not very open. So they're quite socially introverted in that regard. In general, maybe not so much, just slightly. The conscientiousness was off the scale. The last personality traits that we find very interesting was around emotional stability. And emotional stability was very poor across the board.
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A
Okay, interesting, interesting. So they're almost like maybe they're, they're gravitating to marathon running because it improves their emotional stability. Without it, maybe they're not.
- [29:41]
B
Absolutely. And I, I even anecdotally, I hear that all the time in the community that I'm doing this for just to clear my head. And I've got bipolar. I'm doing this because it helps me calm the symptoms down. So I do think there's a large. Actually attracted to the sport because it does provide a support network around that. It is recognized within the sport as a problem and being addressed as well, which is good. So there's no stigma around that or the stigma is being reduced as time is going on. And it seems to be that that type of person is actually attracted to it. You've heard of the adage the loneliness of the long distance runner. And I think, and I think people, they don't particularly want to talk to anybody. They want to be on their own, they want to be in their own space and they go out. And this is a sport that actually encourages that as well. So that's all very interesting. And the emotional stability results, combined with what 93% said it was good for the mental health, kind of drew me into the psychometric testing of them as well. So as part of this study, we got heavily into the psychology of depression and anxiety in the community as well. And that wasn't great results either. It wasn't that positive. We did a number of tests. The first one was cesd, which is a depressive scale questionnaire which we got people to fill out. And another one was stai, which was an anxiety skill that we got them to fill out. And we got around 600 multi marathoners involved in this part of the process. So it was a pretty decent cohort as well. And by the way, this particular study is published in PLOS ONE as well and another reputable journal. And so it's available out there for everybody to look at or at my study hub as well, which you can go and see. But the results of that were quite interesting. And we compared depression and anxiety to large scale aging studies that are around now. There's a number of those. There's a large one in the US, there's a large one in the UK, there's large one across the 17 EU countries, and we actually have quite a large one here in Ireland as well. And so it happens to be based at Trinity College where I'm basing the study out of. And so I had access to the data in there, so I was able to compare both the depressive symptoms and the anxiety symptoms direct to an aging cohort of general public as well to see how they actually fit it in. And when you compared it, it was interesting across the board. Both depression and anxiety were higher than the general public
- [32:51]
A
in the marathoners.
- [32:53]
B
In the marathoners, but they were still less than any clinical measure you would have for depression or any clinical measure you would have for high anxiety. So it's something that is an interesting result, but something that you wouldn't say. It's terrible and we need to do something about it.
- [33:10]
A
Maybe they were, maybe they were, you know, they're using the marathoners, the marathoning to control that a little bit. So it potentially comes down from the, you know, down from the clinical, you
- [33:22]
B
know, cutoff I think the reason for that was very much that we were using averages across five year buckets and the people who are actually in trouble in terms of depression and anxiety were getting averaged out by a larger cohort who were actually okay. So that we weren't seeing the peaks in anxiety and we weren't seeing the peaks in depression because of those averages. And to get around that we used an advanced statistical method called latent class analysis which ignores averages and takes every result in its own merits and looks for groups inside that actually are either very good or very bad and comes out results. And it actually finds some interesting results. It find that about 75 of multi marathoners had lower depression and lower anxiety levels than the general public. But there was a 25% that had way higher and they would have been, they would have been at the first level of clinical diagnosis of there being a problem. And out of that 25%, 8% of them would have been categorized as severe. So they either would have severe depression or they would have had severe high anxiety. And those percentages are higher than what you'd expect to see in a general population as well. So there's no doubt there are people with issues. And then the mental health in the sport and in my study it was initially masked by averages but came out in this latent class analysis. And that's a vulnerability. There's a risk group that's in there that you have to address and it is being addressed. A good example of how it is being addressed is the UK Marathon Club, which is one of the first marathon clubs that ever existed and in my opinion would be probably one of the most progressive and forward thinking, have taken this on board and said, look, we recognize that there's an issue in our cohort and they have about 1500 members. And so they provide. The first thing on their website you see when you go in is saying, are you struggling with your mental health? Here's the help that you can get to address it. And it gives phone numbers and web pages and email addresses and it is real, don't be afraid of it. We recognize us there and they actually are doing something about it. And that alone has given a lot of comfort to people who are living with this condition inside the cohort and that the stigma has gone away. It's been recognized at the highest level and there are help available around it. So I think that's a vulnerability that we come up with. It's a mitigation that actually does work. And fortunately the UK Marathon Club is one of the Model marathon clubs that a lot of the other ones base their own rules and around so they are more likely to copy that as they go forward. So it's those type of clubs that we're trying to get out there and get this message across to.
