Today is Motivation Monday. I did the rower for a half an hour and used the standardized bike for an hour.

Yesterday was the NYC Marathon. Thousands of runners participated either as a charity runner, qualifier, or was chosen by NYRR as a raffle winner. This marathon is one of the elite marathons a runner would be dying to run in. With this marathon in mind, does running lower the risk of cancer? Cancer patients use exercise as an outlet to stay positive and stay healthy.

The below information is from Runner’s World:

Many serious runners still wonder about the effects of their 25 (and then some) miles a week. RW readers aside, runners like this are so rare, representing way less than one percent of the U.S. population, that they don’t turn up in cancer studies. Still, two 2005 epidemiological studies–one with 22,000 Finnish men and 24,000 Finnish women; the other with 116,000 American nurses–found lower all-cause mortality rates, including cancer deaths, among more physically active participants. Similar studies have shown that cancer deaths generally decline as exercise levels increase.

Epidemiologist Steven Blair, the president and CEO of the Cooper Institute in Dallas, Texas, is one of the world-leading experts on exercise and longevity. While he notes that the book is still open on cancer rates among serious exercisers, he says, “In our most relevant work on this topic, we do not see any higher cancer risk in the most fit or most highly active individuals. In fact, the highest activity or fitness groups consistently had the lowest mortality rates.”