2 billion and counting...

Well, this time around, the 2 billion that I am interested in talking about is not money.

Something more precious, rather priceless if I may.

Our heartbeats.

Something that each of us have.

The first indicator that we have arrived in this world (by 16 days of conception!) and the last indicator when we leave this world (you are classified clinically alive even if you are brain dead hooked up to a hundred wires and pipes!).

Also, an entirely involuntary activity if you think about it.

You don’t consciously get your heart to beat. Just one of the many involuntary activities that our body performs so we can continue to live, and thrive if you choose to.

If you think about it, we wouldn’t have been able to achieve most of the stuff we have as humans if not for our nervous system (and some more) taking care of the vast majority of the involuntary activities for us.

Breathing for instance. If you had to keep reminding yourself to breathe, I am sure this world would have done better with a more manageable population, although hard to predict whether we would have progressed as much as we have now managed to.

Most of this is apparently primary biology if you actually managed to pay attention in school. Am sure you did.

Now, depending on which set of theories you are willing to believe in, one among them says each of us arrive here with a finite number of heartbeats. Like an engine which is built to run say a 100,000 miles. Humans in general, on an average, now have a quota of ~ 2 billion heartbeats (~ 60 – 70 years of life expectancy * 365 days a year * 24 hours per day * 60 minutes per hour * 60 – 70 heartbeats per minute; yep, it does work non-stop).

Thanks partly to the advancement in medical sciences geared to keep us alive (sometimes, even when we may not be serving any purpose to the world except racking up the GDP). What I mean by that is, if you go back in time, humans on an average had a much lower life expectancy (35-40 years), and as a corollary also a quota of ~ 1 billion heartbeats.

Which is almost what the rest of the animal world gets to live with. This is also indirectly postulated in the ‘rate of living theory’ which states that the faster an organism’s metabolism, the shorter its lifespan. For instance

• a large whale’s heart beats approximately 20 times per minute and has a lifespan of 80 years on an average ( ~0.84 bn) whereas
• a hamster has 450 bpm but lives only 3 years (~0.71 bn)
• a cat lives 15 years on average and has a 150 bpm rate (~1.18 bn) while
• an elephant beats only 30 times a minute and gets to live 70. You get the drift.

There are numerous scientific studies out there talking about this correlation too such as this one which, however do point out the fact that we haven’t yet been able to answer the question whether ‘Can human life be extended by cardiac slowing?’. So if you can’t increase the quota from 2 bn to 3 bn, could you may be ration the 2 bn over a longer period of time? Someone in Portugal definitely thinks so (pun intended)

Now why did I bother reading up all of this and regurgitate here? To be honest, I got interested in this space when my fitness tracker started keeping track of my heart rate during my exercise sessions.

My average resting heart rate (RHR) which was in its 70s when I started out exercising almost 5 years back, started going down over a period of time, so much so that, now it is in the mid 40s.

Pretty neat huh!

Approximately 25 beats saved per minute.

If you do the math, I am supposed to have clawed back / clawing back ~ 200 days for every year that I live. Looking at it the other way, I am now supposedly ageing only around 165 days for every year I live on or in simpler terms, I am ageing at half the rate I was earlier.

In fact, my RHR has managed to bottom out in the 30s on a few nights in the recent past, although that’s not a frequent phenomenon, yet.

A stat I stumbled across but have had no means to validate though, is that some of the rishis who (used to) penance it out in the Himalayas for years could bring down their RHR to 4 bpm.

Sounds outlandish, of course, until a scientist worth his salt is able to confirm it for us.

At the other end of the spectrum lies what’s called the maximum heart rate (MHR).

Typically, 220 less your age is supposed to be your MHR. Mind you, there are more formulae out there but this is the most commonly used and the simplest.

So, if you are say, 30 years of age, you are expected to have a MHR of 190 (220-30). And so on.

I have been able to touch 196 sometime ago. As recent as this week, I did 193 when sprinting one morning.

Applying the logic in the reverse, I am now as ‘young’ as 27. ??

Where am I leading with all this?

To be honest, all of the above wasn’t even on the menu when I started out or even now for that matter. This was something I stumbled across and read more about primarily due to curiosity.

A dimension I did not know existed, as a corollary to the path towards fitness I was on & working towards.

It is more about the quality of life when one is alive. How well can you live and thrive when you are alive. Live long and die short, as someone said, or at least, hope to.

The biggest takeaway from all of this, the way I see it, we haven’t even scratched the surface when it comes to learning, least of all about ourselves.

"My doctor told me that jogging could add years to my life. I think he was right. I feel ten years older already." Milton Berle