- [36:51]
A
That's very cool. Why don't we just kind of geek out a little bit and talk a bit about, you know, depression and anxiety and of course, I'm no expert, but I know a little bit about the topic or at least of just a hobbyist is, you know, in, in reading and whatnot. And I know that there is, you know, there's certainly a link into the brain of the. What's called the default mode network, which is basically a piece of a piece in the brain. It was firstly discovered in the MRI machines in the control conditions where they told people to go into the. Go into the MRI and just don't think of anything, right? Or just in that. In control condition, of course you can't do that, right? Your monkey mind goes off and they, and they discovered that going around in the monkey mind, right. And a lot of that default mode network action, it's almost like I kind of think about it like you've got these grooves and they're the train tracks ultimately. And you just kind of, a lot of times you can't get out of that train track of going around and swimming around from point to all these various different points in the default mode network, right? So from one point in the brain to the next to the next and next and you're constantly thinking, constantly thinking, ruminating ultimately with your monkey mind on whatever is, whatever is on your mind. Of course there's different ways to get out of that. When we can get out of that. We get out of our depression and our. And our monkey mind and you know, there's meditation might be one way, but of course exercise is another one too, right. So I, you can almost imagine self soothing through the exercise, marathoning training that the individuals are doing. And I would, you know, so it's. And I certainly when you were talking Leo, I was reflecting on some of the athletes that I coach and I know there are some extremely high anxious runners that I, that I do coach. And, and I know, you know, and I almost go to some of these are extremely talented runners, but I almost think that. And the biggest coaching dilemma that I actually have coaching them is I can't get them to stop running. I can't get them to rest and recover. That is the biggest I have. I have no problem prescribing something and they go and do it conscientiously. To your point. Perfectly right. That's the typical runner that I, that I'm coaching here. That is, that is. That is top. What I can't get them to do is to stop doing extra stuff around that, stop doing extra training, doing a little bit more, because they think that's better. And I think, I think to your, you know, to your data, Leo, that they're also going out there and they're probably getting a little bit more soothing and feeling better because they're running and training all the time.
- [39:36]
B
One of the novel things that I've heard recently is marathon talk and that people can actually talk to themselves either out loud or in their head mantras. And that seems to address that train track that you've just mentioned there as well. And there's a few research papers that have come out in the last couple of years about marathon talk, which is a. Interesting. And another thing is I think technology is advancing at a pace as well. The area that I'm actually based at in Trinity in Dublin is actually the clinical neuroscience area. And they're heavily into EEG and hyper scanning, which is how people actually react to each other and how their brains can align when they're actually doing the same activity. And the technology getting to a stage where mobile EEGs are now becoming pretty common. So you can get a 32 channel EEG on a cap with a radio transmitter and so you can actually send people out or send two or three or four maybe with known conditions and seeing how that their brain is actually reacting to running and how it actually reacts with other people who are running with them as well. So I think some interesting research could be done around that to actually monitor what's actually happening in the brain as people run to see what that soothing mechanism you just described actually could be and where in the brain is actually triggering off.
- [41:19]
A
For sure. For sure. Right. Well, I mean, connections with people, right? Like we're having this connection right now. We have to be very. Our mind's not drifting off and thinking about other things we have to do, at least not very often. Like. Like we have to be engaged here to have this conversation. And that's the same thing that happens when someone's having a conversation and they might be running and whatnot and doing that. Right. So that's another way to get out of your default mode network because your brain can't drift off and dissociate. And I know there's this whole thing about the runners and they've been in the sciences where easy zone 2 training, call it or below is very easy to just go off and go for a nice easy run in the forest and you can dissociate right by yourself. But if you're doing maybe high intensity interval training or anything that requires hyper focus, well, you have to associate and you have to really think about what you're doing. That's probably also the same when you're engaged with people too. And that human connection is another way to get out of that. There's a variety of other ones too, right, like focusing on your breathing and all these different things. But these are all mental health assisters ultimately at the end of the day.
