Running for Your Life: Your Immune System

So You Want to Live in Park Slope Dept.

A recent workday I’m rush-stepping along the Manhattan-bound subway platform at Union Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, catching the R Train (normal arrival time 12:04 p.m.); it’s pulling in right on time, par for the course in the longtime upscaling neighborhood, where service managers attend to the product, not like the stories I hear from friends in Clinton Hill or Bed Stuy or Crown Heights; am on my way down the platform in order to get on at the back of the train when I’m met by an alarmed-looking fellow commuter moving rapidly along the platform in the opposite direction. I immediately see why. A rat the size of a loaf of ciabatta is scurrying toward me at about the place on the platform that I like to board the train. Discretion the better part of valor, I turn on my heel and follow behind the commuter, my eyebrows raised as I pass a young woman who turns and follows our as-yet silent parade, whatever was on our minds, gone, poof, like an unstuffed puff (cheese, that is, recipe from the latest “All About You” magazine that landed on my desk yesterday [Nov. 29]), scrubbed by the rat, who is still coming, not any faster, but now the train is stopping, the door’s opening, and I’m at the platform’s near-front, stepping into a car, as I watch over my shoulder to see if the rat does too, follow me into the crowded car, but she doesn’t, and the shrieks and screams and loud thumps of swung and missed briefcases and canes and backpacks and lethally brandished high heel shoes caused by the rat who had surely entered the train, for where else could she have gone, never comes.

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What does a rat have to do with your immune system? Holy hand sanitizer stocks, Batman, you must be kidding. The common rat has managed as a species to adapt to its conditions in ways that makes humans look like 99-pound craven weaklings by comparison.

A rat’s life is nothing if not intense, and I know at least in the circles that I travel in that people are quick to say how “intense” their lives are. Busy, might be more like it. But how intense? When it comes to exercise, say, how much do they push themselves? Is it recreation or athletics? Does it make a difference?

The Runner’s Body http://bit.ly/sc2pC6 puts a lot of the research out there. Studies show that my (knock on wood, and yeah, everybody who knows me well hates me when I relate the fact that I’ve been pretty much cold and flu free since I began running – recreationally in the beginning, but up tempo for I’d say about 20 of the past  for 37 years) better-than-average immune system may just be a factor of my intense – 25 miles to 40 miles per week, 7 to 8:30 pace, with sprint intervals built in – running life.

Consider these factors, courtesy of TRB:

 A large Swedish study found men who walked or cycled thirty minutes a day had a 34 percent lower risk of dying of cancer than couch potatoes;

 Studies show that intense exercise helps to slow, halt and reverse cancer’s growth;

 Something called heat shock proteins, boosted during training, enhances the capacity of heat shock proteins to respond to stressors, including viral infections;

 Running has been shown to change immune system components – macrophages (viral cell dismantlers), cytokines (the immune system's signal molecules) and natural killer cells (my favorite) – in ways that enable them to perform their functions more effectively.

I’m not going to go on about this stuff. But suffice to say that there is a lot you can do to boost your immune system. This is change that you can manage on your own. It’s essential for someone like myself who is trying to run stronger, longer and faster. Even at my age, at 56, I’m on my way to doing that. So it helps that I’ve learned something about inflammation, antioxidants and neurotransmitters. And when it comes to the Running for Your Life theme, there are important lessons to be learned.

For example, systemic inflammation, a condition that is closely linked to the stiffening of the arteries through formation of fatty plaques, doesn’t have a cheery endgame. Unless you do something about it, through medication (always with asterisks, if not serious risks), diet, or exercise, the possibility of heart attack and stroke is all too real. (By the way, when it comes to diet, look up something called Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, which rates the antioxidant capacity of foods. http://bit.ly/sqe4L9)

But one study by researchers at Auburn University found that markers of systemic inflammation were 76 percent lower in subjects with high aerobic fitness than in moderately fit counterparts.

All the more reason to, yeah, get yourself out there. Run for Your Life!

Next: Running for Your Life: Strike a Balance