David Chu, Personal Trainer, Syracuse, NY

It’s spring again, all the yearly ad hoc joggers are out, and the plants are blooming!  My favorite time of year.  This week, I unexpectedly had two of the toughest workouts I’ve had all year.  We decided to add more gardens to our yard, and my contribution was mostly manual labor: digging through grass, weeds, and roots to get down to nice, rich soil for our newest garden additions.  It didn’t sound like a big deal.  But those days were hot, and the amount of dirt to be removed amounted to several hundred pounds, and some of it didn’t move very willingly.  By the time I was done each time, I was out of breath, and very tired.  Fortunately, because I love to stay in shape, I wasn’t sore the next day, just bone-tired.

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I’ve seen several Aleve ads recently.  They feature people who like to play sports that are a little more advanced in age than most athletes.  That sounds great initially - these are not the usual supermodels that we see put out to project an image of health.  Advertisers are recognizing that their clientele is aging, and they’re being represented.

But things get fishy pretty fast.  In one of the ads, a guy says that his sport is so important to him that he’ll never stop playing.  Who doesn’t admire someone who never gives up, and wants to have good health no matter what his/her age?  There’s just one huge problem with that.  The very clear implication is that if you’re older, and you can’t live without playing your sport, just take Aleve, and you can keep on going forever.  The ad copy is probably designed to stop just short of making that claim explicitly enough for them to get sued.  So maybe they can get away with this legally.  The misleading but non-actionable claim is a rhetorical device that advertisers have used since ads began.

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Last night I watched a Nova episode which depicted a project whose purpose was to have non-athletes train to run a marathon.  The candidates were chosen from a large number of applicants, and were provided with coaching, medical staff, and dietary advice.   I really enjoyed watching the process, and it was inspiring and moving, especially in the cases of people who had been quite sedentary before entering the program, and who had multiple difficulties to contend with over the many months of training.

Yet it was a cautionary tale.  Despite starting with physical exams, very short runs, and professional advice, injuries began to occur almost immediately.  One unfortunate lady got stress fractures in her shins.  She was sidelined for several weeks for rest and physical therapy.  When she returned, on her second run the stress fractures re-appeared, and she was out.  Others got knee pain, hip pain, foot pain, etc.  The show didn’t sugar-coat this, and they gave a figure for the amount of force endured by the body during long distance running, which I don’t recall exactly, but remember it being pretty massive.  As the training runs got longer, the injuries piled up, and even the fittest of the runners had trouble. Read the rest of this entry »