Fitness on the Fast and Friendly Track

IN New York City, where parks and river paths rule when it comes to running, it’s easy to forget about the good old track. Though tracks might not seem as commonplace as they are in the suburbs, several do exist and are ideal alternatives for working on speed, improving endurance or simply getting in a challenging workout.

Gary Brode, left, and Mike Guastella of the Warren Street Social & Athletic Club do stretches at the New Balance Track and Field Center at the Armory in Washington Heights.

It’s possible to hit a track on your own for any kind of run, but a number of clubs offer group workouts to make the drills more exciting. 

THE WARREN STREET SOCIAL & ATHLETIC CLUB Founded in 1978, this organization has weekly sessions in the evening that range from 60 to 90 minutes. Members meet indoors during the colder months at the New Balance Track and Field Center at the Armory in Washington Heights. Come warmer weather they gather at outdoor tracks like the one at the East River Park on East Sixth Street at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. Club membership is free. “We have everyone from casual, slow runners to people who are training for marathons,” said Mike Guastella, a club captain. 

Because the membership is diverse, so are the workouts, which vary every week and can be adjusted for individuals. Those wanting to run faster, for example, might do a set of 200- or 400-meter sprints. More experienced runners preparing for races would do more sprints and have fewer resting periods. Beginners would have longer stretches to recover. 

Gary Brode, a 43-year-old club member who lives in Midtown and works in finance, said the track workouts helped him shave nine minutes off his marathon time from a decade ago. “You push yourself way out of your comfort zone when you’re doing speed work with others than you would on your own,” he said. “They are really effective, and the group is very tightknit, so it makes doing them fun.” (warrenstreet.org) 

THE CENTRAL PARK TRACK CLUB This group also offers weekly track workouts, usually at the Armory in winter and the East River Park otherwise. The meetings can run up to two hours, including warm-up and cool-down periods, said the head coach, Devon Martin. Drills can include mile-long intervals or 800-meter sprints eight times in a row. 

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New Ways to Lower Cholesterol with Diet

If you're among the 14 percent of American adults with high cholesterol, you've no doubt received the standard diet advice: lose weight; limit your intake of cholesterol-rich foods like eggs, butter, cheese, red meat and shellfish; and lower your intake of saturated fats from animal foods and hydrogenated plant oils.
[See Plant-Based Diets: A Primer.]

This standard advice is problematic. For one, many people find that cleaning up their diets of saturated fat and cholesterol isn't a surefire way to improve their lipid profile, unless significant weight loss follows. (It's common to replace those saturated fats with excessive carb portions; when that happens, cholesterol levels may not respond as favorably as one might hope.)

Another issue is that standard diet therapy emphasizes restricting, or eating less of, foods that tend to increase cholesterol levels. It doesn't tell people what they can proactively eat more of to help improve their lipid profile. It's hardly surprising that most people wind up on a statin drug to lower cholesterol when all is said and done.

But new research on complementary dietary approaches to cholesterol reduction offers promise. What if there were foods or supplements that we could consume more of, whose presence in the diet would help lower cholesterol—in some cases, by as much as some traditional cholesterol-lowering drugs do?
Indeed, there are at least two such tools that are offering new hope for the power of food and dietary supplements to help lower cholesterol, independent of weight loss. Here are some of the highlights:

• The "Portfolio Diet": Past research has focused narrowly on individual foods that have the power to help lower cholesterol—usually by small margins of a few percentage points. Individual studies have separately suggested that oats, almonds, soy and plant sterol-fortified margarines may all have a modest clinical benefit to this end.

But more recently, researchers have taken a more global approach to dietary intervention by testing a dietary pattern that included a "portfolio" of such foods in people with high cholesterol, and comparing their outcomes to others following the standard recommended diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol.

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