This is a photo of a location below the Golden Gate Bridge that I ran to every morning for nearly 20 years.
I was a runner (I swim now) who ran with a group of friends every weekday morning at Crissy Field next to San Francisco Bay for roughly 20 years. The run was 3.5 miles. We started promptly at 6am.
I’ve run to the site in the photo over 4,000 times, passing each point along the way 8,000 times and traversing over 14,000 miles. More than halfway around the world. Running the equivalent of the distance from London to Singapore and back. I pick that route for comparison because when my father and stepmother retired they bought a mobile-house-van in London and drove it to Singapore. They stopped for a few years in Jerusalem. On their travels I met them for a week in Kabul.
They bought an island in Malaysia about 60 miles northwest of Singapore where they settled for a decade.
I wish I could say something about the health benefits of running so far, so often, but I can’t. I am a sample of one with three brothers who are all athletic and all younger. So health and lifespan are hard to compare. I had a heart attack at age 76.
If you believe in the 3 billion heart beats for a lifetime theory, I got many extra from running. Every running event raised my heartbeat from 60 to 130 per minute, for a rough total of 12.6 million extra beats. But I have medical records (as a pilot) to show that running decreased my average heart rate from 70 to 60. That gives me a decrease in heart beats from the beginning of running of 300 million. 300 million fewer heartbeats; a 10% increase in my lifetime heartbeats. So running is good when looked at from the finite number of heartbeats theory.
If it does anything else, I am not evidence for it. I did it for the pure pleasure and the evident benefits in having a clear mind, much like the same amount of time I spent in sitting meditation.
I have friends who have led sedentary lives who are my age. Quite healthy. What is the health meaning of exercise?