Are you in this for the long run — as well as the long ride?
Called a “must-read” for anyone hoping “to remain a healthy, happy runner for a long time” by Running Times magazine (see review below), Run for Life: the Anti-Aging, Anti-Injury, Super-Fitness Plan to Keep You Running to 100 brings super-fit longevity to running. Traveling the running wor ld from Kenya to Tahiti and Boston to Badwater, Roy M. Wallack talks to the world’s top coaches, researchers, and Hall of Fame athletes like Bill Rodgers, Frank Shorter and Rod Dixon. The result: A strategy, summarized as Run Soft • Run Less • Run Stronger • Run Flexible • Run Straighter • Run Faster that delivers a one-two punch that delays and even reverses the two factors that cripple all runners: the general muscle and VO2 Max deterioration that starts at age 35 and accelerates alarmingly after 50, and the specific joint deterioration and injuries caused by running. Run for Life is loaded with ground-breaking concepts, including:
•Soft Running: A 5-step form overhaul that reduces knee-shock by 50%.
• A Call to Arms: A cheap, simple handgrip that automatically perfects your form.
•HGH Strength Training: How high-intensity exercises stop age-related muscle deflation and build speed, power, balance, and quick-reaction time by jacking up natural release of human growth hormone.
•The Ultra Interval: Crazy-hard 20- and 30-second all-out sprints that leave you gasping—and cue rapid strength increases that essentially make you younger.
• High-tech Water Running: Pool tools that made a world record holder faster and safer on land.
•Barefoot Running: How going shoeless strengthens feet, cuts shock, builds longevity.
•Yoga on the Run: A just-for-runners warm-up by star multisp ort yogi Steve Ilg.
•Bionic Hips & Knees: Medical breakthroughs restoring broken-down marathoners to their 30-year-old selves.
•Secrets of the Kenyans: From the Rift Valley, meet the Italian genius who made them great.
•Anti-Back-Pain Posture Poses: Why “standing like a kindergartener”
helps you fly. •Runaway Weight Loss: How slight changes in diet & timing melt fat and race times.
•Motivation Magic: How rivalries, exotic travel, far-out goals, giving back, and groups like the New England 65+ Running Club keep the fire burning.
• Oral-history interviews and fit aging strategies of 10 all-time greats:
Olympic champion Frank Shorter; Marathon king Bill Rodgers; Octogenarian heroine Helen Klein; Heart-rate guru Sally Edwards; Super-coach and history’s third 4-minute miler Laszlo Tabori; mile-to-marathon superstar Rod Dixon; first Boston female finisher Bobbi Gibb, Hall of Famer and author Tom Osler; 85-year-old pony-tailed wildman John Cahill; and Aerobics pioneer Dr. Kenneth Cooper