When we compiled our list of “25 Who Reinvented the Marathon” to run in conjunction with our celebration of “25 Years of Marathon Madness” (M&B, September/October 1997), we placed Dr. Ken Cooper 19th on the list.

Cooper is a former Air Force doctor who conducted extensive research on the benefits of aerobic exercise in stemming cardiovascular disease. His 1968 book, Aerobics, began a mini-running boom when in it Cooper advised people to run/jog three or four times a week, roughly three miles at a time, as a prophylactic against the greatest of all American killers: heart disease.

His book sold extremely well. In the process, his message reached many of his fellow Americans who had come through World War II and the Korean War, and in the process he undoubtedly added many quality years to countless lives. The mini-running boom that Ken created was too early to affect greatly the millions of Americans born after World War II. When his message arrived in the late ’60s, they were immersed in that glorious stage of life known as teenagehood when young people feel invincible.

Their generation’s messiah would come in 1972 in the person of Frank Shorter. He was one of their own, and he made the crazy point that you didn’t have to quit taking part in sports just because you were no longer a student at a high school or university. You could actually continue to participate in sports after graduation. You could run to stay fit, to keep the famed American potbelly at bay, and to feel good about yourself.

Millions of fellow Baby Boomers followed Frank’s lead. Medical researchers were thrilled. Besides the pool of adult exercisers Ken Cooper had generated in the 1960s, there was now an even larger pool of adults getting into running, and many of them were willing to serve as guinea pigs in the cardiovascular health wars. The benefits to one’s health and fitness and well-being from long-distance running seemed obvious. Many of the researchers themselves were or soon became runners. The enthusiasm was contagious. So contagious, in fact, that it actually got out of hand.

In the late 1970s, Dr. Tom Bassler made the audacious statement that if you could run a marathon in under four hours, you were immune to heart disease. This bold pronouncement by a medical doctor merely fed into the already growing feel-good aspect of running until runners began to believe the inevitable, that childhood’s end had never come, that they were once again invincible.

The soft-spoken, cautious, and modest Ken Cooper was suddenly overshadowed by brash medical folks with more appealing messages. Ken Cooper continued to work quietly at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas and sort of faded from the radar screen.

Jim Fixx’s Complete Book of Running made the sport accessible to everyone who wanted in, and he glorified the Boston Marathon and the marathon in general, making it an aerobic holy grail. On a monthly basis from the pages of Runner’s World, Dr. George Sheehan sang paeans to the benefits of running. Dr. Jack Scaff in Hawaii took Canadian Terence Kavanagh’s post-cardiac-patients-as-runners theory farther by training them to run marathons. A segment of America was on a runner’s high of invulnerability and self-congratulation.

Then in July 1984 Jim Fixx died of a heart problem—while on a run. Jim Fixx had run marathons in under four hours (he had run 3:15:54 in Boston 1975, for example). Those who had heartily endorsed Bassler’s theory of invincibility suddenly began to add caveats. Suddenly runners who weeks before had felt well-armored against the Grim Reaper were running scared and exposed. The influx into running slowed. The first Running Boom came to an end.

Back into the vortex jogged Ken Cooper. He wrote Running Without Fear (published in April 1985), a book meant to alleviate the fear of aerobic exercisers that they might be endangering themselves by engaging in their sport, as Fixx had. The book opened with a careful examination of how and why Jim Fixx died. (Fixx had been to Cooper’s institute not long before his death to research a book and had turned down Cooper’s offer of a stress test.) In typical fashion, Ken Cooper made the subject of Fixx’s death (due in large part to a family history of heart disease) accessible to the lay amateur athlete. His careful consideration of Fixx’s case and a re-examination of what aerobic exercise does and does not bestow was, as usual, level-headed and commonsensical. Then, as was his wont, Cooper went back to work doing research.

Within the last five years, Cooper has released research that seems to indicate that too much aerobic exercise may compromise our bodies through excessive production of free radicals, which could in turn open the way for certain cancers and heart disease. Cooper now recommends a more moderate exercise program than some of us are used to practicing. And, as a result, he has been criticized for it. Our choice of Ken Cooper as one of the people who largely influenced marathoning over the past 25 years was criticized by several readers who are reacting negatively to his caution that too much of a good thing may be just that—too much.

Cooper’s caution is not especially appreciated by those who have found in running long distances a sort of religion or who have substituted running for other negative addictions in their lives they may have left behind.

Some would protect the veneer of invulnerability by stoning the messenger. It would seem more prudent to put aside one’s personal prejudices on behalf of running and objectively consider the evidence Ken Cooper presents. Extreme emotional involvement and objective consideration don’t mix well.

Before disparaging Ken Cooper’s research because it seems odious to our own self-interests, it would behoove us to consider all research carefully so we can better modify and thereby perpetuate our running programs.

