Jim Larranaga is one of Minnesota's elite runners. Now the 61-year-old from Chanhassen is in a different kind of race: trying to hold on to his mind. Larranaga has been diagnosed with a form of Alzheimer's disease that causes literal blind spots. His eyes work, but his brain can't process everything they send it.
His condition is posterior cortical atrophy, a rarer form of Alzheimer's. It attacks the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that handles visual information. Vision checks turned up nothing, and it took further testing to find the problem. That's typical of a disease that can look like an eye problem long before anyone thinks of dementia.
Larranaga's response has been to add something new to his training: weights. He's betting that strength training can slow the effects of the disease on his visual processing. For now, he's ahead of the research. Scientists are still working out whether exercise of any kind can change the course of Alzheimer's, and the evidence for lifting specifically is even thinner. Larranaga isn't waiting for a final answer.
That open question is why the story belongs on a University of Minnesota reading list. Twin Cities researchers have been part of that shift, running exercise trials with older adults who have cognitive impairment. A runner who adds weights to his training is a real-life test of the question those labs are trying to answer under controlled conditions.
One person's experience can't settle the science. If Larranaga's vision holds steady, nobody will know for sure whether the weights deserve the credit. Still, his approach makes sense to anyone who has watched the research on this disease: keep doing the things with a plausible upside and few downsides, and keep running.
