Adding Life to Life
How to Live and Run Intelligently
By Johnathan Edwards and Veronique Billat
Adapted from Véronique Billat - TEDx Talks 2016 / Lille
This is an adaptation of a TEDx talk that Dr. Veronique Billat did in 2016 about how we all can Add life to life through exercising intelligently. The TEDx talk is in French, and I hope to submit a translated transcript through TED Translators.
Albert Szent-Györgyi, a Nobel Prize winner and Hungarian physiologist known for his discovery of vitamin C, once stated:
“In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy.”
If a great white shark stops swimming, it dies. It relies on water flowing through its open mouth and gills as it swims. No movement, no water flow, no oxygen. Dead shark.
If people stop moving, same thing. We may not die as soon as a shark, but we will certainly die sooner than otherwise and with more disease and pain.
Movement is life. Movement is never constant but constantly variable.
Movement can take any form. Walking is the most essential, but all activity is life-giving, or better said, Adding life to life. Whether you push a lawnmower, carry groceries, or walk the dog, it’s “exercise.”
The opposite to moving is sitting around and is linked to higher dementia rates.
This is true of virtually all forms of disease, especially chronic disease.
Movement activates all our biological systems: enhancing blood circulation, oxygen exchange, and lymphatic detox. It lubricates joints with synovial fluid and produces a unique, continuous energy cycle at the cellular level, activity creates more energy, in fact, a perpetual energy system. It’s the only one we know of.
This is what it means to Add life to life.
Overcoming death is a good thing. Living forever, that’s not the goal.
Adding life to life is even better, and it’s possible now.
But how? ‘Or’ What?
We can do this by running intelligently. This intelligence is in everyone. We’re programmed to run, and we still are.
Imagine having a spear and trotting like a little dog. Imagine, that you have a great sense of smell, which allows you to sense a gazelle that passed nearby 6 hours ago. And that it smells good, and that you are going to hunt and eat it, all thanks to your endurance.
Did you know we can run like this for 600 miles over 6 days?
We’re hardwired to trot, just like dogs. It’s a step that allows us to have two feet on the ground. This step allows us to transfer the potential kinetic energy and recover the elastic energy.
So, we benefit from this energy that we have by running, but we also benefit from walking, which is much less expensive.
So, the real race is in human nature.
Man’s evolution is that we all now depend on computers that send us signals, and so on. And somewhere, we lost the ability to do what our dogs have always done very well. They smell incredibly well and can trot for thousands of miles.
Adding life to life.
So how are we going to do this?
Technology and research have found ways to relearn how to run intelligently and longer.
For example, the oldest marathoners—luckily, there are some who still have the intelligence to keep running for a very long time. The world’s oldest male marathoner is 100 years old, and he didn’t start running until age 89. The world’s oldest female marathoner did it at 92 years old.
It’s important to recognize that the future of humanity hinges on the wisdom of our elders, through the very old.
Our marathon performances have evolved. Now a 73-year-old man can run it in 2h58, which some will appreciate; a 9-mph pace. At 73 years old, he matched the men’s marathon record in 1896.
In the field of physiology, we measure what is called the consumption of oxygen or VO2 max. This consumption of oxygen consumed per minute is our ability to burn carbohydrates and fats and transform our chemical energy stored in the form of carbon-hydrogen bonds into mechanical energy.
We humans have an energy output of about 25%. But with elasticity, if we run well, we can increase the energy output to 30-40%. This is why there’s always room to improve the way you run. And that allows us to increase our energy output and performance.
Dr. Veronique Billat, my thesis advisor and co-author, is a former elite athlete, coach, and researcher. Her passion for 40 years is finding the best ways to train and run. The goal is to train less, have more fun, and have time to do many other things.
This is Adding life to life.
We are capable of increasing this oxygen consumption at any age, which will allow us to burn our sugars and fats, transforming them into mechanical energy. The more oxygen we consume, the more mechanical energy we can release.
And we will be able to move faster, kill gazelles, eat protein, get smart, and so on and so on. And we will have the strength to do lots of things.
So, this young man has lots of plans. He’s 80 years old. He has an oxygen consumption of 33 ml / kg / min, far exceeding most people his age. Many of you reading this are 25 years old and have this value.
Thanks to our incredible human energy, the more we use it, the more it increases. Again, it is the only perpetual energy machine that we know of. And the less you use it, the more it decreases. It’s the only energy that increases when you use it and vice versa.
