The medical marvel that is Milton’s marathon man

In October, at 85, Ed Whitlock set his latest distance-running record, completing the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in three hours 56 minutes 34 seconds and becoming the oldest person to run 42 kilometres in less than four hours.

“He’s about as close as you can get to minimal aging in a human individual,” said Dr. Michael Joyner, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic who has studied performance and aging.

Whitlock’s career has been as unorthodox as it is remarkable. For starters, he trains alone in the Milton Evergreen Cemetery. He runs laps for three hours or 3 ½ hours at a time, unbothered by traffic or the eternal inhabitants or the modern theories and gadgets of training. He follows no special diet. He does not chart his mileage. He wears no heart-rate monitor. He takes no ice baths, gets no massages. He shovels snow in the winter and gardens in the summer but lifts no weights, does no sit-ups or push-ups. He avoids stretching, except the day of a race. He takes no medication, only a supplement that may or may not help his knees.

What he does possess is a slight build: He is 5-feet-7 and weighs 110 to 112 pounds. He also has an enormous oxygen-carrying capacity, an uncommon retention of muscle mass for someone his age, a “floating” gait and an unwavering dedication to pit himself against the clock, both the internal one and the one at the finish line.

“I believe people can do far more than they think they can, “said Whitlock, a retired mining engineer who was born in Greater London and speaks with a British sense of self-deprecation. “You have to be idiot enough to try it.”

Four years ago, at 81, Whitlock underwent a battery of physiological and cognitive tests at McGill University in Montreal. One of the tests measured his VO2 max, the maximum amount of oxygen that can be consumed and used by the muscles during exercise. It is measured in millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute. The higher the number, the greater a person’s aerobic fitness.

A top Olympic-level cross-country skier might have a VO2 max of 90, compared to 20 for those living independently in their 80s. Whitlock’s score was an exceptional 54.

That is roughly equivalent to someone of college age who is a recreational athlete, said Russell Hepple, an exercise physiologist who performed the tests on Whitlock at McGill with his colleague and wife, Tanja Taivassalo.

At McGill, Whitlock also underwent imaging and biopsy testing of his muscles. The smallest functional entity of muscle is called a motor unit, which consists of a neuron and the muscle fibres it activates. The number of functioning motor units declines with age.

For example, a healthy young adult has about 160 motor units in the shin muscle, called the tibialis anterior, which helps lift the toes. In an octogenarian, that number could have declined to about 60 motor units, Hepple said, but Whitlock retained “closer to 100.”

This preservation might largely be explained, he said, by a chronically elevated level of circulating chemicals, called neurotrophins, which protect and nurture neurons, helping them survive.

“That’s a big advantage, “said Hepple, who has recently moved to the University of Florida and is continuing to analyze his study of Whitlock and other aging athletes. “But the message with these people is not that they’re freaks. It is that a whole lot of aging, with a bit of luck, is under some volitional control.”