Every day, I try and outrace Death. Every day, Death takes some
of my brain cells away. My effort is about winning a race with
Death almost every day to at least replace my dead brain cells,
and especially over time. Death has a huge headstart on me, and
took alot of cells before I got in the race, so I have to race
hard to get them back in reasonable time.
In the early days of this race, I used to think alot about scenes
from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a film that featured
racing scenes with an elaborately costumed Death. After finishing
my biking for the day, I’d take off my bike helmet, think of
pulling ahead of that black, skeletal figure, and think, “Nyah,
nyah!”.
So why the race? Well, my daily dose of dead brain cells comes
from Huntington’s Disease, which is a kind of disease called
neurodegenerative. That means lots of my brain cells die
every day; one WAG on the web somewhere placed the daily neuron
death level in the millions.
So what can I do about this? Well, I get on my bike every day and
stay there a while. At least 17-20 minutes, preferably over an hour.
Recent research has shown that exercise can lead to neural growth.
Neurodegenerative diseases were thought to be hopeless until
recently because neurons were thought not to ever grow, but in fact
exercise and certain substances (highly present in blueberries!)
have been shown to cause neurons to grow.
Mind you, using this to help with damage from neurodegenerative
diseases is very much experimental. You can think of this as
a lab rat’s blog. I’m going to give the lab rat’s point-of-view
of using exercise for neurodegenerative therapy.
