Why run? Dave Ortman, 59, does it because he can.

And the reason he can is because he keeps doing it.

PLAYING FOR KEEPS

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Inactivity does the same thing as aging, Conley says. It was so astonishing at rst I didnt believe it myself. Why should you care? Because it becomes a vicious cycle. Dont exercise and your mitochondria decline, which makes you less able to move, which leads to fewer mitochondria and so on. The moral of the story is, you can choose to get old before your time.

says. The reason you cant walk up the steps is because youre deconditioned, and the reason youre deconditioned is because you never walked up the steps. He pauses. You did it to yourself.

Im afraid Im going to hurt myself.

Youre right: When you exercise, youre putting strain on your muscles, your bones, the whole shebang. But that very stress is what tells the body to build. Scientically speaking, says Michael Regnier, a bioengineering professor at the UW, When you exercise, it stimulates the release of hormones that signal the cells to start protein synthesis. When you lift a heavy load, it puts compressive forces on your bones. Those compressive forces tell the bones uh-oh, wed better get stronger. It increases their density. Cartilage, as well, gets its nutrients from moving. So you are stressing your body; youre also building it up.

Didnt you hear me? I said I cant walk up the steps.

OK, dont walk up the steps (yet). Try strength training. Every local expert we talked to, as well as a number of national groups, say strength training, like weight lifting, can be more important than aerobic activity, especially as we age. If you dont maintain your strength, things start to slide. It might be the stairs that give you trouble rst. Then its at ground. Then its getting out of a chair. Seriously. It happens.

But Im so out of shape.

This is a pet peeve of another local academic, Glen Duncan, associate professor of epidemiology and nutritional sciences at the UW. I get very frustrated when people say things like, I cant walk up the steps, he

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