Don’t have a stroke. And if you’re a woman, you’ll be less likely to have one if you walk two hours or more a week at a “brisk” pace. This according to a study published in “Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association,” which found that women exercising at this level were 37 percent less likely to have a stroke of any kind than sedentary types. Further, these brisk-paced walkers had a 68 percent lower risk of suffering a hemorrhagic stroke and a 25 percent lower risk of suffering an ischemic stroke. The exact relationship between walking and reduced stroke risk is unclear. The study was conducted as part of the long-term Women’s Health Study, a long-term study of 39,315 female health professionals who are predominantly white and whose average age is 54. Read more here.
Diet alone isn’t enough (again). More research, this time from the Oregon Health & Science University, shows that cutting back on calories alone isn’t enough to lose a significant amount of weight — you’ve got to exercise, too. In this latest affirmation of the need for diet and sweat, the school studied 18 female rhesus macaque monkeys. The monkeys were put on a high-fat diet for several years, then put back on a low-fat diet with a 30 percent reduction in calories. After a month, they exhibited no significant weight loss. During that time as well, the reduction in calories caused the monkeys to become less active. Another reduction in calories a month later saw the monkeys slack off even more. By comparison, a group of monkeys fed a normal monkey diet and trained to exercise for an hour a day on a treadmill did lose weight. The study offers further support to the belief that when the body receives fewer calories it tends to conserve what it’s getting. Read more here.
Pregnant women don’t exercise enough. A study at UNC-Chapel Hill finds that fewer than one in four pregnant women get enough exercise — “enough” being at least 30 minutes a day, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or 150 minutes a week, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “Physical activity during pregnancy … may help prevent gestational diabetes, support healthy gestational weight gain and improve mental health,” according to Kelly Everson, research associate professor of epidemiology in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and author of the study. The most common form of exercise for the moms-to-be who did exercise: walking. Read more here.
Don’t let being critically ill keep you from exercising. Exercise even benefits the critically ill, according to a study done in the medical intensive care unit at Johns Hopkins. 57 critically ill patients were put through 30- to 45-minute exercise sessions, which “included any combination of either leg or arm movements while lying flat in bed, sitting up or standing, or walking slowly in the ICU corridors.” The exercise both sped up recovery times and cut in half the amount of prescription sedatives required per patient. Read more here.
Mary Hartman was getting tired of joining Meetup walking groups that advertised a beginner’s pace, then turned out to be anything but. “We’d get done and they’d say, ‘You’re too slow,’” says Hartman. Then, like Oscar Madison, she was shown the door and asked never to return. By January, she realized that if she truly wanted a group that walked at a beginner pace, she’d have to create one herself. Thus was born the Raleigh Working Women’s Weight Loss Group.read more
I’d been trailing the woman for a few minutes when she decided to let me by. As I passed, she did a double take. “If I’d known you were a guy,” she said, “I would have let you pass sooner.”
Her comment backed a thought that had been developing over the past 10 miles: Women trail runners, as evidenced by the number who were reluctant to let me pass, are competitive. Very competitive.read more
I haven’t run in two weeks because of a twisted ankle, I can hardly breath because of the pollen, my feet are blistered from a 30-mile backpack trip earlier in the week, which didn’t do my knees any favors, either. And this morning at 8 I’m going out with more than 100 other runners on the inaugural Mountains-to-Sea Trail 12-mile Challenge. That’s 12 miles on the rocky, rooty, twisty, turny Falls Lake section of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail.read more
Thursday a week ago, Chuck picked up the phone in his Chicago home. It was his buddy, Stretch.
“What are you doing next week?” Stretch asked. “Wanna go on a road trip?”
Four days later, after loading Stretch’s Chevy Avalanche with an arsenal of groceries and driving 10 hours, the two were standing outside a yellow tent on the Appalachian Trail near Deep Gap, knocking to see if anyone was home. It was 7:30 in the morning. Is that … my dad? Jaime, one of the occupants, groggily wondered from within. Jaime and her hiking partner/boyfriend Doug were stunned to unzip their tent flap and see their fathers’ grinning faces in the doorway. The two AT thru-hikers were even more stunned when they followed their paternal units the half mile back down to Deep Gap and discovered a truckload of what helps keep thru-hikers plugging along through cold and rain, through heat and ticks, through blisters and debilitating fatigue. Trail magic.read more