Tim Jasper
HNR 111
Dr. Isaacson
4 December 2016
Balance/Synthesis of Collegiate and Professional Running
Running, in many ways, has affected my life. If you would have asked me in 7th grade
when I joined the track team at my middle school that running would play such an important role
in my life, I would have told you to go away and that I wanted to play football. One of the
reasons I chose to do my balance/synthesis project was because of my ultimate love for the sport
of running and everything that surrounds it. The more engrained into the sport I became, the
more I fell in love with it. In contrast, as I became increasingly involved with the sport, I started
to look at the science behind running and how collegiate and professional runners are at such an
elite level in their fitness. Running, specifically for professional and collegiate athletes, takes an
immense amount of training, hard work, and determination. However, as running can benefit
even the casual jogger physiologically, it can also destroy a professional or collegiate runner
psychologically.
Physiologically speaking, like I previously stated, running can benefit even the casual
jogger. Research suggests that running can help the heart become stronger. This is because the
heart, being a muscle, gets stronger after a physical activity. This in turn helps the heart pump
more blood to the body, which in turn lowers a person’s heart rate. The less beats per minute a
heart must do leads to a statistically longer life span. I remember getting my blood pressure taken
by an intern for a physical examination I had to get to play sports in high school. She read my
heart rate and asked my physician if it was a problem that my heart rate was hovering around 45
beats per minute. Some professional runners’ heart rate can get as low as 25-30 beats per minute.
The reason that more blood needs to be pumped throughout the body is because the more
anaerobic (oxygen-depriving) workouts a person might do increases the number of capillaries
being made in a person’s body. Many professional runners go to a high-altitude area to train and
do workouts there for about a month to deprive their body of oxygen to build more capillaries in
their body so that when they go back to lower-altitude areas or sea level to race or do workouts,
their body can absorb more oxygen because of the extra capillaries that their bodies’ have made.
And then finally, the most common reason that anyone gets into running is to lose weight, and it
does help anyone lose weight. Running, combined with weight training and core work is a great
way to stay in shape and burn calories and pounds off a person’s body and slim them down.
