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For building cognition, Sudoku is a shovel and exercise is a bulldozer. (p60)

"Sometime I runs and thinks, and sometimes I just runs," the baseball legend Satchel Paige almost said. Running and thinking is better. With exercise, the whole brain blooms.(p61)

If a chicken moved as little as I do over twenty-four hours, the farmer would be legally prevented from calling it "free range."(p96)

Are these things sound science? In a sense it doesn't matter. What matters is that she believes in them.(p154)

Not long ago gerontologists uncovered a quirky fact: scientists who win the Nobel Prize live longer than scientists who don't. The prizes have been given away for long enough that the finding is statistically significant. "Correcting for potential biases," write the authors, "we estimate that winning the Prize, compared to merely being nominated, is associated with between one and two years of extra longevity."(p160)

Masters athletics, the way it's set up, almost engineers a positive outlook. Instead of starting to dread birthdays round about age 35, as many of us do, masters athletes quite openly look forward to getting a year older. Because now you're that much closer to moving up a category, whereupon, if you (touch wood) remain healthy, you will get a chance to whip a whole new cohort. Every five years you are reborn.(p163)

One of the most rock-solid findings in gerontology is that strong social ties boost your likelihood of surviving, over a given time period in late life, by 50 percent. The effect is larger than the impact of exercise. It's roughly the same as quitting smoking. There's evidence that cancer progresses more slowly in people with friends than in people who feel lonely. Strong social ties also correlate very strongly with healthy cognition ... (p194)

1. Keep Moving
2. Create Routines (but sometimes break them)
3. Be opportunistic
4. Be a mensch
5. Believe in something
6. Lighten up
7. Cultivate a sense of progress
8. Don't do it if you don't love it
9. Begin now
(p225-228)

In the morning - very early or merely early, depending on the day - Olga gets up and puts the kettle on for Krakus, a Polish coffee substitute made from roasted flax, barley, and beetroot.

If you're a Super Senior, you are over 85 with a clean bill of health. You have run between the raindrops, diseasewise. You have escaped the "Big Five" killers: cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, and pulmonary disease. You're rare: only about 2 percent of all 85-year-olds can make this claim. (The average 75-year-old suffers from three chronic medical conditions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

"We think longevity is probably seventy to seventy-five percent lifestyle," Brooks-Wilson said. That benchmark number comes from a study of nearly three thousand Danish twins drawn from the general population.

On winter evenings her father, Wasyl Shawaga, mustered his eleven kids around the woodstove. He read them the classics of Ukrainian literature: the detective novels of Ivan Franco, the poems of Taras Shevchenko ("We shall ... take our rest together ... / And your sister-stars, meanwhile / The ageless ones, will start to shine").

But she has largely escaped the kind of chronic stress that defines the daily routine of so many modern urbanites: escalating money woes and job insecurity and workplace politics we have no control over.

"Telomere length," says Gary de Jong of the telomere-measurement lab Repeat Diagnostics, "tells us something about what's going on in our body and in our life."
Not long ago a FedEx package arrived at that company's office in North Vancouver.

Olga has lately been using a "scissors" technique to get over the bar. It looks as it sounds. You approach the bar sideways and sort of sidle over it, one-and-a-two, staying upright. The scissors is a relic of a track-and-field era when pits were sawdust and sand, so landing on your feet was advised. Today, when a superfoamy mat awaits, all top high jumpers use a technique called the Fosbury Flop. That's where - counterintuitively - you turn away from the bar at the last minute, arch your back into a cupid's bow, and sail over backward. It's a trick of physics: the jumper's center of gravity actually passes under the bar.

The philosopher Plato - himself an accomplished wrestler - was sure that bodily fitness and mental fitness worked together.

"You've dodged more than a few bullets," Kramer told Olga in his office earlier. "You don't have Alzheimer's - I can already tell that having talked to you for fifteen minutes."

At the track behind the junior high school near her house, Olga and Barb Vida, the only real coach Olga's ever had, are going through a careful warm-up.