- [42:27]
B
Yeah, I agree totally. And another thing that we encourage our race directors, the governing bodies to educate marshals to educate themselves. And race directors try to identify people that are having symptoms of mental health as they go around and saying we need to keep an eye on that guy or we need to keep an eye on her. And maybe if we have tried this it might help them or get these people to run together. There's lots of things that can be done as well and I think in education of the administration at the ground level and at the governing level could help that as well.
- [43:12]
A
Very cool. Hey team sport coaches, this is the one you've been waiting for. Dr. Martin Bascheidt's brand new course Metabolic conditioning for team sports is now live at hitscience. In just four focused hours, Martin distills his latest research so you can build repeated effort capacity without pointless mileage. Pick the HIT four format that matches each of your players profile and dosed your sessions precisely. No more over or under training. You get lifetime access, full course handouts, a hit science certificate and CEUs all for just 2.99. You won't find this value elsewhere so head over to the Hit Science website, hit the pop up and enroll. We'll see you on the inside. Hey team, big news. We have just launched the new Athletica athlete app, what We've been calling App 2 and it's the closest thing yet to having a sports scientist in your pocket. So this isn't another static training plan, it's an AI coach that you can actually talk to. Ask it how recovered am I today or should I change this session or why is the week set up as it is? And it answers based on your training files, your history and your load response over time under the hood. It's powered by the same HIIT science principles that we talk about on the show. Individualized Interval training, Training Critical power and pace, HRV Guided load management and polarized training distribution. On top of that you get a completely new sleek interface and a full training experience. Integrated community in App Help and Athletica U Education built right into the platform so that you understand the why behind every session, not just the what. There's very little out there that can read and analyze your files, keep tabs on your recovery, and coach you using Proven in Sports science. But that's exactly what we've built in Athletica's new app 2. Head on over to Athletic AI and check it out today with a free trial. Hey team. At hitscience, we've learned that the best knowledge doesn't just come from books or labs. It grows through conversations with other coaches, practitioners and athletes in the field. And that's why we've created the hitscience Community, a global space to connect, share and turn sport and coaching science into practice. Inside you'll find free courses applied to skills, discussions and a worldwide network of professionals who push each other forward. So don't just keep up with the science, be part of shaping it. Join the hitscience community today for free. Simply access through our website, our socials, or click the link in our show notes. Look forward to working with you on the inside. Leo, what are the Are there any other big rocks that we haven't covered in, you know, so far yet?
- [45:35]
B
Here, let me think. We never really covered the cognitive performance angle.
- [45:44]
A
Let's go there.
