Sacramento Running News

Lets say you’ve been training for the California International Marathon and it’s still months away. December 5th seems like a distant country. No need to worry about signing up yet, right?

Unfortunately, that is probably not a good idea this year. Like many races, CIM’s registration is way ahead of prior years’, and they are reporting three times the number of registrations compared to this time last year. You might not want to put it off. They’ve passed 5,000 already and are capped at 7,500.

In a recent post, I wrote about the connection between brain health and physical fitness. Now, there is yet even more evidence for keeping kids active. In two separate studies of children and physical fitness, researchers demonstrate the link between fit children and smart children.

One study demonstrated improved performance by the fitter children (identified by a treadmill test) and connected that with actual physical differences that show up in MRI scans of the brains of the kids .

Meanwhile, a separate study (by some of the same researchers) found a similar connection between working memory in children and the size of the hippocampus. Previous research has shown that exercise can increase the size of the hippocampus, but this study linked working memory, exercise and the size of the hippocampus in children.

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