How much muscle can you gain in a year – really?

By: Christian Finn

For anyone who feels trapped in the body of a skinny teenager, putting on weight can seem painfully and frustratingly slow. Some people gain muscle very quickly. Others, however, make little or no progress at all.

If you're trying to figure out how much muscle you can expect to gain over the course of a year, the simple answer is that there is no simple answer.

There are so many factors influencing your progress. Not many people can do nothing but go to the gym, eat and sleep for a whole year.

Holidays, illness and injury all get in the way. Your partner complains that you go to the gym too often and demands that you spend more "quality time" together. You work late for a few nights and decide to skip training for a week, vowing to "start fresh" on Monday.

All of these things can slow your progress by weeks—maybe even months. In other words, a "perfect" year of training and eating is rare. That's why I think it's a better idea to set your goals over a much shorter period. Six weeks should be long enough for you to see measurable results.

The "average" male, if there is such a thing, with a year or two of training behind them can expect to gain roughly 2-4% of their initial weight after six weeks of regular resistance exercise [3, 4]. Although I haven't seen many studies on muscle growth in women, my best guess is that gains in the "average" female are approximately half those seen in males.

For example, someone who weighs 180 pounds might expect to gain an extra four, five, maybe even seven pounds of lean muscle over a six-week period. This assumes, of course, that you're eating enough of the right kind of foods.

It's not realistic to gain weight at this rate forever. Over the course of a year, it's rare to add more than 25 pounds of muscle. Sure, you might gain more than 25 pounds in weight. But, unless you're using drugs, gaining this much lean muscle in one year or less is very hard to do.

These figures are based on the results of studies using trained subjects with a body fat percentage of 10-15%. Whether extremely lean or very overweight people would get the same results is hard to say.

It's also quite normal to put on a little fat at the same time. So, for every five pounds of muscle you gain, expect to add a pound or two of fat. Although some people want to gain mass while at the same time maintaining very low levels of body fat, this is actually very hard to do.

Why? The issue may be psychological. If you've just spent the last six months working your butt off to get a six-pack, the last thing you'll want to do is put the fat right back on again. Someone in this position may be very reluctant to eat the quantity of food necessary to gain muscle at a decent rate.

The problem may also be hormonal. Studies have found a link between a low level of body fat and low testosterone levels [5]. Dr. Richard Strauss, writing in the December 1993 edition of The Physician and Sports medicine, describes the case of an athlete who was closely observed at monthly intervals for two years. The individual had never used anabolic steroids, and had normal hormone levels during the off-season.

During competition, the athlete reduced his body fat percentage to 4-5%, which is extremely low. This was accompanied by a drop in testosterone. His sexual activity dropped to almost zero, despite the fact he had a very active sex life before losing weight. Once he regained the lost weight, his testosterone levels (and sex life) returned to normal.

Because of this, I think it's a good idea to accept the fact you'll gain some fat while on the mass-building phase of your program.

Of course, not everyone will build muscle at the same rate. Some people are genetically predisposed to gaining weight, and will see impressive results after only a few months. Others will build muscle more slowly.

Your rate of progress also depends on a principle known as the ceiling of adaptation. The closer you are to your ceiling of adaptation, the slower your gains will be. In other words, someone who's been training for 10 years will gain muscle more slowly than someone who is just starting out.

Be realistic. If you have a body designed for long-distance running, it's unlikely that you'll be winning the Mr. America contest in the next few years.

All you can do is get the most out of your own body. There'll be times when you see results very quickly. But there will also be times when you feel like you're stuck on a plateau, and nothing seems to be working. When you get discouraged, what counts is where you end up, not how long it takes you to get there.

Remember that the progress you make when you start training is not always a good indication of how far you can go. Not all training programs are equally effective. Some work well. Others are little more than a waste of time.

So many people out there work hard, but just don't see the results they deserve. That's because they were never really told what to do.

Don't be duped into thinking you're a "hard gainer" because what you're doing now isn't working. If the program you're using hasn't been working for the last six months, it won't suddenly start working tomorrow.

Consistency of effort is important. But your body isn't a machine. Simply doing the same ineffective things over and over again (only harder) will lead to frustration and disappointment.

Does Weight Lifting Make a Better Athlete?

By: Gina Kolata

The New York Times

Published: February 28, 2008.

