⏰ Can You Outrun Time? What 4-Minute Milers Teach Us About Longevity and Elite Fitness
You won’t find a more potent longevity drug than exercise.
Other than maintaining a healthy weight, being physically active is the single best thing you can do to maximally reduce your risk of disease and minimize your chances of dying early.
However, intense debate surrounds the optimal exercise dose for longevity. It’s clear that too little is detrimental. But could the same apply to too much?
“Extreme exercise”—either in duration, intensity, or both—certainly stresses the body, particularly the heart. Years of accumulated stress may predispose lifelong athletes to heart disease and other ailments.
Most of the evidence on the harms of extreme exercise is related to a biomarker of cardiovascular disease known as coronary artery calcification or CAC.
Numerous reports in the last decade have found that lifetime endurance athletes have higher levels of coronary artery calcification and plaque compared to age-matched non-athletes.
What’s lacking, however, is good data on long-term survival and lifespan among “extreme exercisers.” Who better defines the idea of “extreme exercisers” than elite-level runners? If we want to really understand whether lifelong endurance training shortens lifespan, we’d best study the crème de la crème. A new observational study published in the British Medical Journal did just that.
The results might have you training for a faster mile time.
For the study, the researchers compiled a list of the first 200 men to break the 4-minute mile barrier (the first was Sir Roger Bannister, who broke the 4-minute mile barrier just around 70 years ago and lived to the ripe old age of 88).
The men were born between 1928 and 1955 and had an average age of 23 at the time of their achievement. This cohort comprised men from Europe, North America, Oceania, and Africa.
Using publicly available birth and death records, the average age at death (or the average current age for those still living) was calculated and compared to the average life expectancy of the general population matched for age and sex. The difference in life expectancy of the 4-minute milers and the general population was then calculated.
Of the entire cohort, 60 had died and 140 were still alive at the time of the study. Those who died did so at an average age of 73.6, and those who were still alive were, on average, 77.6 years old.
Compared to the general population, the 4-minute milers had a 4.7-year increase in their life expectancy.
Interestingly, runners who were born in the 1950s lived an average of 9.2 years longer than their predicted life expectancy, which may reflect improvements in healthcare in subsequent decades that led to increases in the life expectancy of the general population.
This is supported by the fact that runners born in the 1960s lived an average of 5.5 years longer than their predicted life expectancy, and those born in the 1970s only lived an average of 2.9 years beyond their predicted life expectancy.
Does being elite among the elite improve life expectancy further?
To investigate this question, the researchers compared life expectancy among runners who competed in the Olympics vs. those who didn’t. They found no longevity benefit to being an Olympian: Olympians and non-Olympians lived 4.1 years and 5.7 years beyond their predicted life expectancy, respectively.
Several limitations of this study should be noted. For one, it’s observational, so we can’t imply causation. Second, the causes of death weren’t available for most of the study cohort. Therefore, we don’t know if the athletes had a higher prevalence of certain diseases than the general population. Third, data on other metrics like lifetime exercise volume, cardiorespiratory fitness, and biomarkers weren’t assessed.
This prevents us from concluding that running a 4-minute mile causes you to live longer.
However, this study's results do call into question some recent concerns that high-level endurance exercise may be detrimental to longevity.
While it’s true that coronary plaque levels may be higher among athletes, when we look at lifespan data, the story changes.
Endurance exercise appears to protect against death from cardiovascular diseases and all causes, and several studies (including the present one) have observed greater longevity in elite endurance athletes compared to the general population. For example, U.S. Olympians have a 13 to 20% greater survival probability than the general U.S. population.
Female and male US Olympic athletes live 5 years longer than their general population counterparts: a study of 8124 former US Olympians | British Journal of Sports Medicine
Participating in high-level physical activity for several years to decades doesn’t appear to shorten life. In fact, if we can believe the results of this study, it adds nearly half a decade to it.
What could explain the greater longevity of exceptional athletes?
There’s obviously the possibility that genetic selection is at work—are elite athletes blessed with good genes that allow them to perform at a high level and live long? Perhaps.
It’s also likely that physical fitness is lifespan-enhancing—the higher your cardiorespiratory fitness (i.e., your VO2 max), the longer your life.
It likely takes an incredibly high VO2 max to run a mile in under 4 minutes, or at least the training required to get to that level will produce a high VO2 max.
There is no VO2 max data available for the 200 runners in this study, but other studies have characterized the fitness levels of elite-level mile/1500-meter runners. One study of middle-distance runners observed an average VO2 max of 68.9, and another study of Spanish 1500-meter runners observed an average VO2 max of 73.9.
It’s reasonable to assume that the 200 men comprising the elite miler cohort of the present study had a VO2 max of 65 to 75 or more. These high levels of cardiorespiratory fitness no doubt contributed to elite runners' longevity advantage.
Don’t despair if you don’t have an “elite” VO2 max or can’t break 4 minutes in the mile (join the club). Neither is necessary nor sufficient to live a long, healthy life.
However, the goal of running a faster mile time is something we should all strive for—even if our main focus is the marathon or any longer distance race. If you get faster over one mile, you’ll be faster over many. And you might just live a bit longer because of it.
Have a purpose to your training and strive toward a fitness goal, just as all those men did when they cracked the 4-minute mile barrier.
RELATED ARTICLE: How To Run A 4-Minute Mile: Speed, Strength, + Workouts
