and road sign, | make my way up and around the final loop, eventually doing my walk/run again past the campus of the Technical University. Finally, I make the turn down the 2K straightaway to the finish and pick it up to a slow jog. I go down Hlavna, past the marathon statue for the fourth time that day, around the cathedral, and into the finish area in 3:57. My second half is almost 30 minutes slower than the first. At the finish, I collect my finisher’s medal, am greeted by my wife, Karen (she never asks why, just shows up to take me home), and sink onto a bench in the park at the town square to reflect on being deceived yet again by overoptimism and bad judgment.

As my wife and I wait for the number 7 tram to take us back to our apartment—I am not able to walk Hlavné for a fifth time that day—I look around. The sun is shining, the work crew is beginning to disassemble the spectator viewing stands, and a group of boys across the street are trying to dislodge something in a tree branch—perhaps a shirt or jacket tossed up there by a runner. The boys will soon have a memento of the day; I have mine, a finisher’s medal pressing heavily on my chest. In the end, it’s the finishing part that brings me back to run marathons; I just need to get better control of the starts. Overall, it was a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon in KoSice, Slovakia. If you are also looking for a new start, you might try it sometime. The KPM is usually scheduled for the first Sunday in October.

And What | Learned From It

1. In planning your marathon pace, remember the advice that your high school teachers gave you for taking multiple-choice exams: don’t change your answer at the last minute.

2. When running in a new event or a familiar event in a new place, come prepared. We know not to go off into the woods on a long trail run without food and water, but sometimes we take it for granted that these essentials will be available when we need them on a city course.

3. If the race starts after 8:00 a.m., eat a full breakfast. Turkish nougat is fine for topping the tank before a half-marathon, but it will not get you through a full marathon.

4. When planning your race pace, work out the times for four equally spaced distances so that they can be easily remembered, and write them somewhere on your body.

5. Finishing the marathon is like finishing a competitive game of p darts—at the end, to win, you must hit all the numbers. Ah

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

To Live Your Life to the Fullest, Live It as Though You Were Perpetually a Nine-Year-Old. Part 7.

The first six parts of Dr. Sheehan’s book appeared in our last six issues.

Thirteen BREATHS AND BURPS

Is the “second-wind” a myth? Is it a romantic term left over from the days when every hero had a stout heart, a clean conscience—and a second wind?

In 1915, the great physiologist Walter Cannon called the second wind, “an almost miraculous refreshment and renewal of vigor.”

Yet most physiologists today seem to doubt its existence. And those who mention it do so only to disparage it. “It has been demonstrated,” writes English exercise expert Vaughan Thomas, “that the second-wind has no effect on performance.”

Even if you translate second-wind into “warmup” you will find that researchers are split down the middle on whether a warmup does the athlete any good. In their Scientific Basis of Athletic Conditioning, Jensen and Fisher report eight “yeas” and seven “nays” for the warmup idea, which are the usual statistics pollsters obtain in issues where emotions, not facts, are at issue.

But I’m here to state that the second-wind does exist. [have experienced and continue to experience almost daily that “miraculous refreshment”—that point where the runner’s transmission slips into high gear and running suddenly becomes rhythmic and effortless.

If you start a training run at a slow speed, keeping well within yourself, at about six minutes this feeling of being the complete runner will steal over you and possess you. The only external sign for me is a warm, pleasant sweat. Inside is euphoria and confidence.

Is this all mental, a form of self-hypnosis? Not if you listen to the psychobiologists. These men, the offspring of a marriage between psychology and exercise physiology, started with the idea that what was important was not “what the individual was doing” but rather “what he thinks he is doing.”

“Perceived exertion” (what the runner said he felt) was, they found, directly correlated to what their sophisticated instruments said was happening to the heart and lungs and muscles. The runner’s sensations do indeed result from his physiological processes. He is a totality of mind and body reacting totally. If the runner reports a second-wind, a feeling that the running is measurably easier, then the second-wind exists.

