26 Years Between Marathons

The last time Shirley Douglas ran a marathon, she was 35 - young confident, and a little naive.

When she toes the start line of the Oakland Marathon on Sunday, Douglas will be 61. While she might be a little slower, she feels a lot better prepared, and she says there's a good chance she'll be healthier and happier when she finishes her 26.2 miles.

"My training philosophy was to save my hips and knees and everything," she said. "But I haven't had any problems in my knees or hips. In fact, I have less problems now than when I started."

Marathons are still mostly for the young, or the relatively young. What qualifies as "old" is subjective, of course, but the number of runners in each age group starts to drop off significantly after age 55. Runners 65 and older make up only 1 or 2 percent of total U.S. marathoners, according to Running USA, a nonprofit group that compiles marathon data.

There are more runners in the United States than ever before - and more older runners too. Most are Baby Boomers who took up jogging when it first became trendy in the '70s and have kept it up after retirement.

As long as the over-60 runners pay attention to their bodies and use common sense, there's no reason they can't keep running for years, maybe decades, doctors say. Recent studies have shown that even the old assumption that running ruins knees isn't true.

Someone who's picking up running for the first time at age 60 should be careful - a visit to the doctor and a bone-density scan to check for osteoporosis would be a good idea. And they probably won't want to jump right into a marathon for their first long-distance race.

"But with a runner who's been doing it for a long period of time, I pretty much treat them like any other athlete," said Dr. Srinivas Ganesh, a sports medicine specialist with Kaiser Permanente in Redwood City. "Actually, I get a lot more injuries in our 30-something crew. The older population tends to be a lot smarter about their approach."

Multiple studies have shown that older runners are healthier than their nonexercising peers. They have lower rates of heart disease and diabetes. And most of them have stronger, healthier knees.

People who are predisposed to arthritis may find that running exacerbates the problem, but everyone else is probably better off running than not, doctors say. The thinking is that running builds up the muscles that support the knee, and forces blood - and nutrients - into areas around the joint that don't necessarily get good circulation normally.

When Stanford researchers did a study looking at runners and nonrunners over age 50, "there were a lot of predictions that (the runners) were all going to need knee replacements," said Dr. James Fries, a professor of immunology and rheumatology at Stanford University School of Medicine. "But the runners actually were doing much better."

Running has benefits beyond knee health. The same study, which compared 540 runners with 420 healthy nonrunners over a 20-year period, found that the runners had lower mortality rates and suffered fewer overall disabilities.

The health advantages from running aside, at some point everyone's going to feel the effects of aging. Older people who have been running most of their lives will probably notice that it takes longer to recover from races or tough workouts, doctors say. They might be more prone to injury or discover minor aches and pains that never bothered them before.