She moved in with her sister Jean, in New Westminster, British Columbia, a bedroom community of Vancouver.

The issue surfaced prominently in the 60-meter-dash final at the World Masters Indoor Athletics Championships, in Kamloops, British Columbia, in 2010.

Reporters from around the world have made pilgrimages to her home on the flank of Hollyburn Mountain, overlooking the Pacific Ocean in West Vancouver.

When Olga stumps for the virtues of exercise, she downplays that first part of the old adage, "It adds years to your life," and instead leans on the second part: "It adds life to your years."

But there's evidence that weight training does some of the same kinds of things for the brain as aerobic exercise does - things like stimulating proteins called neurotrophins, which signal brain cells to survive and reproduce. And it may do some brain-building things even better than aerobic exercise does. Teresa Liu-Ambrose, director of the Aging, Mobility, and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the University of British Columbia, found that when older people lifted weights they improved their executive control - things such as scheduling and planning and dealing with ambiguity - even better than the group who did aerobics alone.

So commonsensical is the advice to keep moving as we get older that we forget how new it is. Until 1972, when an influential paper upended the paradigm, the "disengagement" theory ruled the day. What old folk ought to do as they nosed into the golden years was ... nothing.

Some studies show a 70-year-old can improve his or her VO_2 max score, through training, as much as a 21-year-old can.

Laval University in Quebec suggests that the dose effect of that cognitive benefit from exercise - the more you work out the sharper you get - is greater for women.

There's evidence that a woman can more safely push herself at the gym deeper into old age than a man can. For while it's true that women are endowed with less muscle than men, it is in some ways better muscle - that is, muscle more resistant to breakdown.

The trick is, you have to get to a certain fitness threshold before you get to touch the runner's high. You have to work your way up. ("And it really is not much fun at the start," concedes Arthur Kimber, the 80-year-old British masters miler. "You've first got to get fit to be able to run. And then you've got to run to be able to train. And then you've got to train to be able to race." The prize of the competitor's high is hard won.)

Intensity concentrates the physiological benefits of exercise. Research on subjects who were guided through short, periodic blasts of cycle exercise in Martin Gibala's lab at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, suggests we can get by on seven minutes of exercise a week, if that exercise is intense enough.

"Part of the challenge is the mind-set or dogma that we need to slow down as we get older," says Scott Trappe, director of the Human Performance Lab at Ball State University in Indiana. For example, the belief that aging joints and tendons can't take real weight training is dead wrong; real weight training is what might just save them.

Hormones called amines flood the system and then quickly clear out. And with the rest comes the adaptation. (This is why some experts believe ultramarathons or even marathons do participants no favors. They put too much stress on us for too long.)

CrossFit was developed in the 1990s by a former gymnast named Greg Glassman, who concluded that a lot of people are exercising wrong. In his view we've lost sight, in the age of pretty-boy abs and the fetishization of MVO_2 scores and such, of what it really means to be fit. "Fit" in not one or two but ten domains: stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance, accuracy, and respiratory endurance.

Schutz is a running coach for the University of British Columbia track team. She's here to do the "daily" - a workout chalked on the wall like the specials menu in a restaurant with revolving chefs. (You could go to CrossFit for three months and never repeat the same workout, which is precisely the point: to surprise the body and force adaptation.) Strength training has made her both stronger and faster - shaving minutes off her 5K time, Schutz said.

Indeed, in the mid-1990s, when then-Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe started visiting the Hazda people of Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge - one of the last remaining true hunter-gatherer societies and perhaps the closest thing to a genuinely Paleolithic lifestyle today - he found communities teeming with Olga-like female elders. Just about every nursing mom had a hardworking granny helping her out. The old women's experience makes them cannier foragers than the younger Hadza, and they are actually more industrious - indeed, elderly Hadza women brought more calories back to camp than any other group. Grandmothers are the engines driving the survival of the family.

