11.26.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I. Today I will
be reading National Geographic magazine dated October twenty twenty five,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the continuation of

(00:24):
the article I began last time, entitled how to Age
Like an Athlete by Chris Ballard. No neoprene, no gloves,
no warm hat. Kennedy had always enjoyed pushing limits. He
gave it a go immediately he took to it. In
twenty thirteen, at a Ribbon lake in Ireland, he attempted

(00:47):
an ice mile, one of the most daunting and dangerous
feats in extreme sports, a test of mental and physical
endurance that requires covering a mile in ice swimming conditions.
Most who try don't make it. Kennedy not only pulled
it off, becoming the fifty fifth person in the world
to do so, but that was only the beginning. He

(01:07):
took on marathon swims, entered ice swimming championships, and in
twenty nineteen became the first man to complete the ice
seven's challenge swimming an ice mile on all seven continents
and in a polar body of water. Nothing about these
swims was easy, which is part of the appeal. Similar
to an ultra marathon, ice swimming forces you out of

(01:30):
your comfort zone. The urge to quit, to just get
out of the water is overwhelming, hypothermia looms. But if
you stay in, the sense of accomplishment and self confidence
is galvanizing. Interestingly, Kennedy credits his age, or at least
his experience, as an important factor in his success. I
think your own life journey and work adds to your endurance,

(01:52):
he says. Kennedy ticks off stressers. He's faced, his body crumbling,
his divorce, parenting, his job as a plumber. I think
all these challenges make you pretty bloody strong. Kennedy refers
to this as the endurance brain, a term he used
sees as a key to success for aging competitors. I
think that's why a lot of older athletes, even in

(02:14):
American swimming, not just ice swimming, modern swimming, are achieving
into their sixties because they've got all this knowledge and
skills behind between motherhood and fatherhood, between screw ups and life.
Now fifty four. Kennedy has completed nineteen official ice miles
and competed in swimming events around the world. He is

(02:35):
the cheer person of the Ireland arm of the International
Ice Swimming Association. He doesn't take any of it too seriously,
and this may be just as important as anything else.
We do hard core stuff, but we also have great
fun and we enjoy the company, says Kennedy, who was
headed out to an Anthrax show with his mates after

(02:56):
a recent interview. We have a few beers and we
laugh at each other. He's determined to swim as long
as his body will allow, and still relishes the moments
when he can surprise people, like when he recently completed
a swim at seventy eight degrees north latitude in the Arctic.
No one expected it, he says with a grin. They
were like, holy mumm, and I said, yep, the old

(03:19):
man still got it. Looking ahead, Kennedy is planning for
another ice mile. It's a theme that runs through the
lives of all these athletes and countless others. You don't
stop taking on challenges because you grow old. You grow
old when you stop taking on challenges. Next article A
game plan for fighting Father Time by Chris Cohen. Here

(03:42):
for your brain by being social. Most people understand that
making an investment in your physical health, like quitting smoking
or getting in shape, could lead to a longer, healthier life.
It turns out that the same can be said for
investing in your personal relationships. Spending time with friends and
family or signing up for a recreation sports league team
could pay the dividends down the road. Maintaining social ties

(04:05):
seems to work like mental exercise by promoting new connections
in your brain and slowing down age related cognitive decline.
And you don't need to be a social butterfly butterfly
to reap the benefits of connecting with other people. A
recent study found that having even one social interaction a
month can cut the incidents of developing dementia in half,

(04:27):
and the benefits are even greater if you connect with
a person that you can confide in. It is very
important to be socially active for our brains, says Suraje Samtani,
a lead author of the study and a dementia researcher
at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. But
we don't need that much to make a big difference.
Since conducting this research, Stani has ramped up his own

(04:50):
social life through exercise. I started karate, and I catch
up with friends and gopher walks every week, he says.
It has just changed the way I do things. Broaden
your definition of exercise. It's almost impossible to overstate how
good physical activity is for your health, no matter how
old you are. But you don't necessarily need to be

(05:11):
dead lifting four hundred pounds or running an ultra marathon.
Just a little bit of movement, taking the stairs, carrying
groceries has significant health advantages for otherwise inactive people. Any
little good that you can do is great, says I
Min Lee, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Harvard University.
We are only now verifying these insights, Lee says, because

(05:34):
of a new generation of long term studies that equipped
participants with accelerometers think fitness trackers, and she found that,
contrary to popular thinking, the longevity benefits of walking hit
much sooner than ten thousand steps. Other studies have linked
shorter walks to improved mental and cardiovascular health. Similar benefits