Why then have the physiologists failed to demonstrate this phenomenon? Why have they been unable to capture this happening on their graphs and charts? The reason, I suggest, is that they have been looking in the wrong places. The natural habitat of the second-wind is natural man. Primitive man, leaving his cave for the day’s hunt, certainly started at an easy lope that allowed the body processes to adjust. He surely sought a pace which would give him the feeling that the chase would be successful.

Unless scientists reconstruct these essentials—the start from rest and a slow pace—experiments to find the second wind and its effects will fail. On the few occasions when these precautions have been observed, the experiment has been successful.

At the Tokyo Olympics, for instance, Japanese researchers recruited the world’s outstanding marathoners for such an investigation. Using a treadmill and these previously rested runners, they did indeed demonstrate the physiological changes of the second-wind. The most clearcut results were noted in the case of the great Abebe Bikila.

This two-time Olympic gold medalist got on the treadmill without prior warmup and started running at an easy pace. His heart rate and respiratory rate gradually rose over a period of three minutes, reaching a plateau. And then suddenly, at the three-minute mark (it was later for the less gifted), Bikila had a sharp drop in his pulse and breathing. He also began to sweat and his blood pressure widened. He was in the perfect physiological state for distance running.

It is as simple as that. Easy and natural does it. You have to avoid rush and bustle and pushing and shoving, and put away impatience and force and speed, if you want to find your second-wind.

* Eo *

In autumn, the sound of my belch is heard through the land. Fall is the Camelot of runners. There are races everywhere—races run in air turned crisp and invigorating, the perfect temperature for distance running.

But the races also bring tension. In those minutes before the start, I feel threatened. I know I may be beaten. I know I will surely feel pain. And not only my mind knows this, my entire body knows it and acts accordingly. Hence, the belch. That is the way I react when I am in a situation where I am embarrassed, frustrated or apprehensive. The belch is something rarely uttered in anger. It is not the roar of a lion, but the bleat of a sheep.

You might say I was born with this belch. I was certainly born with a dominant vagus nerve which causes spasms of the stomach and excess secretion of acid, especially when under stress. I was also born loosely tied together. Because of this defect in my tissues, my cutoff valve that keeps gas or gastric juice from going back up my esophagus is weak. Put acid and spasm and a weak valve together and there is my belch.

Still, even with these explanations, some think my belch indefensible. To all but the belcher, this noise seems to be produced by conscious effort and therefore is easily suppressed. Physicians regard belchers as air swallowers, put them down as neurotics and the cause of their own problems. No wonder the belcher begins to feel like a pariah, an object of ridicule in society, misunderstood even in his own home (which, incidentally, makes him belch even more).

Ihave found, however, new support for the argument that I am a product of forces beyond my control. When appeals to consider my faulty heredity fail, when no one will listen to my story of being born with hyperacidity and an incompetent esophageal sphincter, I can now discuss Niko Tinbergen. Tinbergen has credibility.

He shared the Nobel Prize for biology =— in 1972 with Konrad Lorenz and Karl

Van Frisch. He earned this award by

observing how animals behave in their

natural lives in the wild. One of the ways of behavior is displacement movements, which are apparently inappropriate or irrelevant actions performed when the animal cannot discharge some powerful motivation. Such a situation occurs when the fighting drive and the drive to escape are both activated. When faced with this internal discord, the male three-spine stickleback digs a hole. I belch.

An extension of these displacement activities to humans has already been made. Tinbergen gives yawning as an example. And, of course, yawning is a phenomenon prevalent in competitive running. Before important races, many runners yawn constantly. recall hearing a spectator comment on how relaxed these yawning runners were, when actually it was an indication of the tremendous tension building up inside of them.

Other innate actions like scratching your ear or rearranging your hair are instances of displacement activities, as are certain learned patterns like lighting a cigarette or handling keys. All say the same thing: this particular human animal is in conflict. So the belch I emit as I place my foot just behind the starting line means I dread what is about to happen. I would much rather be somewhere else.

Once the gun sounds, however, resolution occurs. All is now changed. I am now totally mobilized to this new action and the belch, which is really the sound of a man in dilemma, is gone.