MIKE PERRY, a 31-year-old rower, trained by himself in Ann Arbor, Mich., for six years while his wife attended medical school. Now he is a member of the United States rowing team and hopes to be selected in a couple of months to compete in the Summer Olympic Games.

These days, he works with a coach and a team, and for the first time he is also going to a gym twice a week and lifting free weights for his upper and lower body, and doing a lot of core exercises, he said. His coach insists upon it. Mr. Perry, though, said he cannot tell whether weight lifting is helping his performance.

His 29-year-old teammate, Mark Flickinger, thinks weight lifting has helped him. He said it is difficult to distinguish between the effects of training by rowing on the water and weight lifting at the gym.

But, he added, after three years of working with weights — including lifting to failure, the point at which he cannot do another repetition — he has become a better athlete. The training “improved my P.B.’s by a substantial margin,” he said, referring to personal bests, his best performances.

As it turns out, the question of whether weight training matters to serious endurance athletes is a matter of debate.

Researchers who study weight lifting, or resistance training as it often is called, are adamant. It definitely helps, they say. But other experts in the field are not so sure.

Gary R. Hunter, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is a believer. He cites, for example, a recent study involving middle-distance runners. Three months of resistance training, he said, improved their leg strength and running efficiency, a measure of how much effort it took to run.

And, he said, it is not just runners who become more efficient.

“There is no doubt that an appropriate weight-training program would improve efficiency in pretty much any athlete,” Dr. Hunter said.

William J. Kraemer, a kinesiology professor at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, said lifting weights also can increase endurance and reduce the risk of injury, especially to connective tissue.

And don’t worry about becoming too muscular, Dr. Kraemer said.

“The fear of getting really big is not plausible for most people,” he said. Competitive distance runners and cyclists, who are naturally slender and light, “don’t have the muscle fiber number to get really big,” Dr. Kraemer said. “I can train them until the cows come home and they are not going to have big muscles.”

But other researchers, like Patrick O’Connor, an exercise scientist at the University of Georgia, are not convinced.

Dr. O’Connor points out that the weight-lifting studies, as is typical in exercise science, are small. And each seems to examine a different regimen, to measure outcome differently and to study different subjects — trained athletes, sedentary people, recreational athletes. It becomes almost impossible to draw conclusions, he said.

That may be one reason why different athletes end up doing different weight-lifting exercises. Chris Martin, a 31-year-old chemical engineer who has an elite racing license from USA Triathlon, the governing body for the sport, works on his entire body. But for his legs, he does exercises like leg extensions using one leg at a time, to correct any muscle imbalances or weaknesses. Mr. Martin, who lives in Lawrenceville, N.J., said he got the idea from coaches and from his own reading.

“Cycling and running are one-leg-at-a-time activities,” he explained. And one-legged exercises “recruit more muscles that help the hips.”

Steve Spence, who won a bronze medal in the marathon at the 1991 track and field world championships in Tokyo, is also a proponent of one-legged exercises. Now 45 years old and the head cross-country coach at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, Mr. Spence enters local 5-kilometer races and typically finishes in about 15 ½ minutes.

“I feel that every major breakthrough with my running has come after a period of strength training,” he said. He attributes this to the emphasis he puts on leg exercises, but he also believes that working his upper body and abdomen helped.

Other athletes concentrate on exercises that require them to jump or leap to develop explosive power.

And many top athletes spend lots of time in gyms lifting weights, and many trainers and coaches swear by it. For example, the distance runners who are part of Team Running USA do resistance training for 30 to 60 minutes six days a week, said Terrence Mahon, a coach for the team. This group includes marathon stars Deena Kastor and Ryan Hall, the winner of the Olympic marathon trials last November.

“We do it all,” Mr. Mahon said. “We do upper body, core and lower body. The stronger the athlete is in a total body perspective, the more efficient they become as a runner.”

The Team USA runners do five to six exercises per session, he said. For example, upper body exercises may include pull-ups, the overhead press, bench press, rowing and exercises for the biceps and triceps. Lower body exercises include step-ups, squats, single leg squats, snatches and the leg press.

The main problem with weight lifting is that many people do it all wrong, said Kent Adams, the director of the exercise physiology laboratory at California State University at Monterey Bay. They don’t have a program or a goal. Technique may be sloppy. Or, Dr. Adams said, they use weights that are too light. Muscles need to be stressed if they are to respond, he said.