(05:56):
come from short bursts of more vigorous activity, such as
walking up a hill. Really tiny amounts, anything from two
to four minutes per day, says Immanuel Stamatakis, professor of
Physical activity and Population Health at Australia's University of Sydney.
In one study, he discovered that these bursts of activity

(06:17):
are associated with a substantial reduction in the isn't incidents
of various types of cancer. In other research, using comparable data,
Leonard Wiermann, a professor of public health at Griffith University
in Gold Coast, Australia, found that for the least active
portion of the population, each hour of walking translates to

(06:39):
six extra hours of life. That's quite a good return
on investment, he says. Build up your cardio capacity. No
matter what new longevity science comes out, many researchers still
consider cardiovascular fitness level as one of the best measures
of overall health. Luckily, it can be improved with consistent

(07:00):
exercise and easily tracked. The gold standard for evaluating your
performance level is to calculate the maximum rate of oxygen
you use during exhausting physical activity, which occurs as the
period during your exercise when your breathing hardest. This figure
is called VO two max, and a precise measurer. Measurement

(07:22):
of it usually requires breathing into a mass connected to
a tube in a lab, but consumer wearable devices like
GPS running watches provide a general estimate. Whether your number
is in a good or a bad range depends on
your age and gender. For example, a VO two max
of forty milliliters of oxygen per kilogram per minute would

(07:46):
be considered below average for a twenty five year old man,
but excellent for a seventy five year old. Either way,
that number strongly correlates to your heart health and overall lifespan.
Individuals who have a high two max may have a
lower risk of dying from all causes, says Martin Gibbala,
a professor of kinnesy'siology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.

(08:13):
Over time, moderate to vigorous cardio workouts of all kinds
can boost your VO two max, training your body to
more efficiently process oxygen and turn it into energy. A
quick workout to do just that is a high intensity exercise,
for example, a twenty minute workout that includes three vigorous
five minute efforts. The specific movement matters less than the intensity.

(08:37):
It could be cycling, running, or using an elliptical or
rowing machine. Don't let your muscles go to waste. Raw
strength is strongly associated with a healthier life. If you
train for stronger muscles and bone density now, you'll have
a greater chance of remaining independent as you age. The
American College of Sports Medicine recommends everyone perform some or

(09:00):
of resistance training at least twice a week. But what's
the best strategy to actually make those strength gains? The
helpful answer is emerging from science and is already common
knowledge at your local gym. Lift weights that are heavy
for you, and try to progressively add way over time.
How heavy is heavy? An important concept is muscular failure,

(09:21):
the point at which you can't perform even one more repetition.
You need to know where failure is to know how
hard you're supposed to be training, explains Brad Schoenfeld, a
leading strength training researcher at Lehman College in the Bronx,
New York. While you can make appreciable gains in other ways,
studies show the optimal strength workouts consist of low numbers

(09:44):
of reps one to six performed relatively close to failure
two or three reps away in other words, strength workouts
are ideally quite strenuous, but this training only needs to
take an hour or so each week. You can make
very nice gains with a fairly minimal routine in three
or even two days a week. Shown Feld explains, provided

(10:05):
you train hard cultivate good eating and sleeping habits, you'll
only get the gains you deserve from your workouts if
they are paired with solid recovery and nutrition. And while
the wellness industry would like to sell your gadgets and
supplements for that, it's best to start with some basics
for recovery from the gym and from life. Nothing is
more important than sleep, and a foundation for better rest

(10:28):
is simply routine. Studies indicate that people who go to
sleep and wake up on a regular rhythm get more
and higher quality sleep. This is because your body is
hard wire to operate on a roughly twenty four hour
circadian cycle. Disruptions can lead to increased risk for cardiovascular disease,
increased risk for cancer, changes in mental health, all those

(10:50):
sorts of things, says Tira Legates, a professor at the
University of Maryland School of Medicine. And while the prevailing
diet advice often focuses on what you can't eat. A
better approach is to find a way you feel full
and satisfied from whole, unprocessed foods. Fill your plate with vegetables, grains,
and meat, fish or plant proteins. Stuff you enjoy. One

(11:12):
landmark study provides some insight as to why. Researchers compared
a diet of ultra processed foods factory made ready to
eat items, and a diet of whole foods. While the
two diets were nutritionally equivalent, study participants who went on
both diets for two weeks each gained weight on the
processed diet indus industrially prepared foods seem to mess with

(11:36):
your sense of hunger. The study subjects said. The taste
of the two options was equally appealing, but they ate
more of the altra processed foods. All the same, the
good news is that your whole foods diet can should
be delicious. The more you can do to structure your
life so that you're not having to constantly resist temptation,
the better, says Zachary Knight, a physiology professor the University