I move to the rhythm of my breathing, gradually settling into my own tempo, neither pursuing nor pursued. The pain comes and is accepted. There are groans alternating with “Oh God!” on the last mile through the hills. But then I can see the finish and I let everything go.

Afterwards, there is peace. It will be hours, perhaps even days before I start belching again.

* Eo *

The “stitch” will never make Disease-of-the-Month or have a foundation named after it. Discovering the cure for the stitch won’t mean the Nobel Prize, or an invitation to the White House, or even a line in the medical journals. But it will make a lot of runners happy. And it will silence those malcontents who go around saying, “They can put a man on the moon but they can’t cure the stitch.”

Oddly enough, it looks as if “they” are about to cure the stitch. The pieces are coming together. The pieces are “backward breathing” and “air trapping,” and their antidotes “‘belly-breathing” and “resistance.”

But let’s start at the beginning. The stitch is known to be due to diaphragm spasms. This excruciating pain in the lower rib cage and its frequent satellite pain in the shoulder is caused by a charleyhorse of the muscle that divides the chest from the abdomen. The stitch is the diaphragm gone haywire. Man’s perfectly designed ventilatory system is being mishandled by its owner.

The most obvious maltreatment is the sudden, prolonged use of the diaphragm ina sedentary individual. The diaphragm is accustomed to moving 1.5 centimeters 18 times a minute while we are at rest. Maximal effort brings those figures to nearly seven centimeters a breath and a rate of 45 breaths a minute. No wonder the diaphragm complains.

Such demands on an unconditioned muscle explain the stitch that occurs in beginning runners. But what of the veteran runners who still are bedeviled by this spasm? What about accomplished distance runners who still experience this pain from time to time?

These athletes, the scientists suggest, are doing other and more serious things to their diaphragms. They are breathing backward or trapping air, or both. Pulmonary function experts are finding that certain normal people have a tendency for their tiny bronchial tubes to collapse and accumulate air in the lungs. Breathing

backward is a much more common phenomenon. When I breathe, my diaphragm should go down and my belly out. A minute’s observation will convince most people they are doing quite the opposite. When they breathe in, their bellies go in; when they breathe out, their bellies go out.

When the diaphragm is being stretched by air trapping and further stretched by backward breathing, it is only a matter of time until the runner once more experiences the most dreaded of all racing pains—the stitch.

Knowing these mechanisms, however, we can now move toward a cure. This means no less than a complete re-education of the breathing cycle, the sort of thing you might learn best from a singing teacher rather than a track coach. Maximum breath control is a necessary—you could say vital—part of every singer’s schooling. They have to develop the ability to fill every nook and cranny of their lungs before they go into those arias.

Only the correct belly breathing method can do this. At the same time, singers are automatically correcting any tendency to trap air. Singing, which is expelling air against resistance, is as good a way as any to keep these small bronchial tubes from collapsing and retaining air. In fact, any slight resistance to exhalation will do it. Some simple home exercises may do just as well:

1, Learn to use your diaphragm correctly. Lie on the floor with a weight or books on your stomach. As you breathe, the books should rise. Keep this up until you breathe this way naturally. It is, after all, the way the body was designed to breathe. One difficulty will be tight stomach muscles. Stretching exercises usually have to be done quite persistently to overcome this difficulty.

2. Make it a habit of breathing out against a slight resistance. An occasional groan to get maximal exhalation is very helpful. Groaning also induces you to contract your stomach muscles when you breathe out. Some very good runners grunt or groan with each breath even in long races. They have apparently found on their own the value of belly-breathing and exhaling against resistance.

Fourteen AGE AND ABILITY

Do athletes live longer than non-athletes? Will winning a letter in school add years to your life? Has early physical competence anything to do with later survival? Do sportsmen, in short, have a greater Longevity Quotient than their spectator classmates?

In a world whose disease is heart disease and whose best remedy may be exercise, such questions have increasing significance. Unfortunately, the answers the scientists come up with are yes, or no, or maybe.

Yes, writes Dr. Curtis Prout, who found that Yale and Harvard oarsmen lived over six years longer than randomly selected classmates.

No, claims Dr. Peter Schnorr, who discovered that 297 Danish champions who attained the age of 50 thereafter lived no longer than the average for the country.