Dr. Kraemer is on the same page. One study, he said, found that women tend to lift half or less of what they could lift. And this happened even when women were working with personal trainers, he said.

“There is so much misinformation,” Dr. Kraemer said. “It’s a quagmire out there.” He recommends trainers certified by the National Strength and Conditioning Association, which also supplies educational information. Dr. Kraemer is a past president of the organization.

The right trainer, these researchers say, can be helpful when people are learning to lift weights. Not only can trainers teach proper technique, but they also can help people develop programs that meet their goals.

“I hate to say that a trainer is required for everybody,” Dr. Adams said. “But I think it is an excellent way to learn.”

That said, though, the evidence that weight lifting can improve performance is equivocal enough to leave plenty of room for the skeptics. And not every successful athlete spends serious time lifting weights.

DR. O’CONNOR, for example, lifts weights for health, for enjoyment and for vanity’s sake (he does not want an emaciated upper body, he said), but stops lifting when he is training to run a marathon. Those muscles, he said, “are just dead weight you have to carry around.” He adds that a sport like rowing, swimming or running requires specific muscles and nerve-firing patterns that may best be developed by actually doing the sport.

“If your goal is to improve running performance, then weight training should probably mimic the running pattern,” he said. “If you do leg extensions, you can get stronger, but people don’t run like that.”

That’s pretty much what Cathy O’Brien, a 40-year-old distance runner, thinks. She started racing when she was 12 and ran the marathon in the 1988 and 1992 Olympic Games.

“As far as resistance training, I have always been a minimalist,” she said. She does push-ups, pull-ups and dips for her upper body, and abdominal exercises, but does not work her legs.

“I think that running is the best thing for running results,” Ms. O’Brien said.

Kevin Hanson, a coach for the Hansons-Brooks team of distance runners, is of like mind.

“We do some weight training,” he said. But other than some abdominal exercises, “everything we do is for the upper body.”

He has a ready answer for runners who ask about doing exercises for their legs.

“You let me know if you think we are not working your legs enough,” Mr. Hanson said. “There’s a lot more we can do to beat you up. But you don’t have to lift weights.”

Cold Runner

By: Patrick White

The Globe and Mail

Published: Friday, January 4, 2008.

YELLOWKNIFE — As any top athlete knows, the best training regimens incorporate an element of brutality.

Swiss tennis ace Roger Federer prepares for big matches in the searing desert heat of Dubai. Sumo wrestlers wallop one another with baseball bats or bamboo swords to get fighting fit. Ex-NHL sharpshooter Pavel Bure was known for skating lap after lap trailing a parachute.

And then there's Lore-ann Krysko.

The 44-year-old government worker may not aspire to such lofty athletic heights, but that doesn't mean her training is any less severe. Ms. Krysko is a marathoner living in Yellowknife, where the mere act of stepping outside in running tights this time of year is a test of will.

“Those first couple minutes where you're thinking you aren't going to be warm enough are the worst,” says Ms. Krysko, who has won both the Yellowknife and Hay River, NWT, half-marathons. “But if you actually go through with it, it does make you psychologically tougher.”

Yellowknife's average January temperature hovers between lows around -30 C and highs around -20. Hypothermia can set in instantly. Exposed skin can freeze in a matter of minutes. And yet Yellowknife has become a city of runners.

Through a combination of sheer resolve and specialized attire such as wind briefs and shoes studded like snow tires, joggers in the capital city have formed what must be one of the world's hardiest running communities.

“It really gets the blood pumping for the few daylight hours that we have,” says Francis Chang, 51, who has helped train several hundred Yellowknifers over the years through programs at the gym he owns. Mr. Chang says 80 to 120 aspiring runners, aged from teens to early 60s, sign up for his groups every year, though not all of them stick to it through the frigid winter months.

Like most people here, Mr. Chang had no desire to run in -35 wind chill when he first arrived in town more than 30 years ago. “I hated running,” he says. He wasn't keen on the whole town seeing him sweat either. “I was too embarrassed to run in the open like that, so I ran on a treadmill instead.”

On a -38 day in December, his brother finally convinced him he should try it. He overdressed in a heavy jacket and thick mittens, but by the time he'd shed down to an undershirt, he was hooked. Today, he heads into the cold for a run three times a week and sometimes brings upward of 18 people with him.

