68-Year-Old With Alzheimer’s Staves Off The Disease By Climbing The Same Mountain Every Day

A 68-year-old man with Alzheimer’s disease has kept up his fitness routine for the sake of familiarity and habit, but also because the routine is a matter of health and discipline.

Sion Jair estimates he has climbed the same mountain over 5,000 times. Judging by his health — along with a recent study that supports brisk exercise as a means of staving off dementia — his fitness routine is definitely helping. 

This article in The Guardian pointed to a randomized, controlled study that looked at how exercise affected men and women with Alzheimer's disease.

Some of the walkers significantly increased their scores on cognitive tests that focused on thinking and remembering. The brain’s hippocampus, the area most closely linked to memory retrieval, had in some cases actually grown.

“I got over this business of going up a mountain for a challenge years ago. I just do it because I enjoy it. I do it because it’s familiar, and particularly when you’ve got Alzheimer’s, you need something that’s familiar,” Jair told the Guardian.

He has heard the advice to do puzzles to keep one's mind sharp, but that didn't work for him. After the first three clues, he could only stare blankly at the page. But hiking up his mountain, called ‘Old Man of Coniston’, seems to provide him with the clarity and memory that otherwise might slip away:

When he reads, Jair finds that he has forgotten the start of a sentence by the time he’s finished it. Nevertheless, as we wind our way up the Old Man, he has a precise recall of events that took place 50 years ago, even down to very specific details.

The article has other specific data to back up the anecdotal experience of the "Old Man" from the Lake District.