(12:00):
of California, San Francisco who studies the internal processes that
govern hunger. That means having healthier foods at home. Next,
I want to live to be one hundred. As told
to Devon Gordon, these iconic athletes were the greatest of
all time at what they did, so who better to
ask about getting the most out of their bodies? As

(12:21):
we age. We came in search of wisdom, but they
gave us something even better motivation. Nadia Komanice sixty three.
Comaniche was just fourteen years old when she scored the
first ever perfect ten by an Olympic gymnast at the
nineteen seventy six Summer Games in Montreal, and then she
did six more times in what many sports historians consider

(12:44):
the greatest performance of the modern Games. Her combination of
athleticism in our artistry captivated a global television audience. Five
years after her retirement, in nineteen eighty four, she defected
from communists Romania to the United States and later made
married US Olympic gymnast Bart Connor. They now run a
gymnastics academy in Norman, Oklahoma. In my time, athletes used

(13:09):
to compete, and then they retired. I stopped exercising in
the nineteen eighties because there was not enough information yet
on how keeping your body in good shape would help
you navigate your long term health better. I thought all
that came from genetics. But I was playing soccer for
fun and some of my friends and I realized I
was gasping to breathe, and I was like, oh my gosh,

(13:31):
that doesn't seem right, especially for a former athlete I have.
It's changed when I came to the United States and
discovered Gold's gym. We have a house in Venice Beach, California,
and the original one was right across the street where
Arnold Schwarzenegger worked out. I saw him there a lot.
It was an introduction to a different kind of lifestyle,
and then it becomes a part of your day to

(13:53):
day life. I realized over time that my body was
developing different muscles and that I felt better. That was
the most important thing. I was even thinking better now.
I work out forty minutes a day no matter where
I am, and I'm very realistic. Your body tells you
what you can do. I don't run, for example, because
I feel my joints will go out too fast. People

(14:14):
often say to me, Nadia, you're in good shape. Then
I say, yeah, like a human shape. I'm in okay shape,
but don't expect me to do a double twist. If
I missed that feeling, I go and get it by
walking on a beam, doing some turns, getting out on
the floor, doing some artistic moves. I stopped competing many
years ago, but I didn't get away from the sport.

(14:35):
It's always there for me. Carl Lewis sixty four. In
an era when top American sprinters were major celebrities, Lewis
was a towering figure, not just in the world of
track and field, but across sports. The fastest man alive
throughout the nineteen eighties and early nineties. At age thirty,
he broke the world one hundred meter record, finishing in

(14:55):
nine point eight six seconds. He likes to say when
athletes started going to Las Vegas in the eighties, he
hired a chef to improve his diet. Today, he's head
coach of the track and field program at is alma mater,
the University of Houston. It feels like everything changed. When
I turned sixty. Forty was nothing, Fifty was nothing. Sixty

(15:17):
it's a lot harder now. It's just a lot of
little things. It feels like if I took. If I
look at a calorie, now I gain weight and I
can't sleep through the night anymore. That's one thing that's
kind of frustrating. And of course I wake up twice
a week wondering why does my back hurt or why
is my hamstring tight? In the history of time, we've

(15:38):
only been getting old for like three seconds. We haven't
lived this long for very long, so we're finding out
how so much about aging ourselves. I get fulfillment now
from doing something every year that I never thought I
would do. I decided I wanted to bench three hundred
pounds at age sixty, which is crazy. I got to
two eighty five. Then one year I went skyded for

(16:00):
sixty three. I wanted to do a split. I started
training about six months beforehand, and I still haven't done
the split. It may take me until sixty five, but
I'm going to do that damn split. And when I'm
sixty five, I want to ride sixty five miles on
my bicycle in one day. The most I've gone is
like forty. I've always felt like you need to have

(16:21):
two or three reasons why you want to push yourself.
For me, I just feel better physically and emotionally when
I work out and keep my weight down, and there's
definitely some vanity in there. I mean, come on, let's
be real. I ran around with more or less no
clothes on. But also I want to live to be
a hundred. I try not to fall into the tramp
of saying, oh, you are a super athlete, so you're

(16:43):
a super human. I'm a normal human. Cheryl Miller sixty
one basketball player, nineteen eighty four Olympic gold medalist, Basketball
Hall of Famer, four time College All American, three time
College Player of the Year, two time nc Double A champion,
three thousand, eighteen total career points, fifteen hundred thirty four rebounds.

