Slow BURNER

Sasha Mclaren has always wanted to be a runner but felt she’d missed the boat.

“I’d love to run but I can’t,” she mentioned recently. I pricked up my ears. Why? An adept yogi and swimmer, in her early 40s, she had good fitness and no obvious barrier. Unpleasant past experience, was the short answer.

“I did try running,” Mclaren recalls. “I thought I'd go up the incline on my street and round two or three blocks. I ran up the incline and I was exhausted, in pain, and hated it. I got home and had shin splints for a month.”

Despite the lure of freedom, frugality and accessible cardio, she concluded that age and lungs had banished running to the too-hard basket.

Fair enough, but as a mildly-evangelistic