What Makes Olga Run
Bruce Grierson (Henry Holt, Jan. 14), 256 pages, $25 hardback, $11.99 e-book.
Who is Olga and why do we care what makes her run?
Olga Kotelko is a 94-year old track and field athlete who holds 23 world records, 17 in her age division.
Who cares about old people’s world records?
Senior citizen “Olympians” are slow. Real champions are fast.
Early in his anecdotal survey of aging research, author Bruce Grierson writes about another guy with a similar opinion. In 1999, Italy’s minister for sports pooh-poohed masters competitions, declaring that races among athletes older than 70 were meaningless freak shows.
In response, four octogenarian runners led by Ugo Sansonetti (born in 1919) staged a televised meet in which they ran the 4 x 100 relay in less than one minute, with 15 million people watching on TV. “Slow” is a relative thing.
But here’s why anyone might care: We all are aging. While everyone who ages is destined to lose physical and mental abilities before death, some lose both far sooner than others, and their final years are a slog through dependence, pain and need.
Meanwhile, “super agers” like Kotelko go sprinting around the globe, hurling javelins, leaping hurdles. What’s their secret?
Does this book reveal the secret?
No. Grierson’s a big believer in the transformative power of routine, intense exercise not carried to extremes, and so he highlights research supporting that view. But he also documents the limits of exercise as an age retardant, noting that some world-class elderly athletes also have cognitive impairments and aren’t immune to Alzheimer’s.
It’s also notable that while the vast majority of nonagenarian track athletes are male, 90 percent of centenarians are women. He doesn’t unlock that puzzle.
So he doesn’t know answers? Then why read the book?
Because he asks good questions in amusing and memorable ways, and because his relationship with this old lady is kinda curious. Why does she put up with him?
He surveys the field of aging research by hauling the retired schoolteacher from one research method to another. He reports on the tests applied, how she does and what she thinks about the experience.
They range from mail-order DNA kits that purport to analyze her spit and telomere-measurement labs that test her blood, to less-expected assessments of neuroplasticity, including a virtual-reality lab that puts her through simulations of crossing a dangerous intersection on foot. Those video game-style tests prove emotionally harrowing for a woman who has never played video games and isn’t used to her own virtual death.
He also recounts IQ tests, an MRI of her brain and other adventures they take together. And he delves into her personal history, which makes good reading and tends to work against the idea that she’s aging so well because she’s had an easy life.
One especially enlightening chapter describes a training session with a track coach who tries to reteach her a high-jump approach she used once upon a time in her 70s but gave up because she had a bad landing habit that cost her points in competition.
During the years Grierson studied her, she was the world’s oldest competitive female high jumper, and trying to raise the bar, literally. Along the way we learn about two other methods and why older athletes can’t do one of them.
He also follows small, telling disasters that hit her after a fall in 2012: an apparent loss of killer drive in her performances, a touch of glaucoma, intimations of inevitability and what she makes of them - and of his nosiness.
Finally, this is the story of a relationship with more need on one side than the other. Why does he care so much? It calls to mind Bruce Sterling’s novel Holy Fire, although Sterling is less concerned about what happens when we age than he is about why we want to go on being young.
Does this book provide the last word on cutting-edge research?
No, and it’s aimed at the general reader, too, so don’t expect scientific exactitude. For instance, he takes an appearance by Mehmet Oz on Oprah rather seriously.
Also, the book ends with a coda that lists Kotelko’s “Nine Rules for Living,” and they read like something a marketer demanded.
But it’s still an inspiring book that should appeal to the legions of worried agers who snapped up copies of Younger Next Year like they were Get Out of Jail Free cards.
ActiveStyle, Pages 27 on 01/13/2014