Maybe, asserts Dr. Dale Largey, who studied life spans in “Who Was Who in American Sports” and found that athletes in certain sports—especially track—lived longer than the average.

The waters have been further muddied by Dr. Anthony Polednack, whose study of 6303 Harvard men pointed out that winning a letter might add years to your life—but only if it was in a minor sport. Major athletes according to Polednack, died significantly earlier than non-athletes from coronary heart disease, and perhaps earlier and more often from tumors.

Despite these discrepancies and apparent disagreements, the whole question has, it seems to me, a fairly simple solution. None of the studies shows whether or not the athletes remained athletes. We can assume they didn’t. Polls in England, where sports participation runs high, disclosed that only 10% of married men ages 23-30 continued their sports activities. Americans probably have an even worse record.

The question that these researchers are asking is, “Do ex-athletes live longer than non-athletes?” The answer is “Probably not.” The differences detected by Drs. Prout, Schnorr, Polednack and Largey are simply the tendency of our population to have different life spans, based on body build. Your carcass, which anthropologist Earnest Hooten said is the best clue to your character, is also the best clue to your allotted life span.

The muscular, aggressive ex-football players are statistically susceptible to cardiovascular disease to just that degree shared by their muscular, aggressive non-athletic counterparts. Onlookers who share the magnificent physical and psychological attributes of crewmen will share in their extended life span. Thin, small-boned people represented in sports by distance runners are genetically programmed to live longer than the general average.

All this may explain our present information, but it leaves still to be answered the question of whether or not an athletic program continuing into middle age has any effect on our longevity. Do athletes live longer than ex-athletes? Can the Longevity Quotient be enhanced by fitness and reduced by a life-style of overindulgence and psychological stress?

The answer to that, I suspect, is “yes.” Such a premise is strengthened by the findings of Dr. Ernst van Aaken on the effects of maximal endurance running. Reviewing reports on 1000 members of the Association of Veteran Long Distance Runners between the ages of 40-90 from 29 countries, Dr. van Aaken did not find one case of a heart attack or cancer in five years of observation.

This almost incredible statement is supported by the work of Dr. Thomas Bassler who has found almost absolute immunity to coronary disease in runners actively competing at the marathon distance or training six miles or more per day.

The moral is obvious: Like everyone else, including the wife and kids, your body keeps asking, “Yes, but what have you done for me lately?”

Eo * *

Consider the nine-year-old. If anyone has made it in this life, it’s the nine-yearold. You could, of course, just say the child. That would put you right with the Lord (“Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven’’) and the poets like Eliot (“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time”).

The child is the answer, and, of those years, I pick the nine-year-old. He is pound for pound the world’s best endurance athlete. And he moves with the grace and elegance of the free animal. He has, as German physiologists have discovered, the biggest heart volume for his weight that he will ever have unless he is an Olympic champion. He is therefore the nearest thing to perpetual motion in human form you will ever see. And yet he is capable at other times of the contented lethargy of a lion after a kill.

The nine-year-old can teach us a lot about our bodies. He does nothing, you see, that his body doesn’t tell him is in some way good. Consider some of his instinctive reactions: his recess periods, his desire to go barefoot, his aversion to baths.

Take recess for one—those quarter-hours of helter skelter bedlam and hilarity, those 15 minutes of maximum unprogrammed physical activity with the noise level of Kennedy Airport. Where are adults’ recesses? Gone, of course. Gone and replaced by low blood sugar and coffee breaks. Now that mid-morning feeling that called us to action, that low blood sugar that told us we were now ready for our best physical effort, is being dieted and medicated and fed out of existence. Only the nine-year-old knows his recess brings him and his blood sugar up to normal until lunch. If we listened to him, the streets would be filled with running, playing people about 10:30 every morning.

For the nine-year-old, playing comes naturally. No Canadian Air Force exercises for him. His preferences come from his total person, not the dictates of social status or medical authorities. If we take to exercise now, we should remember what we liked to do when we were nine, before we began to conform, to do the “right” things, to follow the current craze whether it be jogging, skiing or weight lifting.