The hardest part about northern running is overcoming the initial shock of opening the front door. “It's like jumping into a cold pool,” says Corey McLachlan, 30, another avid runner. “Your first impression is to jump right back out.”

But eventually, most runners decide that the benefits outmatch the discomforts. “Because the winters are so long, you need to be outside and active and doing things,” Mr. McLachlan says. “If you don't, the winters feel longer and darker and colder.”

The right clothes go a long way in easing into an arctic running routine.

For men, wind-resistant briefs are a must. “As a guy, you only forget to wear those once,” Mr. McLachlan says.

Other sartorial standards include several different weights of thermal underwear, mitts, hiking socks and balaclavas, which dampen the burning sensation of breathing frosty air.

Footwear often depends on the weather. Mr. Chang prefers a special Swedish shoe that comes with small cleats. “You can run on ice and turn on a dime,” he says.

Others use Yaktrax, webs of rubber and metal bands that pull over the bottom of any normal shoe for added traction.

As for food and water, the trick is to carry everything as close to the skin as possible. Even a poorly insulated CamelBak – a back-mounted water carrier – won't freeze until about -25 as long as it's worn underneath a jacket. Energy bars need to be warmed up in an armpit before they're soft enough to chew.

And you can pretty much forget about wearing an iPod. The batteries barely last an hour unless kept warm against the skin.

Armed with the right attire, Yellowknifers run a number of unique events over the winter months.

In one loosely organized event, runners strike out across Great Slave Lake for the village of Detah, about 13 kilometres away.

And last year marked the inauguration of the Rock and Ice Ultra. This ultra-marathon features two running events: a one-day, 75-kilometre race and a three-day, 135-kilometre race. The temperature plummeted to -40 for last year's event, prompting half of the more than 100 participants – who come from as far away as Taiwan, South Africa and France – to drop out.

“After -40, nothing works,” says Scott Smith, the race director, who's anticipating a much larger international field this year. “That's about when you have to pull the plug.”

But that hasn't stopped Ms. Krysko from signing up for this year's event, which starts March 22. She started training specifically for the ultra on Boxing Day with a four-hour run in -27 weather. “I mainly wanted to make sure that my food wouldn't freeze,” she says.

Ms. Krysko is also training for the Ironman triathlon in August in Penticton, B.C., where she hopes her extreme training will give her an edge.

“Every time that cold wind hits, you think ‘other people aren't doing this,' ” she says. “Psychologically, that makes you tougher. And plus, lugging all that extra clothing around has got to make you stronger.”

I'm Not Really Running, I'm Not Really Running...

By: Gina Kolata

The New York Times

Published: December 6, 2007.

His coaches and teammates, though, noticed that he could jump even higher. Every time he cleared the pole, he had about a foot to spare. But if they moved the bar up even an inch, the vaulter would hit it every time. One day, when the vaulter was not looking, his teammates raised the bar a good six inches. The man vaulted over it, again with a foot to spare.

When his teammates confessed, the pole vaulter could not believe it. But, Dr. Morgan added, “once he saw what he had done, he walked away from the jumping pit and never came back.”

After all, Dr. Morgan said, everyone would expect him to repeat that performance. And how could he?

The moral of the story? No matter how high you jump, how fast you run or swim, how powerfully you row, you can do better. But sometimes your mind gets in the way.

“All maximum performances are actually pseudo-maximum performances,” Dr. Morgan said. “You are always capable of doing more than you are doing.”

One of my running partners, Claire Brown, the executive director of Princeton in Latin America, a nonprofit group, calls it mind over mind-over-body.

She used that idea in June in the Black Bear triathlon in Lehighton, Pa., going all-out when she saw a competitor drawing close. She won her age group (30 to 34) for the half-Ironman distance, coming in fourth among the women.

When it was over, she ended up in a medical tent. “I felt like I was going to pass out or throw up or both,” she recalled. “At a certain point in a hard race, you’ve pushed yourself beyond the point of ignoring the physical pain, and now you have to tell your mind that it can keep going, too.”

The problem for many athletes is how to make a pseudo-maximum performance as close as possible to a maximum one. There are some tricks, exercise physiologists say, but also some risks.