Let’s consider a series of facts:

1. Criticizing Dr. Ken Cooper because he’s saying something you may not want to hear is unfair and unwise. Cooper is a respected and careful researcher. He isn’t a hotshot shooting from the hip, hoping to hit the media attention jackpot. When he speaks, many of us listen because we’ve come to respect the fact that he doesn’t speak to hear himself talk.
2. Long-distance running (and especially extremely long-distance running) is an unnatural act. Sure, a lot of people do it, but that doesn’t make it any more natural than sticking dried leaves in your mouth, setting fire to them, and then inhaling the smoke produced.

There is a swell theory about why marathoners tend to hit the wall around 18 to 20 miles. The theory is that this distance is hardwired into us through evolution. Primitive Hunting Man had a range of 8 to 10 miles per day from the tribe’s center. Go out 8 to 10 miles on the hunt, then return 8 to 10 miles, with or without game. Considering that the Primitive Hunting Man had no asphalt highways to travel, an 8- to 10-mile range sounds about right. What happened after the day’s 16- to 20-mile hunting trip? Man’s natural resources (glycogen) gave out, and the hunter became exhausted, that is, he hit the wall.

Let’s face it, running 26.2 miles, or 50 miles, is not a natural act. Yes, human beings were built to sweat more efficiently than other animals, which is one of the reasons hunters could run game to exhaustion, but only to a point. And yes, human beings were built upright so they could see farther, which often included the far horizon, about which they were curious; but they didn’t necessarily get to the far horizon and back in one day. True, the Tarahumara regularly run great distances, and they are indeed a primitive people, but they do so as part of a traditional ball game.

After thousands upon thousands of miles of running and observing and questing and questioning, Dr. George Sheehan became one of the foremost proponents of the theory that long-distance running is an unnatural act. But the pursuit of unnatural acts is a very human trait. With every unnatural act, however, there is the promise of dire consequences. Sail off the edge of the world? Dragons who live down there’ll eat you. Seal yourself in a tin can and lob it toward the moon? You’ll die. There isn’t any air out there.

3. You don’t have to be a great thinker to agree with the statement that “not all running is good running,” although you don’t have to travel too far to get arguments on that point. Some runners will, indeed, argue that all running is good running. But they’re wrong. Anyone who has run for any length of time can explicate on this point.
4. No two people are constructed exactly the same; ergo, the same running program will affect different people in different ways. What is biomechanically agreeable to one runner will cripple another. There are enough examples of this limping around.
5. Cause-and-effect as practiced in the real world does apply to running. Run too many miles, and an overuse injury sets in. Rest too little, and overuse and burnout sets in.
6. More miles does not equal more immunity from disease. In fact, there is a point beyond which more miles equals more susceptibility to disease. While scientists like Ken Cooper work on this interaction slowly and logically, the rest of us can rely on years of simple observation. Ask Bill Rodgers what used to happen to him in the final weeks before a major marathon. His immune system would become compromised, and he would suddenly be open to virtually any little bug making the rounds, which inspired him to avoid bugs at all costs. Who hasn’t pushed the personal endurance envelope only to break down and succumb to any germ that came along?

By the same token, it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize-winning scientist to realize that the more we break ourselves down in training, the more susceptible we are to whatever comes along, from flu bugs to certain cancers.

7. Long-distance runners, some of them better than most of us, do die prematurely from heart disease. It isn’t widely advertised, but some years ago, four hardened veterans of the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run were diagnosed with various forms of heart disease—in spite of long-running aerobic programs that were off the charts. One of them, the lovable Dick Collins, died of a heart attack on February 18, 1997, at the age of 63. Even more sobering, however, was the 1997 death by heart attack of Jim Pellon, 47, who had “buckled” 12 times

at Western States and during the 1980s was one of the stalwarts of this much-respected race. Jim took second place in 1982 (17:22), 1985 (16:48:31), and 1986 (16:48:19); he also took fourth in 1988 and fifth in both 1981 and 1989, and sixth in 1984.

We’d all like to think that our running makes us special, and in a way, it does. But it doesn’t make us invincible. And someone arguing that running doesn’t make us invincible deserves to be heard as much as or perhaps more than the too-oft’-repeated mantra of immortality.

The debate comes back to discussions that used to get swatted around like tennis balls 20 years ago: If there were no medical benefit, would you still run? Which is more important, quality of life or quantity?

Life is a daily gamble with but one ultimate outcome. Instead of attempting to silence the messenger who bears disturbing news, we’d be better served to listen carefully. Ken Cooper doesn’t tell us to stop running but rather to be aware that there are consequences to all acts, both positive and negative. He also offers simple vitamin approaches to controlling the free radicals that excessive exercise produces.

To close our minds to solid scientific information because we don’t want to have our world shaken up is more an unnatural act for naturally curious critters like homo sapiens than is running too long and too often.

—Rich Benyo