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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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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 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 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? 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.

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

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 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 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 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 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

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

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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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.