Among their evidence, Lieberman and Bramble point to twenty-six features early Homo sapiens evolved specifically connected to running, including short toes and big butts.

She first immersed them in tanks of water, but soon switched tack for ethical reasons (it turns out, unhandily, that if you put people in water for more than six hours they start showing symptoms of psychosis).

The second-best exercise, bang for buck, is to stay standing. True, it doesn't burn many calories, but in terms of muscle activation, standing for two hours has been likened to going for a two-mile run - which may be why museum-going is so perplexingly exhausting.

Hepple has as nuanced an understanding of the benefits of exercise as just about anybody on the planet. On one hand, he's a little blown away by what we now know it can do, how comprehensive are its effects on tissues throughout the body. But at the same time he's aware of where the evidence stops. And beyond that line we are simply overselling exercise as the elixir of extended life.
"Look, exercise is great," Hepple tells me across the table. "It's better than any drug ever invented. It goes so wide. But. As someone who has worked this area for his whole career, I can tell you, it's not the be-all and end-all.

Her position reminds me of that of Kenyan Patrick Makau Musyoki, the world-record holder in the marathon (2:03:38). Like Olga, Makau is coachless. That way, "you can listen to your own body and take time to recover after training," he told a reporter recently. "Sometimes a coach pushes too much."

Melatonin disruption has now been so credibly linked to elevated cancer rates that the World Health Organization has labeled shift work a "probable carcinogen."

We oscillate, 24/7, through "on" and "off" modes - a phenomenon dubbed the basic rest-activity cycle (BRAC), by the man who discovered it, University of Chicago physiologist Nathaniel Kleitman (who lived, incidentally, to be 104). The principle is this: Every ninety minutes or so the brain wants to lighten up; it wants to recover from the work it just did. At night we honor those ninety-minute cycles unconsciously, rising and falling on that tide, from shallow to deep sleep and back again. But during the day, when we're in control, we often plow through those signals. Ideally, every hour and a half we'd push back from our desks, flop down on the floor, and nap for fifteen minutes. That's a recipe for good health and maybe even long life. It's also a recipe, in most offices, for exploring other employment options. Ramlakhan counsels her clients to build in other kinds of rest breaks - be they "active" rests, such as a dreamy walk, or "passive" rests, such as meditation or prayer. Both can boost energy levels.

Ryan Hall, a top U.S. marathon runner, cooked up for himself a "self-therapy" technique that's actually quite similar to Olga's. Instead of a wine bottle, he rolls his back and hips over a hard rubber lacrosse ball. Instead of a towel to provide resistance on those leg lifts, Hall uses a rubber band.

A 2004 meta-analysis found massage reduced depression and anxiety as much as psychotherapy did.

We now know that diets high in cholesterol make us about 50 percent more likely of developing Alzheimer's or dementia.

For instance, Olga herself doesn't benefit all that much from the classically healthy "Mediterranean-style" diet, high in olive oil and other monounsaturated fats. She doesn't have the genes for it. (Many people of European descent carry at least one variant of a gene called PPARgamma that regulates fatty acid storage and glucose metabolism. And these lucky folk become healthy and svelte as they eat monounsaturated fats.

By all means develop a habit of walking, says former NASA life-sciences director Joan Vernikos. "But when you walk, don't walk at a steady pace: walk fast and then slower, fast and then slower."

She doesn't complain much and she frankly can't stand complainers. If she finds herself sitting with a group of athletes grumbling about their aches and pains, she will get up and leave.

People with high A scores have lots of friends and very few enemies. They listen well and are generous with praise and affection. (A good test of character, it is often said, is to watch how people treat someone who can do them no obvious good. Such people would score high in agreeableness.)

Not all old folk are mensches, to be sure. Indeed, some psychologists have suggested that people's personalities can become more astringent as they age. The weaker we get, the more vulnerable we feel, the crustier we have to be to survive, goes the theory. Writer Chris Crowley evoked the image of a "mangy old wolf, snarling furiously at the slightest threat."

