By Stephen Beech via SWNS

The long lives of sub-four-minute milers show that “extreme” exercise doesn’t reduce lifespan, according to new research.

A study of the first 200 athletes to run a mile in under four minutes – including Britain’s Sir Roger Bannister who was the first to achieve the landmark feat – shows they outlive the general public by around five years.

The study, published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, marks the 70th anniversary of Bannister’s world record-breaking run at Iffley Road athletics track in Oxford on May 6th, 1954.

Bannister, who was later knighted for his services to sport, died of pneumonia in March 2018 aged 88, just 20 days short of his 89th birthday.

While regular moderate exercise is considered a pillar of healthy aging, researchers say it has long been thought that exposing the body to bouts of extreme endurance exercise may push it too far and shorten life expectancy.

Study author Professor Mark Haykowsky said: “The repeated bouts of near maximal to maximal exercise performed by mile runners makes them a unique group in which to test the potential impact of extreme intense exercise on longevity.”

The research team scrutinized the list of 1,759 athletes who had run a mile in under four minutes as of June last year.

They extracted the details of the first 200 to do so, on the grounds that they would be at an age that would either match or exceed the average life expectancy for their generation.

The athletes’ longevity was tracked from the exact date of their first successful attempt at breaking the four-minute barrier to either the age of 100, the end of 2023, or death, to find out the average difference in life expectancy between them and the general population, matched for age, sex, and nationality.

This difference was calculated as the observed life years for a runner minus their population-matched life expectancy. This number was then averaged across all 200.

The first 200 athletes to break the four-minute mile spanned a period of 20 years from 1954 to 1974. They came from 28 different countries across Europe (88), North America (78), Oceania (22) and Africa (12).

They were all born between 1928 to 1955 and were aged 23, on average, when they ran the mile in under four minutes.

Of the total, 60 (30 percent) had died and 140 were alive at the time of the analysis. The average age at death was 73, but ranged from 24 to 91, while the average age of the surviving runners was 77, ranging from 68 to 93.

Information on the cause of death wasn’t known for most of the athletes, but of the seven who died before the age of 55, six were due to trauma or suicide and one was due to pancreatic cancer.

Haykowsky, of the University of Alberta in Canada, said: “The analysis revealed that the under four-minute milers lived nearly five years beyond their predicted life expectancy, on average, based on sex, age, year of birth, age at achievement, and nationality.

“When factoring in the decade of completion, those whose first successful attempt was in the 1950s, lived an average of nine years longer than the general population during an average tracking period of 67 years.

“And those whose first successful attempt was in the 1960s and 1970s lived 5.5 years and nearly three years longer during an average tracking period of 58 and 51 years, respectively.”

General improvements in life expectancy secondary to advances in the diagnosis and treatment of several major diseases might explain this particular trend, suggest the researchers.

But they acknowledged that they didn’t have any information on the lifelong exercise habits of the 200 athletes included in the study, so weren’t able to determine the precise relationship between lifelong exercise and longevity.

No woman has yet run a four-minute mile. The women’s world record is currently at 4:07.64, set by Faith Kipyegon of Kenya at the Diamond League meeting in Monaco last July.

Haykowsky said: “This finding challenges the upper ends of the U-shaped exercise hypothesis – as it relates to longevity- and, once again, reiterates the benefits of exercise on the lifespan, even at the levels of training required for elite performance.”

He said that although the effort required by the sub-four-minute milers might seem to be less than that of endurance athletes, the high aerobic and anaerobic requirements of middle-distance events, such as the mile, necessitate putting in relatively high training volumes.

Haykowsky added: “While all this raises the possibility of pushing the body beyond its limits, particularly from an intensity perspective, this doesn’t seem to affect lifespan, and if anything seems to prolong it.”

The physiological explanations for the extended lifespan are yet to be fully identified, say the researchers.

However, they suggest that they likely reflect the “positive” adaptations of endurance exercise on cardiovascular, metabolic, and immune-related health and function.

The research team also pointed out that a healthy lifestyle and genes may also play a role as 20 sets of brothers, including six sets of twins and father and son combinations, were among the first 200 runners to break the four-minute mile barrier.