You should start by making your energy transition.
Ecology is a big topic nowadays, but we’ve forgotten the energy of humans. Notice that when we move, we also warm ourselves up. We save thermal energy.
So, he’s 80 years old, he’s got lots of plans. He wants to run a marathon in less than 4 hours. His goal is to run a 3h50 marathon. This is the average performance of the Paris Marathon. The 50,000 people who finish the Paris Marathon will run this time. Except that he is 80 years old, and the average age in the Paris Marathon is 44. It means that more and more people are running, later and later.
And maybe that’s what ‘is quite interesting. Adding life to life ultimately generates more energy. To optimize our oxygen consumption or VO2 max across our lifespans.
This is French cyclist Robert Marchand. At 105, he set the world record for the hour in a velodrome. His average speed was 17 mph. Cycling 17 miles in an hour takes a lot of work. When you ride your bike to go shopping, it’s about 9 mph. Typically, his maximum heart rate is predicted by 220 minus his age. With age, the heart’s function declines, and its ability to beat faster. So there, Robert Marchand set the hour record at 101 at 14 mph. He broke the record at 103 years old at 17 mph. He increased his VO2 max. He increased his ability to burn carbohydrates and fats.
Oxygen consumption inevitably decreases as age increases.
This is what happens when we do nothing. And fortunately, this gentle but inevitable slope is reversable. And again, an increase in oxygen consumption is possible at any age.
So, how about you? You can choose now.
When you go out, you might have a light meal. But what will give you the strength to be able to go back?
And this is what we want to convince you to do. Through self-knowledge we can improve at any age through running.
Nothing in life is ever constant. Not one thing.
When we run a marathon, our running speed naturally varies and oscillates. So now, the object is to understand this optimal speed variation. It allows us to run faster and more safely than if we had run at constant speed. If we ran only at a constant speed, we would never be able to catch the gazelle.
We need to rediscover this instinct; we need more self-awareness. We need to become aware of what the animals are doing, our dogs. Have you ever seen a dog or horse that runs at a constant speed like we were taught in school?
You have to be regularly irregular here.
In a marathon, it’s important not to follow the imposed pace. You see here that there are runners who are paid to be rabbits. You have a magnificent flag in 4 hours, which means that all the people who want to run the marathon in 4 hours are crowded behind this person carrying the flag.
It would be best if you ran with your feelings. And the brain, ultimately, is a wonderful integrator. Today’s technology, we have sensors of all kinds that allow us to understand better the mechanical energy being released in our bodies, in real time. It’s important to understand and integrate all these biochemical and biomechanical signals.
The oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, the blood acidity, the respiratory rate, and the heart rate. All these signals and how our brains integrate them is how we choose our optimal speed variation or better said, our individual speed signature.
And that can change with fatigue, which can change with training. And we’re always trying to figure it out, like a puzzle. You have to know how to speed up. You have to know how to slow down.
At the same time, we measure speed to help find our own speed signature, which allows us to maintain a physiologically stable state.
Many of us are busy professionals, engineers, healthcare workers, businessmen, or raising children at home. And most don’t have time to train, and that’s okay. Predicting the optimal speed variation and designing our speed signature allows us to run less, achieve great performances, and do more things.
Naturally, we don’t trust our feelings while running.
So, we must go through our cognitive processes again. We are using passage times and calculated algorithms. Depending on strength, cardiac efficiency, acidosis, and perception criteria.
All of this consumes oxygen, allowing us to define an energetic profile, a kind of radar with a score from 1 to 4 for each of these 4 items. Behind this are hidden 20 variables resulting from biomechanical, physiological, and perceptual measurements.
The Running Advisor BillaTraining or the RABIT test, is a self-administered test running at five speeds: easy, medium, hard, sprint, and all-out sprint. So, at BillaTraining.com we administer a self-perceived test without observing any speeds.
This will allow us to develop a speed signature that will guide the person to discover their optimal speed variation, and therefore run using alternating accelerations and decelerations.
This is called variable paced running, which is exactly the opposite of constant paced running.
We must reteach the person to run using their correct energy signature.
In an ideal world, we would like all these computer signals on the running watch to disappear. So, schedule your own retreat from running watches, officially. But for now, we still need them, so it’s not an immediate obsolescence.
But agree to let go and optimally speed up and slow down when you need to.
And that’s how you Add life to life.
If this type of training is of interest, please see our book, The Science of The Marathon where ever books are sold, and at my website.