- [45:46]
B
Okay. One of the things we wanted to look at was how these people are cognitively performing. And we had a number of markers. Cognitive performance is another one of those life markers that degrades over time as well. And so from the age of 30 onwards, cognitive decline is inevitable. And again, it's one of those things that as you get older and older it gets to a level of first annoyance and then dependence. We were looking to see how the marathon runners would behave against a normative database in that regard as well. I guess the assumption at start was you're running, so therefore it's bound to be good for you in that regard. But it was and it wasn't is the answer to that. We looked at three different markers. The first one was attention focus, short term attention. The second one was the ability to make a decision and then act on that decision, and that was a motive one which actually had a time related to it. And the third one was just general cognition in that regard. So if you take the first one, which was attention to focus, we find that there wasn't really that much difference between multi marathoners and the general public, except for older men. Older men, there was an advantage. When I say older, you're talking in the 60s, 70s and 80s. There was a definite advantage in terms of focus is good because as you get on in a marathon and you get tireder, as you get near the end, your mental focus can go and your pacing strategies can go. Making the right decision can go as well. If you're on a trail marathon, your footing could go and you could fall. You know, there's all kinds of reasons for having good focus. But we found that there was definitely an advantage for older men, but not so much in women or younger men, in terms of the ability to make a decision and then act in that decision. It was good. Multi marathoners were faster to make a decision and faster to act in a decision than the general public. And again, that has benefits in life and in running a marathon as well in terms of pace. And the last one was just general cognition. We used the MMSE test, which is a test of general recognition, and we found that overall multi marathoners were better. They had higher scores. But there was an interesting sidebar to that in that we were required as part of those tests to ask the educational attainment level of multi marathoners. And we had 130 people in this particular study from all over the world. You know, I got on my plane and flew to Liechtenstein, to Finland, to Italy, to all over the UK, all over Ireland, and even to the US and to test these people. So it was a pretty good global study. And the educational attainment levels were high. We're talking about 60% of multi marathoners had tertiary level education, had been to college or university. And I was shocked by the number of PhDs and MDs were actually involved in this sport. And what that did in terms of their cognitive performance is two groups emerged that was nothing to do with the number of marathons you run, nothing to do with gender, nothing to do with your age, but was very much aligned to your educational attainment, whether it was tertiary level or whether it was secondary or below. And the cognitive markers were way lower on the lower educational attainment levels and way higher on the higher educational attainment levels. So that might be just a natural demographic of this particular cohort. And if we exclude that as a co founder, there wasn't really that much in the cognitive performance study in that regard. But at the same time, the adage of we're running, therefore we're bound to be better didn't hold up that, well,
- [50:30]
A
well, correct me if I'm wrong though, but I think that really the moral of the podcast is ultimate. Comes back to the first study that you've done, right, where we're looking at general physical activity throughout your lifespan. Higher VO2 max associated with lower all cause mortality indicators, but then not only that, but mentally, because dementia and Alzheimer's is one of the key killers with high associations with all cause mortality. We've had Dr. Tommy Wood on the podcast. He just wrote the book the Stimulated Mind. And you know, you were talking a little bit about the education factor as well. I'm just, I'm reading the book right now and I, you know, I think I read that chapter last night where it's an interesting correlation. But even, you know, having higher, higher education in your life, it, for whatever reason seems to be associated with lower, lower risk of dementia or Alzheimer's. For whatever reason, it kind of comes back to that conscientious mindset, right? Like you're, you like ticking boxes. You like continuing, continuing to learn and following the rules and continuing that whole ongoing process of bettering yourself and finding out probably different things about different areas in your life. Constant learner. And again, this can only be beneficial in that 60, 70 age group cohort that hopefully we all get there and we want to continue to be functional and active and mentally sharp as we're moving through that. So again, to me, this mostly sounds like positive data, Leo.
- [52:16]
B
Yeah, it is. And actually the title of my thesis, my PhD is successful aging A Study of Multi Marathoners Across Physiology, Psychology and Cognitive Performance. And I think they really are a model for successful aging in that regard, as long as you take the vulnerabilities into account. But I think most of them are fixable.
- [52:46]
A
Yeah. Hey, again, it's always about me, but one of the problems that I've recently encountered through my multi marathoning and multi ironmanning is hip osteoarthritis. And unfortunately, yeah, I've had to have a full hip replacement that, that, you know, I kind of didn't see that coming when I was training the house down in my, in my, in my 40s. But it slowly manifested as I grew to my later 40s. And whether or not the marathoning was a contributor to that or not, I don't know. But that definitely all I can say is that that happened to me. And. Yeah. Is there any data, have you ever looked at that kind of issue across your data set, Leo, or thought to?
- [53:33]
B
Well, we have looked at multi skeletal issues and they are absolutely there and injury is one of the downsides to this level of exercise. But I think that adoption, persistence, the support of the community around them and acceptance of people who are having issues are allowing these people to still complete marathons. A good example is events that are put on for this court tend to have very long cutoffs. Like very long. You know, you're talking seven, eight hours in some places. And you get a lot of people who have knee replacements or hip replacements and maybe run for the first half and walk for the second half. And that's perfect, acceptable, you know, So I think that helps. They're still getting their cardiovascular exercise in even though that they are having multiple multiskeletal issues. And they can still participate. And they still participate with those interventions like the one that you actually have as well. And I know many multi marathoners with new knees and new hips.
