A study of the 50 largest metro areas in the U.S. finds the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area is among the 10 “youngest” places in the country. The study, released today, looked at 52 factors and ranked the Triangle No. 8 nationally, just below No. 7 San Diego and just above No. 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul, in terms of how old we really are.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, our average annual age is 46.8. According to the study by RealAge.com, we’re more like 45.9.

The study was culled from questionnaires RealAge collects at its Web site. A thousand surveys for each of the 50 areas was randomly selected from questionnaires submitted over the past three years, according to RealAge’s chief medical officer, Dr. Keith Roach. RealAge says 27 million people have filled out the questionnaire since its introduction in 1999. The questionnaire is one of several tools offered by health Web site.

The Triangle’s ranking comes as a bit of a surprise, especially considering the five key health factors that accounted for 50 percent of a city’s “real age”: cholesterol, smoking, blood pressure, diabetes and weight. Located in a state that tips the scales when it comes to obesity (North Carolina ranked 10th in the nation in adult obesity according to a study last year) and is in the heart of tobacco country, Triangle residents nevertheless manage to live younger than their years.

Curiously, again considering the state’s obesity standing, the Triangle ranked as the nation’s youngest area in terms of cholesterol levels.

“Honestly, I was surprised at that,” Roach said Monday from New York. “But the ranking took into account good and bad cholesterol, and cholesterol can be affected by good genes and whether people are taking their medications for it.”

The Triangle also got good grades for drinking responsibly — at least among its men, who ranked sixth nationally. The Triangle’s women did not crack their gender’s top 10 list.

A curiosity on the subject of alcohol: Salt Lake City, which ranked as the nation’s youngest city overall, didn’t break the top 10 in responsible alcohol use.

“An average of one glass a day for men and a half a glass for women can lower your mortality rate,” Roach explained. It’s when you get to two drinks a day or more that alcohol negatively affects your lifespan. And four drinks or more at one time? “That’s considered binge drinking and your risk of accidental death goes sky high,” said Roach. Roach said Salt Lake City’s poor showing was based on the fact that people either drink too little or way too much.

We also sleep well in the Triangle In fact, only people who sleep better are in Austin and New York, the city that allegedly doesn’t sleep.

On smoking, another one of the study’s Big Five, the Triangle ranked 16th. “It was one of the few cities in the Southeast with a good score,” said Roach.

One area the Triangle needs to keep an eye on: hypertension. The Triangle ranked 31st nationally, prompting Roach to suggest our public health officials might want to step up free blood pressure tests.

Elsewhere in North Carolina, the Charlotte area ranked 34th, with residents there a tenth of a year younger than their calendar age, while the Triad — Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Highpoint — ranked as the nation’s second “oldest” area, with residents there exhibiting bodies a half year older than their calendar age.

Roach said he filtered through 300 medical journals and sources ranging from Harvard Medical School to the U.S. Census Bureau to determine criteria for the study. Some insight into four of the categories used.

• Aspirin use. We consume a ton of aspirin every year in this country — 16 tons, actually, according to Roach. It’s regular consumption by men over 45 and women over 55 is generally beneficial, he said. Regular consumption by younger users “can do more harm than good,” resulting in points off.
• Marital status. “This one’s complex,” said Roach. “Happily married is the best. Unhappily married is worse than divorced. Living alone is bad, especially for men.” Simply having more social interaction reduces the four forms of risk considered in the survey: cardiovascular (heart and stroke), cancers, accidents “and all others, including diabetes, infectious diseases and my favorite, getting hit by a meteor.”
• Income. This category gave the highest rankings to the cities where it’s costliest to live: 1. San Francisco bay area, 2. Washington-Baltimore, 3. New York. Roach conceded that the incomes there are obviously higher because of the cost of living, and that disposable income would have been a better tool, but they weren’t able to gather that information.
• Employment: Another complicated area, said Roach. “Fully employed or being a student is good, being unemployed is bad. Having two jobs is bad, and being part time when want to be full time is almost as bad as unemployed.”

For more information on the study, visit RealAge.com.

Photo: Jack Benny was forever 39. Can Trianglites stay forever 45.9?

The post Living young in the Triangle appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

At first, it seems like curious logic: A marathon is too much, I’ll do a triathlon instead. Curious, until you realize that the triathlon in question isn’t of the 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, then a 26.2-mile marathon Ironman variety. It’s the increasingly popular sprint triathlon kind, consisting of a roughly 300-yard swim, 12-mile bike ride and 3.1-mile run.

“Three miles seemed reasonable, I love being in the water and I love riding a bike,” Kim Feth of Apex recalls of her decision to get into shape by training for a sprint triathlon. “And with three sports, I figured I wouldn’t get bored.”

It was late 2009 and Feth had just turned 42. She was grieving the death of her mother, was plagued by headaches, her weight had ballooned to 207 and after putting in a full day at Poe Montessori Magnet School in Raleigh as lead secretary/bookkeeper/nurse, had little oomph left for exercise. Her A-ha moment came when her son approached one day and said, “All you ever do is lay on the couch and have a headache. When are you going to play with me?’”