In one, exercise scientists at Northumbria University in England put athlete-subjects on stationary bikes. In front of them was a video display of another cyclist, a competitor they were asked to chase. The competitor was, in fact, themselves - an "avatar" riding at the top speed the subject was capable of based on their best time. In the trial, the subjects were able to stay on the avatar's tail.
Then the testers cheated. They sped up the avatar. Now it was moving faster than the subjects ever had. Still the subjects kept up.

"If you think your body is in top shape, your immune system will more effectively fight back when a bug attacks," the University of Georgia gerontologist Leonard Poon, a leader in the new field of "psychoneuroimmunology," put it not long ago.

What makes someone continue to be a go-getter at an age when there really isn't a whole lot more to go get? Whatever the constituents of competitive fire are - maybe the oxygen of ego, the accelerant of hormones, and a chip on your shoulder to burn - it's crazily rare to still have them going in your 90s. Generally, everything hurts, money's tight, and the friends and family you used to do it for, and with, are dying off around you. This is the stage where many people raise the white flag, upgrade their TV cable package, and settle in for the sleepy denouement.

Why does Olga enter eleven events when most people enter one or two? The obvious answer is because she can. But there's another angle on this: she is spreading her risk. And spreading risk is a good strategy for emotional health.

(But Christa would later learn that her mother had been approached by officials from the German Track and Field Federation who were scouting talented youth to develop for the 1956 Olympics. Her mother had turned them away.) At 20, Christa left the country with ten dollars in her pocket. In Canada, where she landed, she clawed her way up in the male-dominated field of accounting. She worked in Ottawa in a government division rife with chauvinism. She recalls a conversation between the deputy director and the director.
DD: "I see you hired a woman."
D: "Yeah, but I put her somewhere where she couldn't do any damage."

When Dean wakes up in the evening (mice are nocturnal) he typically goes straight to his wheel, before eating, even, and just runs full-out, making the wheel squeal. He has run as much as nineteen miles in a day.
Many scientists are interested in how Dean and his siblings can log that kind of mileage. What physiological features are in place to support that level of activity? Turns out, neither Dean's heart nor his lungs is remarkable. What has evolved, in him, is a fantastically efficient system to deliver oxygen to his muscles.

It was a remark by the Nobel laureate James Watson, codiscoverer of DNA, concerning guys my age. "Men of fifty don't like to fail," he said, "which is why they are so dull."

There had been a buzz, as Sacramento approached, that Henry Rono, the great Kenyan distance runner, might race. Rono's post-Olympic life is a sad story. After a slide into alcoholism and even homelessness, he'd ballooned to 230 pounds and found himself too broke to travel.

"Listen to everyone's advice - then feel free not to take it," said Ed Whitlock.

"What you wanted to do was keep your head up and look at the guy in front of you, at the backs of his shoulders," he said. "There's an imaginary line connecting you. Then very slowly you reel him in. When you're right behind him you can stay there for a moment, and then you just nip by him. And at that point the power balance shifts and he thinks, I can't stay with this guy, and he looks at the track and he's done.

I averaged 7:49-minute miles. A guy has run faster with a milk bottle on his head.

That this is all terribly hard work seems to matter. After all, you can be in a book club or a coffee club with somebody for years and never really feel close to them. Comfort doesn't promote togetherness. Discomfort does.

"See you in two years," I overheard one man say to another in parting, as he schlepped his friend's suitcase to the curb. "If you don't hear from me it means I died."

"Have you heard of the Skilled Veterans Corps?" I asked Olga one day. This is a group of a couple of hundred Japanese seniors, many of them retired engineers or factory technicians, who made themselves available as "first responders" in the event of a national disaster. If another Fukushima meltdown happens, for example, they have pledged that they will walk right into the radiation and work on the reactors to prevent further damage. Old people are uniquely suited for such duty, they believe, for while they may get deadly cancer, they'll probably die of natural causes first.