- [54:49]
A
Hips, okay.
- [54:49]
B
And they're spring doing.
- [54:50]
A
That's great. And I have. I mean, I don't know the. I'm no expert in it, but I have been doing some interesting. Just some searching on it. I think the jury is kind of still out on the topic whether the exercise is contributing to that because. But I think when we actually compare multi marathoners or we just compare heavy exercisers with the general public, the percentage of incidents ultimately is not different between the general public and the exercisers. And there's some data, I believe, also that's even saying that the incidence is less in those that are actually exercising. But there's always the anecdotal n ones like myself that kind of. That wonder, right? Because it's like, oh, I wonder if I didn't do as many, maybe that wouldn't have happened, but hard to know.
- [55:38]
B
I was actually surprised by the lack of injuries like the one you just described in the multi community. It didn't seem to be as big a problem as I was expecting it to be.
- [55:49]
A
That's great. That's great. I'm really happy to hear that. Because, you know, I also feel. I feel guilty sometimes, right? Because when my mind drifts and my mind's watering, my default mode network is working. And I'm like, oh, I wonder if, you know, did I. Was I too conscientious and doing too much? But maybe, maybe, you know, being too hard on myself.
- [56:08]
B
Just to give you an idea of some of the numbers that are around, there are. We're talking about people who are doing thousands of marathons across their lifetime being at the top end. I think the number one on the list is over 3000. There's around 50 or 60 over 1000. The amount of pounding that these people give their bodies is incredible. And they're still doing it right through more advanced years.
- [56:41]
A
Fantastic. So Leo, we're getting towards the end of the hour here. Can you summarize the key takeaway messages based on where you're at with your data collection and what do you want the listening public to take away from this?
- [56:56]
B
Well, in terms of the data collection, it's pretty much finished now at this stage there are four peer reviewed journals out there in Q1 journals plus one, the Nature portfolio, Scientific reports and Acta Psychologica which has the anxiety and depression. So they're all available. You can just google my name or Google multi marathoning and they'll pop up where they're available in any of the academic search engines. There are also three more that are hopefully very close to being accepted in terms of cognitive performance. I have an interesting one which we didn't get to talk about, which is an integration and correlation across all of those particular areas. And the last one is the policy recommendations that are coming out of this study. If I may, I'll just advertise my study hub before I go assess a website that contains all of the information that we talked about. It's multimarithoner, let me get it right, multimarithening research stuff. And on there everything is actually available. And the last takeaway that I'll give is you don't have to run 100 marathons to get the benefit. This is all about sustained participation over the lifespan. So it's high levels of exercise, whatever it is, will give you the cardiovascular benefit and that will naturally map onto an all cause mortality risk reduction, particularly when you get into the older age groups. And it's in the older age groups that we're seeing the most, the highest advantage and particularly for women. So that might be my takeaway and that there's a lot of benefits to following this model. And even though it seems like quite an extreme cohort cohort, it's actually a very valuable cohort to actually map onto aging in general. And I think we all know that ageing in general is probably one of the biggest public health issues that's rapidly coming up on us all and that this is a way of reducing the burden on yourself and on the public health areas as we age.
- [59:22]
A
Yeah, just brilliant. Just brilliant, Leo. And that's exactly it. Right. So there's no question you want to keep moving, keep being active throughout your lifespan as long as you can. And it's in your best interest to do that as well because, yeah, it's getting harder and harder to draw on the healthcare system because it's definitely, it's bursting at the seams and you want to stay away from that as long as you can. And yeah, so this is great advice to help you do that and manage it. And yeah, Leo, that's incredible work that you're doing. We really appreciate it and thanks for coming on and sharing it all with our audience audience and we will link to your, to your website where I know that's what I was getting all of my information from. It's well laid out with everything there. So we'll link to that. And Leo, on behalf of myself, Martin and the whole Hit Science Athletica team, all the best and we'll keep keep up with the great work and Finish up that Ph.D. thanks very much.
- [60:26]
B
I appreciate it.