Could The "Quarter" (400-Meter Run) Be The Ultimate Longevity Benchmark?

In a previous blog article, I revealed the single best workout, by far, that you can do to promote longevity. If you don’t want to click over right now, the spoiler is: 

The thing that you personally enjoy doing and want to do for the rest of your life!

That article also described the silliness of the extensive clickbait asserting that you have to achieve a specific performance result to be considered for good longevity status. You know, deadlift twice your bodyweight or run a seven-minute mile. While having some impressive fitness numbers is certainly predictive of longevity, everything needs to be age-graded to be relevant. 

This article will argue that the 400-meter run (which, along with the high jump, happen to be my favorite events in masters track&field) could be one of the most accurate and valuable markers of overall fitness and longevity potential. This is because unlike the vast majority of mainstream fitness challenges and programming, it requires a tremendous level of anaerobic (strength/power/explosiveness) fitness, as well as a foundation of aerobic endurance.

Unfortunately, anaerobic fitness is widely disregarded–even by serious fitness enthusiasts–in favor of aerobic/endurance oriented workouts and workout modalities. However, anaerobic fitness fades much more quickly and severely with aging than aerobic fitness, so it’s a very very good suggestion to emphasize anaerobic conditioning, especially for anti-aging benefits, and especially for fat reduction benefits. As Mark Sisson and I described in detail in Born To Walk, endurance training doesn’t really contribute to fat reduction and can often promote fat storage. Meanwhile sprinting sends the opposite genetic signals - for fat reduction and gaining or maintaining lean muscle mass. 

The 400-meter, aka the “quarter” (i.e., it’s nearly a quarter of a mile), is simple, relatable, accessible, and is also widely regarded as the most torturous event in track and field (800 gets votes there too). For the uninitiated, the 400 is one lap around a typical running track, as seen in most schools and other facilities in virtually any town or city in the world. Apologies to endurance freaks out there (yes, I used to be one of them), but competency in the 400 meters says much more about your overall fitness for longevity than being able to shuffle through a half-marathon. Apologies to gym bros as well, but 400-meter competency might be more valuable and illustrative of fitness than your ability to throw around heavy weight and carry around lots of (possibly non-functional) muscle mass. And sorry to the over-caffeinated, overly-intense weekend warrior types in adult basketball or soccer leagues. You can kinda fake your way through stuff and shuffle down court and still show some great moves from back in the day, but be carrying around visceral fat and high injury risk. This Tuesday night you might score 12 points in a league game, but next Tuesday might be the night you rupture your Achilles. 

Competency in the 400 meters - now that’s a different story. It’s called the “race of truth” because the race entails sequentially exhausting the various high-intensity energy production systems of the body. Starting with the ATP-creatine phosphate system (fuels all-out efforts of 0-7 seconds); then maxing out the ATP-lactate system (all-out efforts up to 30 seconds - yes burning muscles are a by-product of this energy system); then placing max demand on anaerobic glycolysis (sugar burning without oxygen) and finally requiring some aerobic glycolysis (sugar burning with oxygen) to get to the finish line. Overall, for most fit people, the 400 meters is 66 percent anaerobic and 33 percent aerobic. 

You may be familiar with the extensive research suggesting that the mile run is a great predictor of longevity. A landmark study of 66,000 people by Cooper Institute and UT Southwestern Medical School revealed that one’s time in the mile run at age 50 was strongly predictive of potential to live to 80 in good health. Those in the superior category (men under 8 min, women under 9 min) had vastly better odds of sailing to 80+ in good health, while those with a failing grade (men over 12 min; women over 13 min) had a high morbidity risk. 

That’s fantastic stuff, but we must acknowledge that the mile is predominantly a test of aerobic fitness, not anaerobic power or explosiveness. Remember, Dr. Ken Cooper is considered the founding father of aerobic exercise for heart health, with his 1968 book Aerobics kick-starting us into the running boom. For slower exercisers, the mile is even more heavily weighted to aerobic because it lasts 7, 8, 12, or 14 minutes to complete at maximum speed. The mile is a great test of aerobic endurance for all, and tracking your time is a great longevity benchmark. But I’m also strongly suggesting that you pay more attention to your anaerobic conditioning and performance standards. 

This is especially true because the vast majority of mainstream fitness programming is predominantly aerobic. Popular activities like group exercise classes (spin, step, boot camp, etc.), CrossFit, Hyrox, Orange Theory and others are–from an exercise physiology standpoint–extreme endurance events. That’s right, any sustained challenge - like a class or a competition - that lasts for more than a handful of minutes has drifted into the category of “extreme endurance”. CrossFitters or Hyrox enthusiasts obsessed with developing broad based functional fitness with the assortment of different strength/power and endurance challenges required, might not sufficiently appreciate this point. 

While CrossFit and Hyrox indeed entail assorted explosive, anaerobic efforts - like Olympic lifting sets to failure, explosive box jumps, or burpees - the big picture is that these are gruel-a-thon workouts that are emphasizing the aerobic system. You can’t truly be powerful, explosive, and anaerobic throughout a Hyrox event because your body gets progressively more tired. Yes, you still have to push and pull a weighted sled, do weighted lunges, throw wall balls, and so forth while running one kilometer (eight times!) between each challenge. Consequently, the aggregate effort becomes all about endurance because of the duration. 

The fitness exhibited by today’s “hybrid” athlete doing things like CrossFit Games or Hyrox is incredibly impressive, but far out of reach for the average fitness enthusiast. Hence, I’m urging recreational fitness enthusiasts with generalized goals like increasing energy, improving longevity or losing weight to focus and pay more attention to truly explosive fitness endeavors that emphasize the anaerobic system. This argument can be supported with the observation that the anaerobic system declines much more steeply and severely with age than the aerobic system. Get out there (with doctor’s clearance) and put up a time in the 400 meters, and track it regularly for the rest of your life. You may find yourself getting hooked on sprinting. Maybe I’ll see you at a Masters track&field competition someday!