(17:07):
Women's basketball history goes back further than Miller, but she
was the sport's first crossover superstar, leaving the University of
Southern California to two NCAA titles in the mid nineteen
eighties and being the centerpiece of the gold medal winning
Team USA at the nineteen eighty four Summer Olympics in
Los Angeles. The w n b A didn't come until

(17:28):
well after her retirement, but she was one of the
league inaugural head coaches, with the Phoenix Mercury. The last
time I played in a pick up game, I was
twenty seven, maybe twenty eight, But since then I haven't
picked up a basketball competitively. The pain was already too
bad back then, the crunching and the popping and the swelling.
It wasn't worth it. I had bone spurs in the

(17:50):
front and in the back of my knee. I could
only walk for twenty minutes, and then I'd immediately have
to get home and do the icing the elevation, but
there was no relief. I was miserable. But the only
reason why I finally got knee replacements, one around Thanksgiving
of twenty three, the other in April of twenty four
is I couldn't ride a bike any more. Why do
I wait so long because of that old warrior mentality?

(18:14):
Because I was a big dummy. Now I have a
second lease on life. I'm a kid in the candy
store and learning how to run again. I can at
least get out there and put some shots up and
move around. I wake up at four in the morning,
get myself organized for the day, do my Bible study,
and then I'm out the door and walking up hills
and jogging and it's such a joy. I'll see a

(18:34):
pick up game and I want to possibly get into it,
but I'm not quite there yet. That curiosity is there, though.
It's like I wonder if I can still get up
and down the floor, get hit a little bit, set
a screen, try to box somebody out, grab a rebound,
make that outlet pass sprint down, finish the lay up.
Those are still things in the back of my mind.

(18:55):
I wonder, with a smile on my heart, I wonder.
Cherry Rice sixty two football player, three times Super Bowl winner,
Pro Football Hall of Famer, twenty two thousand, eight hundred
ninety five receiving yards, fifteen hundred forty nine catches, two
hundred eight total touchdowns. Rice is the NFL's all time
leader in catches, receiving yards, and touchdowns, and yet, coming

(19:18):
out of little known Mississippi Valley State University, Rice faced
concerns he might be too slow and too untested. He
wound up playing twenty seasons as a wide receiver while
earning a reputation for out working every one on the
field and always staying in flawless shape. He won three
Super Bowls with the San Francisco forty Niners. He still
lives in the Bay Area and co founded an energy

(19:40):
drink business, g O A T Fuel with his daughter
and son in law. I wasn't the greatest athlete out there.
I wasn't the fastest. There were guys so much more
gifted than I was. Chris Carter, Michael Irvin, Randy Moss.
What they could do on the football field was amazing.
I'm not saying those guys didn't work hard, but I
knew I had to work harder. I was always reaching

(20:02):
when I played, and I'm still reaching after retiring from
the game. I'm not dialing anything back now. Man. I'm
always challenging myself to be the best individual that I
can be. It's just in my DNA. I want people
to know that after you step away from something that
you've been doing for a long long time, life is
not over. I actually believe that when people have nothing

(20:24):
to do after their careers, that's when everything goes downhill.
There's nothing to wake up for and be excited about.
I wake up every morning and well, I'm not going
to say I'm excited to work out because I know
it's going to hurt, but it's going to put me
in a frame of mind that hey, I really did
something productive for my body, and now I'm ready to
be the greatest person that I can be during the day.

(20:46):
I'm actually down to my playing weight now, and I've
been out of the game for a long time. I
do a lot of peloton, a lot of CrossFit. I
also have a big South African mastiff and he likes
to run, so he get out there. And yet the
knee is going to swell sometimes and you might be
a little stiff when you get out of bed, but
you've got to fight through that pain knowing that the

(21:07):
ultimate goal is that you're still going to be flexible
and active as you get older. So that's my motivational speech.
Challenge yourself every day and it's going to reward you
in the end. Next article How an American icon helped
save Egypt's ancient temples by Kate Story. Sixty five years ago,
the temple of Abu Simbal were destined to disappear beneath

(21:31):
the murky waters of a new dam. Then Jackie Kennedy
got involved to secure its future. Egypt had made the
hard decision to let go of its past. It was
nineteen sixty in construction had just begun on southern Egypt's
a Swan high dam, which would generate hydroelectric power, provide
more arable land, and control the flood prone Nile River.