She knew then that she had to do something. Shortly, she decided on a sprint tri. Her training began immediately — by walking laps in her living room. It was December, Feth explains: “I don’t like the cold.”

She didn’t want to pay to join a gym, so she went to WalMart and bought a training DVD. That first workout was one mile and it took her 30 minutes, again in her living room. “I thought I was going to fall over sideways,” she recalls.

She didn’t. She kept at it and my March was walking outside, for five miles at a brisk 12-minute-per-mile pace.

Also from the start, Feth signed up on RealAge.com, a Web site offering tips and tracking tools for people trying to get into better shape. She began eating better, looking now at food as fuel to feed her walking habit. “I stopped eating junk,” says Feth. She cut out sodas, substituting them with water, occasionally spruced up with lemon or cucumber. She switched from ground pork to the leaner ground turkey in the family’s weekly spaghetti, started using Greek yogurt instead of fatty sour cream, switched from fried chicken to baked or grilled, dropped from 2 percent to 1 percent milk, started using whole wheat noodles, stopped buying ice cream simply because it was on sale.

She was religious about entering every detail of her fitness program — what she ate, her workouts, her weight — into her RealAge.com tracker. She was especially tickled to see her measuring tape — a graphic device used to show progress — get smaller. “It’s goofy, but I love seeing that. I love seeing the progress that I made.”

Just two weeks into her new lifestyle Feth says she could notice a difference. “My pants were fitting better … I’ll over-share here. I was wearing size 18 pants [before launching her fitness regimen]. Realistically, I should have moved up to a bigger size, but that would have meant crossing the hallway in the mall to the big girl’s store. Mentally, I knew if I went into that store I was never coming back. I just couldn’t do that.”

Spring rolled around and Feth added cycling to her workout regimen. That, too, was unorthodox for a triathlete-in-training. Rather than three-hour rides in the country on a sleek carbon bike with aerobars, she was tooling around the neighborhood on the cruiser she had gotten for Christmas. When the neighborhood pool opened at the end of May, she added swimming. Again, her training deviated from the norm of triathletes swimming in 2,000 to 3,000 yards three times a week.

“I’d do mostly sidestroke, some backstroke,” she says, acknowledging the absence of the more competitive freestyle stroke. “I was losing weight, so what did I care?”

It wasn’t until she showed up for her target race, the Dash for Divas in September that the unorthodoxy of her training struck her. First, there was the 250-yard swim — in a murky lake. Feth had trained in a clear pool. Then the gun went off and the adrenaline kicked in. “I got so caught up in the pace I was out of breath. That’s a scary place to be.”

She made it out of the water in 35 minutes and ran to the bikes. “I noticed all the other moms were on serious racing bikes with those clip-in pedals. I’m in a mommy cruiser, in running shoes.

Time began to blur on the bike. Had she been pedaling five minutes? Five hours? Then she noticed a car was following her. She tried to wave it around, but it continued to stay on her rear wheel. She turned and discovered it was a sheriff’s deputy car, lights blazing: It was the escort car for the last rider, and it would keep her company through the end of the race. Not far from the finish — where volunteers were already packing up equipment — a volunteer told her, “You’re almost there! I’m going to run with you until 20 yards from the finish.” She did, peeling off so Feth could enjoy her moment alone. Or, as it turned out, with her awaiting husband and son. It was her 9-year-old son that provided her true motivation.

When she saw the police cruiser and realized she was the last racer, “It was all I could do not to break into tears. I just wanted to toss my bike in the trunk and quit.” She kept going, and when she saw her son at finish, realized, “I don’t care if I have to crawl across the finish line, I’m not going to let my son see me quit something. I want him to see what I’ve accomplished.”

Over the course of her training, Feth lost 34 pounds. She continues training and hopes to be under 150 pounds in time for her next sprint triathlon, the Ramblin’ Rose in Raleigh, on May 22.

The post An unorthodox approach to the sprint triathlon appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