The first thing to know, said Dr. Benjamin Levine, an exercise researcher and a cardiology professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, is that no one really knows what limits human performance. There’s the ability of the heart to pump blood to the muscles, there’s the ability of the muscles to contract and respond, there’s the question of muscle fuel, and then, of course, there is the mind.

“How does the brain interact with the skeletal muscles and the circulation?” Dr. Levine said. “How much of this is voluntary and how much is involuntary? We just don’t know.”

But since most people can do better, no matter how good their performance, the challenge is to find a safe way to push a little harder. Many ordinary athletes, as well as elites, use a technique known as dissociation.

Dr. Morgan, who tested the method in research studies, said he was inspired by a story, reported by an anthropologist that, he suspects, is apocryphal. It involves Tibetan monks who reportedly ran 300 miles in 30 hours, an average pace of six minutes a mile. Their mental trick was to fixate on a distant object, like a mountain peak, and put their breathing in synchrony with their locomotion. Every time a foot hit the ground they would also repeat a mantra.

So Dr. Morgan and his colleagues instructed runners to say “down” to themselves every time a foot went down. They were also to choose an object and stare at it while running on a treadmill and to breathe in sync with their steps. The result, Dr. Morgan said, was that the runners using the monks’ strategy had a statistically significant increase in endurance, doing much better than members of a control group who ran in their usual way.

That, in a sense, is the trick that Paula Radcliffe said she uses. Ms. Radcliffe, the winner of this year’s New York City Marathon, said in a recent interview that she counts her steps when she struggles in a race. “When I count to 100 three times, it’s a mile,” she said. “It helps me focus on the moment and not think about how many miles I have to go. I concentrate on breathing and striding, and I go within myself.”

Without realizing what I was doing, I dissociated a few months ago, in the middle of a long, fast bike ride. I’d become so tired that I could not hold the pace going up hills. Then I hit upon a method — I focused only on the seat of the rider in front of me and did not look at the hill or what was to come. And I concentrated on my cadence, counting pedal strokes, thinking of nothing else. It worked. Now I know why.

Dr. Morgan, who has worked with hundreds of subelite marathon runners, said every one had a dissociation strategy. One wrote letters in his mind to everyone he knew. Another stared at his shadow. But, Dr. Morgan asked him, what if the sun is in front of you? Then, the man said, he focused on someone else’s shadow. But what if the sun goes behind a cloud, Dr. Morgan asked?

“Then it’s tough,” the runner conceded.

Dissociation clearly works, Dr. Morgan said, but athletes who use it also take a chance on serious injury if they trick themselves into ignoring excruciating pain. There is, of course, a fine line between too much pain and too little for maximum performance.

“The old adage, no pain no gain comes into play here,” Dr. Morgan said. “In point of fact, maximum performance is associated with pain.”

The brain affects everyday training as well, researchers note.

Imagine you are out running on a wet, windy, cold Sunday morning, said Dr. Timothy Noakes, an exercise physiologist at the University of Cape Town. “The conscious brain says, ‘You know that coffee shop on the corner. That’s where you really should be.’” And suddenly, you feel tired, it’s time to stop.

“There is some fatigue in muscle, I’m not suggesting muscles don’t get fatigued,” Dr. Noakes said. “I’m suggesting that the brain can make the muscles work harder if it wanted to.”

Part of a winning strategy is to avoid giving in to lowered expectations, athletes and researchers say. One friend tells me that toward the end of a marathon he tries not to look at people collapsed or limping at the side of the road. If he does, he suddenly realizes how tired he is and just gives up.

Marian Westley, a 35-year-old oceanographer in Princeton, N.J., and another running friend of mine, used several mental strategies in the recent Philadelphia marathon.

She slowed herself down at the start by telling herself repeatedly that she was storing energy in the bank. And when she tired near the race’s finish, she concentrated on pumping her arms. “I thought about letting my arms run the race for me, taking the pressure off my legs.”

She finished in three hours and 43 minutes, meeting her goal of qualifying for the Boston Marathon. “I am over the moon!” she wrote in an e-mail message the day after the race.

What is acidosis?

Human blood pH should be slightly alkaline ( 7.35 - 7.45 ).  Below or above this range means symptoms and disease.  A pH of 7.0 is neutral.  A pH below 7.0 is acidic.  A pH above 7.0 is alkaline.

