Grim Joggers and The New Evolution Diet

I've been playing Grim Joggers on my iPad, and it's been lots of fun. In my opinion, it beats Angry Birds hands down. But as a jogger, I'm terribly biased of course.



Let's get a second opinion from 'The New Evolution Diet' by Art De Vany:

"Lately I've been playing a lot of tennis, which is all the running I need." 

What, no jogging? What is that all about? Let's check out his new book.



Let's start at the Afterword, where N. N. Taleb (a thinker and walker) testifies:

"Art showed, backed by research, that regular jogging and marathon running degrades your health, while sprinting and interval training improves it." 

Huh? Have I missed something?

"...my only regular activity in life is long walks, which I tend to take every day. I try to take aimless walks of between 1 and 2 hours a day, up to 5 hours when I travel."

Then he goes on, on the very same page:

"No Moderate Exercise Sessions: either too little, or too much, or way beyond what I plan to do, and with no set schedule... No Purely Aerobic Exercise: The separation is foolish and not empirical. Avoid listening to "trainers"."

This doesn't make much sense to me. Yes variety is refreshing, and a couple of anaerobic sessions per week might be ok, but certainly most of the training should be moderate aerobic exercise.

Unfortunately the actual content written by the author is not any different or better. We are told that  jogging is not acceptable, but that opinion is not backed up by anything even remotely convincing.

"We are made more for walking and sprinting than for jogging. The fact is, few hunters ever literally ran down prey over the marathon distance of 26.2 miles." 

Gotcha, Art, and thank you for allowing us learn this gold nugget of a scientific truth (wink wink).

So the take-away value from this is that if you are a grim jogger, reading diet books by grim non-joggers is to a large degree a waste of time. You'd be better off jogging, or playing Grim Joggers.