The 82-year-old man who is the subject of study for having a metabolic age of someone who is 20

Juan López was 66 years old when, for the first time, he put on a pair of sneakers and went out the door of his house in Toledo, Spain, to run. Today, at 82, he has broken several records in the "ultra distance" categories within his age range.

Despite having little time to train because he takes care of his wife, he still tries to go running six times a week to stay in shape. "Every morning I spend it fixing breakfast, shopping, in short, the things of the house," he says, "and in the afternoons, when I leave my wife, Mari, quiet in the armchair, I can allow myself to go train: then I train, winter or summer, between two hours and two and a half hours." On Sundays things change because he goes out in the morning with a group of colleagues and they do long distances: "It's very enjoyable because you can chat at a comfortable pace with which you can do several kilometers of running." Juan is a special case, so special that a team of researchers from the University of Castilla La Mancha, in Spain, decided to study him in depth and discovered that his metabolic age, that is, the age of his organism -measured in the amount of energy (calories) that the body spends at rest- is equivalent to that of a person in their twenties.

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"Above all, what Juan's muscles have is that they are very efficient at the cardiorespiratory level of oxygen utilization to produce force," Dr. Julián Alcázar explains to BBC Mundo. And while scientists admit that there is an element of luck in his case - not having had to deal with any major congenital diseases in his life or having suffered any accident that left him with sequelae - this hardly serves to explain a minimal part of how special Juan really is. Rather, what more and more experts agree on is that, if one wants to understand the secret of longevity, it may be more useful to listen to the life stories of people like this proud Toledan, stories in which tenacity and the capacity for innovation become the key tools to be able to live a long and healthy life.