Whatever the nine-year-old does, he is in no hurry. His tempo is decided by his body and senses and emotions working in harmony. Ready at times to exploit to the fullest every hour of the day, to use himself to the bone, he also can spend a day in idleness, recognizing all these actions as ends, not means.

Whatever he does, he would prefer to do it in bare feet. Every schoolboy knows shoes to be the enemy. The foot wants no shoe, no more than the body wants to ride in a car. If we must have shoes, let them be the mold of our footprints. Some adults have already discovered that and are making shoes like that footprint.

Some adults may also discover the truth about baths. Why do nine-year-olds who love to swim hate baths? Why do children who won’t leave the water in the summertime refuse to get into a tub in the winter? Swimming is good; baths are bad.

It could be simply esthetics. The bathtub is not the finest work of art in the house. But it may be more than that. Baths in the winter lead to chills and chills to colds. Baths also drain energy. Any athlete or nine-year-old knows that. Baths make one relaxed and sleepy, and no one with the world and its wonders in front of him wants to sleep.

So the nine-year-olds do have lessons for us. They are, I suspect, one of those small “pockets of phenomena” which anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss are studying to understand other ways of life, other ways of happiness.

“Anthropology,” says Levi-Strauss, “invites us to temper our pride and to respect other life styles.”

I’ll take the life style of the nine-year-old: spontaneous, effortless, innocent and easy, filled with wonder and new things to which he responds totally with his head, his heart, his gut.

* Eo *

Aging is a continuous, linear process. Body time does not bend. It is not relative; it is relentless. Our lives follow an appointed course. We may not go gentle into that good night, but we will go and we will go at a predictable rate. Here and there, some slip through the net—a Picasso, a Grandma Moses, an occasional athlete, not a few ballerinas. But they are quirks of nature. For them, the bad genes are absent, as they are in those mountain people living in enclaves like Hunza and Vilcabamba and Abkhazia.

The rest of us echo the Psalmist: “Let me know, O Lord, my end and the number of my days that I may know how frail I am.” That’s what we want to know: exactly how frail we are, when we peak physically and what is in store for us in the future. What can we expect at one and 20, one and 40, one and 60, one and 80?

Some centuries back, Aristotle suggested that the physical acme occurred between the ages of 30 and 35. The intellectual acme he put later, at the age of 51. Aquinas set the end of youth and the beginning of wisdom at the age of 40. Only then, he thought, could a person become a philosopher. Clemenceau remarked that everything he knew, he had learned after he was 30. There is, you see, a general agreement that aging has merits for the mind, as it does for fine wine.

But testing intelligence and imagination and creativity is a chancy business, and rarely convincing. It is not yet the science that scientists make out. Applied

physiology is, on the other hand, at a point where very sophisticated measurements of bodily function can be made quite accurately. With such methods, we should get all the answers we need about when we peak and how fast we age.

Unfortunately, we don’t get those answers. We can measure decreases in vital capacity, kidney function, near vision, basal metabolism, sense of taste, cardiac output and more. But we are not at all sure what those changes mean when it comes to overall performance of the human body. The question remains as to what the ordinary person can do in a real-life situation when he puts his mind and body into it.

I think we are finally getting some answers. Dr. L. E. Bottinger, a professor of medicine at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, has one answer. Bottinger took the problem out of the laboratories and onto the ski course of Vasa and the running course of Lidingo in Sweden. And in place of the 25 medical students in the usual experiment, he had 7625 skiers and 1911 runners—a cross-section of the population with regard to age, occupation, education, etc. And this was not just a few minutes on the treadmill. The Vasa race extends a distance of 87 kilometers (54 miles); Lidingo is a shorter, faster race of 30 kilometers (19 miles).

Michael Hughes \

Bottinger sorted out the Vasa and Lidingo finishers into age groups of five years—starting with the 16-20 sample and ending with 61-65. Taking the mean time of these groups, he made two findings of great interest:

° The best performances (lowest times) were turned in by the 31-35-year-old skiers and the 26-30-year-old runners.

¢ The times rose from that point practically linearly with age. This decrease in performance came to approximately 6-7% every 10 years.