An acidic pH can occur from, an acid forming diet, emotional stress, toxic overload, and/or immune reactions or any process that deprives the cells of oxygen and other nutrients.  The body will try to compensate for acidic pH by using alkaline minerals.  If the diet does not contain enough minerals to compensate, a build up of acids in the cells will occur.

An acidic balance will:  decrease the body's ability to absorb minerals and other nutrients, decrease the energy production in the cells, decrease it's ability to repair damaged cells, decrease it's ability to detoxify heavy metals, make tumor cells thrive, and make it more susceptible to fatigue and illness.  A blood pH of 6.9, which is only slightly acidic, can induce coma and death.

The reason acidosis is more common in our society is mostly due to the typical American diet, which is far too high in acid producing animal products like meat, eggs and dairy, and far too low in alkaline producing foods like fresh vegetables.  Additionally, we eat acid producing processed foods like white flour and sugar and drink acid producing beverages like coffee and soft drinks.  We use too many drugs, which are acid forming; and we use artificial chemical sweetners like NutraSweet, Spoonful, Sweet 'N Low, Equal, or Aspartame, which are poison and extremely acid forming. One of the best things we can do to correct an overly acid body is to clean up the diet and lifestyle.

To maintain health, the diet should consist of 60% alkaline forming foods and 40% acid forming foods.  To restore health, the diet should consist of 80% alkaline forming foods and 20% acid forming foods.

Generally, alkaline forming foods include: most fruits, green vegetables, peas, beans, lentils, spices, herbs and seasonings, and seeds and nuts.

Generally, acid forming foods include: meat, fish, poultry, eggs, grains, and legumes.

For a detailed list of alkaline and acidic foods, click here.

- home.bluegrass.net/~jclark/alkaline_foods.htm, retrieved May 14, 2007.

Redefining Junk Miles

By: Jennifer Bostwick

I recently read a definition of “junk miles” in the June 2004 copy of Runner’s World. Junk miles were defined as:

“Miles run at an easy pace, added to a training program only to reach a certain weekly or monthly mileage total rather than to achieve any specific training benefit. That said, not all easy miles are junk miles, as they can aid recovery.”

Since I rarely do speed work, wear a watch inconsistently, only guesstimate my mileage and run nearly every day, I wondered if all my miles could be classified as junk miles. I considered the idea of rating runs and miles. Clearly, for an elite athlete, training must be of a certain caliber and quality in order to set and achieve professional goals.

However, I am a recreational runner who runs for fun, fitness, challenge and happiness. When not training for a race, my running consists of one-hour runs that meet my need for alone time, relaxation, sweat and fresh air. I can’t imagine my life, my sanity, myself without these “junk miles”. Not only do I problem solve, analyze and daydream during this hour, I also enjoy the rhythmic sensation of my feet hitting the ground, the cool morning air and the warm semi-strained feeling in my muscles. I thrive during this hour.    

The miles I run save me from becoming overwhelmed with life and allow me to feel proud for being disciplined enough to maintain a regular running routine. During these miles, I am able to revisit yesterday, ready myself for the day ahead and look forward to tomorrow. I rarely feel overtired from running. I am rarely injured. I handle long runs well and feel strong and challenged at races.

It is difficult for me to call the bulk of my running “junk miles” when I am improving myself physically and mentally. In fact, I love my junk miles and wouldn’t give them up for faster paces.

On recent junk mile runs, I have been uplifted by a beautiful sunrise, saw a bunny scurry across the trail, surprised a fox in the bushes and watched a falcon's rise on the wind. If I had been charging ahead, pushing myself hard and maximizing my speed, I would have either missed these events entirely or been unable to fully enjoy the wonder before me. I will continue to run the majority of my runs at a pace that allows me to take in my surroundings.

My junk miles also help me to succeed in my life. I am a more patient mother and a wiser woman. I am grateful everyday for the ability to run and the life I lead. I have solved my most complex life-problems during runs. I have written articles, planned the remodel of my bathrooms and refocused on the important aspects of my life during junk mile runs.

Maybe we should judge the time spent running by our own personal rating system. Do you feel fulfilled when you run? Do you feel better after you run? Does it benefit your life to be a runner? Because the joy I feel when running provides me with infinitely more than just "training benefits" and I will continue to define all my running miles as valuable, rewarding miles.

They do more for me than a quicker finishing time ever could.