Nice Exercise Article in the NYT

But not enough detail to take any kind of action unless you do a little research.

So here it is in shorter and more useful form:

First, the NYT article:

Take home message: Exercise is good for you and you are probably not able to do enough to harm yourself unless you are an elite athlete.

The minimum recommended level of effort is 7.5 metabolic equivalent hours (We will come back to what this is and how to measure it.)

You gain a benefit from more than the minimum and the peak is somewhere between 3-5 times the minimum.

But don't worry! You can do up to 10 times the minimum without harm.

The journal article where the NYT gets all its facts--which it spreads-out over a lot of verbiage:

Okay, so what is this Metabolic Equivalent Hours (MEH). Simple: An hour of sitting around is 1.0 MEH. There are charts all over the internet of Metabolic Equivalent Time for different activities and effort levels, here is one. If you run at 8 minutes per mile, the MET is 11.8. So for an hour at this pace, this is 11.8 MEH.

Wikipedia on Metabolic Equivalent:

This makes sense, or at least agrees with calorie calculators--which you can find all over the internet. At my age/weight/sex/height and setting of sedentary, I need 1,800 calories per day to maintain my weight. This comes to 75 calories/hour. Other calculators show me burning 867 calories in an hour of 8:00 minute per mile running. 75 into 867 is about 11.6, which is not far from the 11.8 that I got out of a chart. The math works! Or is at least consistent.

Finally, how many times the minimum effort do I do? I run 30 miles/week at 8:00 minutes per mile which takes an even 4 hours. (11.80)(4)/7.5 = 6.3. I am a little above where the benefit ends, but well below where harm begins.

All Three Doing The Same Thing--Thinking Very Different Thoughts.

On the way home from the movies on Monday, I had to drive very slow--below the speed limit even!

The reason was that the car ahead of me was a police car and ahead of him was a driver who had obviously spotted the police car. So we three cruised two miles down the quiet street that leads home.

I had a mad thought of just blowing-past the cars ahead of me. The road used to have double yellow lines for the whole length, but some residents complained that it made the road seem like a highway and caused people to drive faster. I thought that theory was BS and liked how the lines aided driving by adding to visibility. Nonetheless, one night soon after the lines were painted; a heavy machine came through and ground the lines off.

"Wouldn't it be funny to just pass them both?", I vocalized to the passengers. "Yeah!" "But I would get a ticket for speeding--they can't get me for a no-passing zone since the lines are gone..." "Just pass really slowly". I admitted to myself the comical possibilities, but we were only going about two miles under the limit.

Those were my thoughts and of selected passengers.

I am sure the driver ahead of the cop's thoughts were worry--blossoming into paranoia when the cop followed him into the small dead-end side street.

I don't know what the cop was thinking, presumably he had a reason to follow our neighbor. He must have thought it was odd that the car behind him also turned onto the small side lane.