The younger age of the runners reflects the less demanding nature of the event. Lidingo is more purely physical. Vasa is a super-endurance race where technique and physiological factors play a large role. And here age has the edge.

Taken together, these races tell us more than we ever knew about when a body peaks, and when and how fast its physical working capacity declines. Bottinger’s work is a thing of beauty. The size of the sample is awesome, the statistics are beyond question, the experimental situation is unparalleled. But what thrills the reader more is the evidence of the enormous power of the common man—and more particularly the aging common man.

Time may be relentless, but Vasa and Lidingo prove that we were not made to be spectators. We are continually capable of doing whatever we did in our prime—a little slower, perhaps, somewhat weaker, surely, but if they wait around long enough we’ll finish.

* Eo *

One of the beautiful things about running is that age has no penalties. The runner lives in an eternal present. The passage of time does not alter his daily self-discovery, his struggles and his sufferings, his pains and his pleasures. The decline of his ability does not interfere with the constant interchange between him, his solitude, and the world and everyone around him. And neither of these happenings prevents him from challenging himself to the ultimate limit, putting himself in jeopardy, courting crisis, risking catastrophe.

Because he refuses to look back, the runner remains ageless. That is his secret, that and the fact that his pursuit of running is in obedience to, in Ellen Glasgow’s phrase, “a permanent and self-renewing inner compulsion.”

In my 50s, I am aware of all this. Like all runners, I live in the present. I am not interested in the way we were. The past is already incorporated in me. There is no use returning to it. I live for the day. Running gives me self-expression, a way of finding out who I am and who I will be. It makes me intimate with pain. I know the feeling of too little oxygen, of too much lactic acid. I have, always within reach, the opportunity to test my absolute barriers, to search out the borders set up by straining muscles and a failing brain.

But what about performance and competition? What about time and place? How does the aging runner handle the stopwatch? How can he feel really competitive during a race? The answers are (1) age-rated performances, and (2) age-group races.

For less than the entry fee to the Boston marathon, you can get a computer printout of your age-rated performances for every standard running distance. With this point scoring, you can compare your results not only with your own achievements from year to year, but with world class (1000 points), or national championship (900), or high school dual meet (600-700) performances.

Age-group racing normally begins at age 40 for older runners (there’s a similar program for the very young), with classes split down to five-year increments.

Together, they make age 55 as exciting as 21. They make every race important, and therefore stimulating and absorbing and exhilarating just like mine on one weekend.

The first was the 40-and-over mile. Normally, I would be over my head in the 40-and-over race. Some of these runners arrive at the line with the icing of their 40th birthday cake still on the corners of their mouths. But this time only one really good runner, Joe Bessel, showed up. Bessel won by a hundred yards to polite applause. But the crowd was on its feet and shouting for three of us fighting it out down that last furlong, the longest homestretch I have ever seen.

I just outlasted the other two in 5:19 (840 points) and afterward received my plaque from Ben Jipcho (an 1100-point miler). Now you can say what you will, but there are not too many ways a 55-year-old can equal taking a second place, running the equivalent of a 4:17 mile and getting his prize from one of the world’s best milers—especially when Ben Jipcho says “Fantastic . . .” in handing it to you.

The weekend, however, was not over. A five-mile race with 300 entries was the next day. Here, I moved back into the 50-and-over category and my initial appraisal at the starting line disclosed there was no one to worry about. I could concentrate on my form, my time and my point score. Winning the 50-and-over would take care of itself.

So I was ina state of happy agony nearing the finish, knowing I was the winner in my division, when I saw Rod Nichols up ahead. I had always thought of Rod as a very good runner working out his salvation in the 40-and-over group. But I suddenly noticed that Rod was getting quite bald, and it occurred to me that Rod had been around the running scene for a very long time. He began to look more and more like a very competent 50-year-old.

Atconsiderable cost, partially paid for by the panic I felt at this thought, I caught up to him. Easing alongside, I casually gasped, “How old are you, Rod?”

“I’m 75,” he replied in a tone just short of exasperation, and then added, “I’m 44.”