My goodness, it's important. All of a sudden when you start putting your head on your own arm and finally get softer than your pillow is kind of concerning. The best time to start lifting might have been 20 years ago, but the second best time is now. Welcome to the trailhead of TrailRunner Nation. We go on virtual trail runs and we've invited you to join us. If you're listening to this, thanks for joining the run. Today we're going to talk about, as we do every week, things that will help motivate us, things that will bring joy in our running, bring health into our lives, and hopefully make us better human beings. Today, we're going to talk to Alex Hutchinson about the most important thing that moves us down the trail, and that's muscle. How do we keep it? And how do we get it back? Welcome to another edition of Trail of Renonation. My name is Don Freeman. And I'm Scott E. What is my name? War. And I'm Scott War. For years on this podcast, we've talked about endurance, resilience, and what it means to stay healthy as we age. But there's some, there's one piece of the puzzle that I think that we often overlook. At least as runners, we definitely do, and that is our strength. In the book, Stronger, the untold story of muscle and our lives, Michael Joseph Gross, reframes muscle not as something cosmetic or performance driven, but as a core part of the human health identity

and longevity. Now, Alex Hutchinson, I don't know if you've done this every year, Alex, you put out a, here are the books you should read at the end of the year, 10 books that any endurance athlete should read, right? In fact, I do it twice a year in the summer and right before the holidays. Well, now we have a purpose for a second podcast in June.

But this was on your 2025 sweat science holiday book list. And Don saw it and he thought, Hey, that sounds like a good, a good book. Let's talk to Alex about that book. I read the books so you don't have to. And I asked this question so that we get the answers. And so my first question, Alex, did the author Michael Joseph Gross in his new book Stronger teach us anything new about strength? He taught us a lot more than I expected. I read it digitally so I don't know if it's actually a doorstopper of a book, but

digitally it felt like a doorstopper of book. It's got a lot of stuff. Now, what I am going to take away from it is maybe a reinforcement of things that I was already coming around to. You know, the best books are things that tell you the things that you want it to be told, and this told me some things about the importance of strength, which as a runner, Like you guys, perhaps I've tended to neglect it and have been resolving for a long time to take more seriously. This book is not just a like, hey, you need to be strong if you want to age well, so get strong. It's like, it goes back to the beginnings of humanity and how people think about muscles and it really forces you to think about the assumptions As we make about how our bodies move and how people think about my cells and it really forces you to think about, you know, the assumptions we make about how our bodies move and how we move through the world and how we act on the world and all these sorts of things. Now, do you need all that stuff to age healthily? Maybe not, but it took me a while to get through the book. It's heavy, but I was glad I did. And I think going forward, that it will help bolster my attempts to take strength more seriously. So you mentioned how has how his strength and muscles evolved over the centuries. Where are we today and I would say. You know many of us we've reviewed the book on on this podcast to read Peter atias book, and he is a huge advocate for strength training, especially as we get older. Where are we today in strength training? And I would say as a society, and then let's get down to the microcosm of endurance athletes has strength training changed over the years. Yeah, so let me answer that question by answering a completely different one. Which I don't like your question. I'm going to make up my own and I'm going to answer. Yeah, yeah. Let me know what you said. I'm going to be running for office next year, so I'm practicing. Okay. You mentioning Peter Athea, that's a, here's the train of my discombobulated thought, which is that Peter Atea has made a very strong case for like, forget about muscle to make your biceps look bigger. You need to get muscle so that you can spend the last 10 or whatever years of your life enjoying and moving through the world and not, lying in a bed sucking meals through a straw. And I think he's made that case really well. And that's probably the main thing I've taken from Peter as he is worth. And it's, you know, one of the spurs that has helped me think about what's on a different way. So, this book's stronger by Michael Joseph Gross. It's divided into three parts. And each focused on one central figure who has done a lot of Researcher or worker in this area and the first section of the book is About a classicist a guy who studies like how how people thought about muscle and ancient Greece and how that's and and you know It's the sort of fundamental people didn't know what muscle was and and not to so'm being very digressive here, but I had no idea that the word for muscle comes from the Latin word for little mouse, because when you flex your biceps, it looks like there's a little mouse running along under your skin. That's literally like people didn't know what the hell muscle was. They didn't know muscle was what made things go They thought it was just this sort of gross inert byproduct that built up on your body And so like you know, gale in the the famous physician used like man There's nothing worse than having muscle on it. It crushes your soul If you put on all these big muscles you you know, you're just basically stifling your soul anyway So there's a big first section on like the sort of philosophical aspect of what is muscle due for us. The second section focuses on a woman named Jan Todd who is probably the most famous and most influential female powerlifter in the world. She's a on faculty at the University of Texas. She and her husband sort of created the first real center for the study of physical culture. But she was also among the pioneers in forcing people to take seriously the idea that women could pit on muscle and might like to put on muscle and might benefit from putting on muscle. So that's part two is this really real trailblazing female power lifter. And then part three is about a woman named and woman named and I will definitely pronounce this wrong Maria Fiatorone Singh. I think she's from the States originally been now based in Australia and she has been the one of the key pioneers starting in the I think early 90s in getting really old people to lift weights and showing that you can get like 90 year old people who can't walk or whatever, you know, the The lifting weights maybe starting by lifting their arms basically, but you can see substantial increases in their musculature and changes in their quality of life such that they can learn to walk again or whatever if they've been too weak before. So the reason I'm saying all this is A, because we're talking about the book, I might as well summarize it, but also B, you mentioned Peter Atilla. And so part three of the book is dovetailing with this idea of what does muscle do and strength do, how does it help you enhance your health span? And I found it really compelling. And Peter Atilla's message is like, start now and you need to start building up muscle to have available in your last decade of life. And what Maria Fiatorone Singh is saying is like, hey, even if you're already in what maybe you're the last decade of your life, even if you're in your 90s, start lifting. Like do it, do it now. There's nothing more, it's safe, but it's also effective and can have a powerful effect on your life. So does it say anything different than Peter Tia? It makes some of the same cases, and it picks up that idea that's in the zeitgeist right now of how we think about muscle, but I think, obviously if you say, how do we think about muscle right now? Lots of people think about it in different ways, And there's still a very dominant thing that I get all about looking good in a tight t-shirt and stuff like that.

And you know, whatever, like, you know,

it's not like nobody wants to look bad

in a tight t-shirt. But for someone as runners, like, like, I don't really care so much about that. But boy, it does reach me this idea of like,

yeah, I want to be independent and strong

and living, you know, healthily in my later years.

How's that for a scatter dancer?

Uh huh. it does reach me this idea of like, yeah, I wanna be independent and strong and living, you know, healthily in my later years.

How's that for a scatter dancer?

I like it.

Well, that's a great answer.

And, you know, I like this saying,

is there any hope for me?

Is, should I start lifting?

Can I make a change?

And I think the rule is if you're still 98.6 degrees,

there's a chance. There's hope. You can continue. The body is amazing, but you've got to put a load on it so it can adapt. We don't hit a certain decade and then stop adapting. We're always moving one direction. Yeah. And there's been these sort of stories or narratives out there where it's like, oh, well, as you get older, you're, you know, the hormones decline. You don't have the testosterone and the growth hormone.

And so you can't put on muscle anymore.

And it's like, no, that's a misaperhension that born of like looking at typical trajectories, which is that people generally don't start lifting in their 60s or whatever. So it's like, yeah, people in their 60s never put on muscle. Well, they've never really tried. So that was the radical thing about Maria Fietto and his saying is like she went to the,

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