Running just 1-2 hours per week can dramatically increase your odds of living longer

Written by record-breaking GB ultrarunner Damian Hall, Run Forever unlocks the secrets to becoming an ageless ace. It's an exciting time to be a masters athlete and while ageing in inevitable, slowing down is optional. 

Run Forever gives you the tools to keep moving - stronger, smarter, longer. It may sound dramatic, but some of the information in here could save lives and make those final decades much more enjoyable. 

In the following extract, Damian explores just how beneficial running can be. 

Running away from death

Research into more than 55,000 people showed that those who run for 1–3 hours per week have a 30% lower risk of death. Just ten minutes a day reduces all-cause mortality and death from cardiovascular disease, specifically by improving the health of our cells, which in turn fight off ageing. Running doesn’t just extend lifespan, it could greatly improve our healthspan, the idea of remaining healthy for longer. Few of us would choose to live to 100 if it meant a decade or two of slowly dying in a chair, and myriad studies have attested to exercise’s ability to reduce the chances of a visit from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia and cancer. Indeed, when it comes to disease resistance, running is queen. Pounding the pavements (other surfaces are available) helps to boost our respiratory function, hugely lower our cholesterol, and reduce our risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. There are so many studies with these types of results.

While running doesn’t cure cancer, it can help to prevent it. If you run regularly, you may have a 70% lower risk of developing colon cancer, 30–40% less chance of developing breast cancer and (although results here were less clear) a reduction in the overall risk of prostate cancer ranging from 5% to 65%. Running three times a week for an average of just seventeen minutes at a time reduced the risk of fatal heart attack or stroke by as much as 50%, found a large study. For some, regular aerobic exercise is part of a successful treatment plan for cancer.

Though there is no known effective treatment to prevent or stop the progression of Alzheimer’s, running gives us a much greater chance of dodging it. A study of women who were highly fit in their forties to their sixties found that their risk of dementia decreased by nearly 90%. In a study of 649,000 US (male) masters with an average age of sixty-one, the fittest in the group were 33% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s after nine years than the least fit.

The findings suggest that the association between cardiorespiratory fitness and Alzheimer’s risk is inverse: the fitter you are, the less likely you may be to get Alzheimer’s. Another study found that brain inflammation reduces by 55–68% in those who exercise regularly. Although this evidence – and much of the existing research – is currently limited to animal studies, it still suggests that aerobic exercise has the potential to significantly reduce disease markers associated with Alzheimer’s.

In fact, running was probably key to allowing Homo sapiens to reach old age in the first place. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors had two copies of a genotype that greatly increases the risk of Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease. However, humans began living much longer than other mammals at this time. Professor David Raichlen believes that the need to constantly be on the move – in order to find food and to run from danger – caused our hearts to enlarge and our capillaries to grow. This minimised the chances of developing these diseases, despite the presence of the high-risk genes. ‘I tend to think that exercise explains quite a bit about why we are the way we are today,’ Raichlen says, pointing out that our risk of chronic disease has surged as our time spent exercising has plummeted. By not running, we’re negating or even reversing our evolutionary history.

Running pushes back against senescence and makes us healthier in many ways. As we age, our arteries stiffen and can’t widen as well as they used to in order to accommodate an increase in blood flow, particularly in the aorta (the artery leading from the heart) and the carotid arteries (which run from the chest to the head). When this happens, major cardiac events aren’t far behind. But aerobic exercise restores elasticity and dilation to arteries, allowing them to behave years younger, while restoring youth and vigour to the vessels.

Run one step and all our muscles – quads, calves, glutes, even our lats, shoulders and biceps – demand more oxygen. To feed them, we suck in air, our heart beats faster and it pumps oxygenated blood through the arteries to every muscle fibre. The process isn’t just a delivery mechanism. It’s invisibly keeping our arteries strong and healthy, transforming our heart into a younger version of itself. When arteries are healthy, science shows that everything outside the cardiovascular system is usually healthy, too. Cognitive decline and disease are closely linked to deterioration in artery function and health. The increased risk of diabetes as we age is highly correlated with vascular health and function. Kidney disease is also closely linked to the health of our arteries, as are neurodegenerative diseases and inflammation. It’s scary stuff. But much less so if we’re runners. We joggers can slash our risk of cardiovascular-related death – the world’s biggest killer – by 45–70%.

Regardless of how old you are, whether you’re male or female, how much booze you drink or whether you’ve ever exercised before, if you start running just 1–2 hours per week, it can dramatically increase your odds of living longer.

Running also strengthens lungs, helps to regulate blood sugar and therefore manage body weight, and strengthens the immune system – ever notice you don’t get viruses as often as your non-runner friends? For anyone over sixty, working out once or twice a week reduces all-cause mortality by 50% and reduces the risk of cancer threefold. ‘Motion is lotion’ and ‘mobility is medicine’ are other popular healthcare mantras.

In short, keep running and you can increase both the quantity and quality of your years.

So now you know some of the ways running improves your healthspan, how can you continue to reap the rewards of running? Run Forever gives you the tools to keep moving - stronger, smarter, longer.