(21:52):
But for all the good a dam would do, it
was also going to be disastrous for the area's archaeological wonders.
The massive reservoar was expected to destroy dozens of priceless
historic sites, including the majestic twin Temples of Abu Symbol
built more than three millennia ago. The monument was commissioned
by Rameses the Second and chiseled directly into a sandstone

(22:14):
cliff on the western bank of the river. The imposing
facade of the main temple was guarded by four towering
Rameses the Second Colossi, each sixty seven feet high, and
the nearby smaller temple was dedicated to Queen Nefertari and Hathor,
the goddess of love, music and dance. The temple's inner
sanctums were carved deep into the cliff and filled with

(22:36):
statues of Egyptian gods and reliefs depicting victorious military battles.
It was one of Egypt's finest pharoonic treasures, and it
was about to be lost forever. In October nineteen sixty five,
the nineteen ton visage of Rameses the second was carefully
cut from the Egyptian Riverbank mountain, where it had stood

(22:57):
for more than three thousand years and hoisted onto a
truck headed to a new site. If not for an
alley halfway around the world, Abu Symbols famous statues may
have been lost to a vast lake created by the
Aswan High Dam. To save Abu Symbol, an international consortium
of conservationists launched an unprecedented rescue mission before the dam's

(23:19):
completion in nineteen seventy. The plan was to cut the
entire complex out of the mountain by meticulously deconstructing each
stately chin, cheek and crown, more than a thousand pieces
in total, and then transporting and reassembling them on higher ground.
In order to succeed, it would require unheard of orchestration
between United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization UNESCO, and

(23:44):
thousands of archaeologists, architects and egyptologists from dozens of countries,
but with a cost equivalent to four hundred million dollars
to day, the entire undertaking seemed far too expensive to
pull off, until an unlikely diplomat intervened with a bold
vision to support a project that ultimately transformed UNESCO and

(24:05):
reshaped how future leaders in her role would go on
to effect change if a world away. Future First Lady
Jacqueline Kennedy had been closely monitoring the fate of Abu
Symbol ever since reading about Howard Carter's nineteen twenty two
discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb. She had remained fascinated by

(24:26):
the mummies and pyramids of ancient Egypt. Years later, when
a friend gave her a copy of the UNESCO Courier,
the official magazine published by UNESCO, which called on world
leaders to save Abu Symbol before it was too late,
she vowed to protect the memory of the once mighty
empire she'd learned about as a little girl. After John F.

(24:46):
Kennedy became President in nineteen sixty one, Jacqueline got to
work convincing her husband why it would be advantageous for
the United States to get involved. But rather than just
talking behind closed doors, the new First Lady to go
through more official channels. She crafted a carefully composed memo
likening the loss of Abu Symbol to letting the Parthenon

(25:08):
be flooded, underscoring the research possibilities of the temples and
how important they were to the whole of Africa, a
region with which JFK was trying to strengthen diplomatic ties
during the Cold War. She gave the note to White
House adviser Richard Goodwin, who then helped draw the President's
attention and the financial might of the U. S to Egypt.

(25:30):
I convinced the President to ask Congress to give money
to save the tombs at Abu Symbol, Jacqueline proudly recalled later,
but there was a caveat. He only would if I
could convince Republican Congressman John Rooney of the Appropriations Committee,
who was always against giving money to foreigners. She was
ultimately successful, and the U. S. Government announced its intention

(25:52):
to cover up to one third of the cost. The
rest would be financed by Egypt and UNESCO. Of course,
she wasn't the first woman in the White House to
use soft diplomacy as a conduit for influencing matters beyond
traditional lines of negotiation. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who famously
visited troops in the South Pacific during World War Two

(26:13):
was often referred to as the eyes, ears and legs
of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But prior to Jacqueline, a
first lady's diplomatic duties almost always took the form of
trips abroad or hosting dignitaries at the White House. A
woman's credibility was part of what created liking and friendliness
and cooperation, and would soothe the relationship often between the

(26:36):
heads of state, says Elizabeth J. Nattal, author of Jacqueline
Kennedy and the Architecture of First Lady Diplomacy. She created
the blueprint for the way in which First Ladies used
different kinds of communication tools, pointing to initiatives like First
Lady Michael Obamas Let Girls Learn, a plan to increase

(26:57):
educational opportunities for young women worldwide. Natal adds that now
first Ladies can actually influence policy. The plan was put
into place in nineteen sixty three and a team of Egyptian, German, French, Swiss,
and Italian workers among them, mastered marble carvers from Carrara, Italy,
then cut Abu symbol into enormous blocks weighing up to

(27:20):
thirty three tons. Using a variety of tools including hand saws,
the blocks were numbered and taken via flatbread trailers to
a new artificial sandstone mountain two hundred feet higher than
the old Nile shore line and six hundred ninety feet inland.
Crane operators resurrected the grand Ferohonic work piece by piece,

(27:41):
like a giant lego set, successfully put back together again.
This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for to day.
Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep
on listening and have a great day.