Swim. Bike. Run.
We did them for fun as a kid. And, increasingly as we approach middle age, we’re doing them to get in shape. Only instead of spreading the activities out over the course of a day, we’re doing them in rapid succession: swimming  500 meters, hopping out of the pool for a 12-mile bike ride, then lacing up the running shoes for a three-mile run.
According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association, 1.2 million Americans participated in at least one triathlon in 2009. And according to USA Triathlon, which sanctions the majority of triathlons in the U.S., more than three quarters of triathletes eschew the longer Olympic and Ironman distances in favor of sprint triathlons, races that typically begin with 6 to 10 laps in the pool, followed by a 12- to 15-mile bike ride and a 3.1-mile run.
And it’s not 20something hard-bodies driving this trend: USA Triathlon, which has seen its membership grow seven fold in the past decade, to 134,942 in 2010, has seen the greatest growth in the 35-44 age group.
To a growing number of health-conscious adults, doing a triathlon is a sensible way to get in shape. The three disciplines work a variety of muscle groups, all offer aerobic benefits, and the variety reduces risk of injury from overworking the same muscles.
“People work, they have stuff to do in their lives,” says Jason Biggs, one of the founders of Cary-based FS Series, which promotes and runs races throughout the state. “For people who don’t have time to ride 100 to 150 miles a week, or swim 2,000 yards three days a week, they’re great.” In a survey of 15,000 members, USA Triathlon found 87 percent said they participate to stay in shape.
Kim Feth of Apex found herself in a physical funk shortly after turning 42 in late 2009. She was grieving the death of her mother, she’d gained weight, she couldn’t motivate herself to move. Then came the gut punch:
“My son came up to me and said, ‘All you ever do is lay on the couch and have a headache. When are you going to play with me?’
“It all crystalized for me,” says Feth, who weighed 207 at the time. “I decided then and there that I cannot keep this up. I decided I’m going to do a sprint-distance triathlon.”
That logic might be a head-scratcher if your only familiarity with triathlons are the highly publicized Ironmans, in which participants swim 2.7 miles, ride their bikes for 112 miles, then run a marathon — 26.2 miles. Not for Feth.
“I knew I couldn’t do a marathon, I couldn’t run that far. But three miles seemed reasonable, I love being in the water and I love riding a bike. And with three sports, I figured I wouldn’t get bored.”
Doing a sprint triathlon also seemed the sensible thing for Gerald Babao of Charlotte when he was diagnosed with adenoid cystic carcinoma, a rare from of head and neck cancer, in 2008.
“That was my launching point,” says Babao, who was 33 at the time. “I felt I need to do as much activity as possible.”
Not that Babao, who works for USA Canoe and Kayak, was a slug. He hiked, backpacked, paddled. “I wasn’t overweight, but I wasn’t in shape.”
Baboa spent the summer in Durham getting treatment at the Duke Cancer Center. When he was strong enough, he bought a bike and started cycling (that led to him sponsoring Team Wannabe Riders in the Livestrong Challenge ride in Philadelphia). Then someone mentioned sprint triathlons, so he he signed up for the TRYMCA class through the Ballantyne Village YMCA. The class met three times a week for eight weeks, swimming, running and cycling. Baboa and his classmates supplemented that training with workouts on their own.
He did his first sprint tri last July, finishing about mid-pack.
“Realistically,” he says, “I know there’s only so much I can do about my cancer. “But this allows me to believe I’m doing everything possible to keep the cancer from returning.”
Feth’s training was a little less … orthodox.
“I started walking around my dining room,” says Feth. (“I started training in December,” she explains. “I don’t like the cold.”)
In March, she started riding her bike (outside) and in June, when the neighborhood pool opened, she added swimming to the mix. She also signed on to RealAge.com, which offers tips and tracking tools for people looking to get into better shape. Between training for her tri and eating better, she dropped 34 pounds by the time her target race, the Dash for Divas, rolled around in September. She looked better, felt great — and realized at the starting line that her self-styled training left her totally unprepared for the race.
At one point on the bike, she sensed a car slowly rolling along behind her fat-tired beach cruiser. She kept trying to wave it around, then stopped to find she was being tailed by a sheriff’s deputy, lights blazing.
“He was behind me because I was the last racer,” Feth recalls with a laugh. “It was all I could do not to break into tears. I just wanted to toss my bike in the trunk and quit.”
But she didn’t. She finished, with the police escort still on her heels. And she signed up for her next race, the Ramblin’ Rose in Raleigh this May.
Her goal for that race: to have the scarlet letter removed from her leg. Actually, it’s an “A” and it’s in black grease pencil. It stands for “Athena” and its given to female participants who weigh over 150 pounds.
“I know,” she says, “it’s pride. But it’s a righteous pride because I’m trying to get healthy.”

* * *

Try a tri?

• The Charlotte YMCA’s TRYMCA program is an eight-week training program intended to prepare first-time triathletes for their first sprint tri. Cost is $135 for Y members, $195 for nonmembers. The next session begins April 4. For more information go here or call (704) 716-6927.
• In the Triangle, the Raleigh Triathlon Training Team Meetup group holds training events and offers opportunities to learn from seasoned triathletes.
• You can also find training programs online. At BeginnerTriathlete.com, for instance, plug in specifics about the type of event you’re training for and you’ll get a recommended training program.
• For a rundown of triathlons, sprint and otherwise, in North Carolina, visit TriFind.com at  or the Endurance Magazine calendar.
• Just getting started? Check out TriathaNewbie.com — “Guiding Beginner Triathletes into the World of Mini-Triathlons.”

Photo: From last year’s Ramblin’ Rose in Raleigh. Photo courtesy Clarke Rodgers.

The post Tri this: A sprint to fitness appeared first on GetGoing NC!.