7.

FINDING A LITTLE PURPOSE

JULY

Saturday, July 13

In the summer of 2001, two events washed over Mike Adsit’s life: the Tour de France and chemotherapy. Mike was fifty-two then, the owner of a construction company in Milford, Pennsylvania, and recently diagnosed with small-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Queasy and weak from the chemotherapy toxins that he hoped would spare his life, Mike lay on his couch one afternoon, flipping through the channels until he happened on the famous bicycle race. Lance Armstrong, who had barely survived testicular cancer, was in the lead.

“I made an internal resolution that I was going to do something,” Mike recalls, sitting at my dining room table on this humid summer day. He is a tall man with wiry white hair, trim and vigorous in his biking shorts and jersey, with the sculpted legs of a serious athlete. “I didn’t like running, and I didn’t like swimming, so I got out my bike, dusted it off, and started riding.”

In 2001, Lance Armstrong had not yet fallen from grace and admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs. Back then, worried about his chances for survival, Mike Adsit knew only that Armstrong’s story was a road map to a new life. At first, Mike could not ride his heavy mountain bike a quarter mile without walking. But slowly, he shed pounds and gained ambition. He hired a coach and began riding with other cyclists in the area. He entered his first race. He won his age division.

“I was hooked,” he says, laughing as he confessed there were only five men in his division. But he trained harder and began entering more races with younger riders. “I got completely annihilated, but I was having the time of my life.”

I am interviewing Mike because of an observation I have made: Midlife research is missing a crucial ingredient. It ignores a vital secret to thriving in middle age, during these long and dutiful years so full of responsibility. The research describes the challenges of keeping your marriage fresh and your career meaningful, the tools for sharpening your dulling brain, the rewards of investing outward and forward into the next generation. It is all good, it is all useful. But it is all so Puritan, this life of grimly paying our bills and sending in our taxes. It makes me want to jump out of a window.

I want to make a case for intentional frivolity. I argue that pursuing passions and hobbies is not incidental. It can hone your brain, it can boost your health, or, as in Mike Adsit’s case, it can save your life.

In the two years after his cancer diagnosis, Mike lost eighty-five pounds, made new friends, and drove down his race times. His passion took him away from familiar territory, where he was competent in his job but a little bored. It took him to territory where he was a novice, where he had fresh, tangible goals, where he could not coast.

Thirty months later, the cancer returned. A new monoclonal therapy beat it into remission and Mike began to race with more than his own health in mind. Since he wore Livestrong jerseys, people discovered he was a cancer survivor. Friends and strangers he met at races would ask him to talk with their friend or family member who had just been diagnosed, who needed a guide through this perilous territory.

“I kind of viewed myself as their coach,” Mike notes.

He encouraged them to take charge of their own research, to get second opinions, to keep moving forward.

“I’m saying, ‘Come on! You got to get up tomorrow and you can’t get behind, you got to get on top of this and you need to find answers. Here’s a phone number, call them and talk to your doctor and talk to another doctor.’ Some of them have gone on to do well. Some of them have lost their battle.”

With his second bout of cancer in remission, Mike decided to try a national competition. In 2007, he qualified for and raced in the National Senior Games for athletes fifty and older. The event, which is known colloquially as the Senior Olympics because of its affiliation with the U.S. Olympic Committee, is attracting better athletes each year. Mike placed in the middle of the pack that year. He skipped the 2009 games (he was too busy saving his construction business during the recession), then placed seventh and tenth in two races in 2011.

“I thought, Next time, I’m going to be on the podium.” In the top five.

That aspiration, it turned out, would run into complications. In the summer of 2012, a few months after qualifying for the 2013 Games, Mike was looking in the mirror while shaving.

“And all of a sudden, I discovered these lumps on my neck,” he recalled. “And lo and behold, my cancer came back after nine years of remission.”

The disease had morphed into a different kind of cancer. His previous therapy no longer worked. The disease roared back: Every two or three days, another lump popped up, on his neck, his shoulder blade, his back. This time, his only recourse was a stem-cell transplant.

Mike began the treatment in August 2012, when he underwent a total of four multiday rounds of chemotherapy in the hospital. The first three pushed the cancer into remission before doctors could harvest and store his stem cells for the transplant. He needed to produce three to five million cells each time, which generally takes one to three days. Mike produced six million cells the first day.

“I don’t know if it was a record, but it was close to it,” Mike says, clearly pleased with his body’s performance. “My body is just cranking out cells. I’m absolutely convinced it has to do with my fitness.”

A final, six-day, grueling round of chemotherapy wiped out his immune system, before his doctors pumped his stored stem cells back into his body in November 2012. Mike recalls being almost too weak to walk, but he persuaded the nurses to move a stationary bicycle into the hallway, where he would spin as long as he could—sometimes just for five minutes, “more to say, Damn it, I’m still here, and I’m not quitting.” The day after Thanksgiving, the doctors sent him home with instructions to remain isolated for thirty days. He had no immune system and needed time to develop one.

Mike credits bicycling with his recovery, both physical and emotional.

“Sometimes you go up a hill and sometimes you go down a hill, and sometimes the hill is very steep,” he says. “So you begin to look at these challenges of life and this cancer thing, and, much like you ride a bicycle, you say, ‘Well, if I’ve got to climb the mountain, I’ve got to climb the mountain, and let’s get the game face on and get it done.’”

He pauses.

“But I’m also sitting there, thinking, I wanted to be on the podium in 2013 in Cleveland. Am I going to be able to do this?”

Mike will know the answer in less than two weeks’ time. I nod briefly, caught up in his suspense, before sitting back and thinking, Wait a minute! Eight months ago, this sixty-four-year-old man had been stripped down to a baby’s immune system, barely able to walk, and now he’s worried about whether he’s one of the five fastest masters racers in the country? I suppose you can overlook a miracle when you’re in the middle of it.

HOW TO BUILD A YOUNGER BRAIN

Kirk Erickson is not one to trash-talk intellectual stimulation. The researcher at the University of Pittsburgh began his career studying brain training and other mental exercises; he found these really do help people preserve their cognitive abilities. Then he conducted his first exercise studies. He realized that nothing will keep you as mentally acute as raising your heart rate a few times a week. Nothing.

“The effect [of exercise] was so much more consistent, so much more robust, so much more widespread in the brain,” he says, that he shifted the focus of his research to exercise.

Exercise is a little like the Michael Jordan of cognition: well-rounded, versatile, dominating every game it plays. Does exercise preserve brain tissue as you age? Yes.1 Does it increase the size of the prefrontal cortex, the area of our brains that allows us to plan, set goals, focus attention, and control our speech and fine motor skills—essentially, what makes us human? Yes. Exercise grew this region by as much as 10 percent in sedentary people.2 Does exercise correlate with larger hippocampi, where memories are formed? Yes.3 And does exercise improve one’s memory, even physically change one’s brain? Yes, yes, yes!4 We have a new contender in the race to avert dementia.

I was particularly interested in Erickson’s most recent study on the hippocampus of older adults. I had watched my father, as he moved into his eighties, lose his ability to encode new memories, to the point where he would lose the thread of any conversation that continued more than twenty seconds. And here Erickson found that older adults (fifty-five to eighty) who walked briskly for forty-five minutes three times a week scored better on cognitive tests in one year; those who did toning or stretching exercises saw no improvement. More astonishingly, those who did aerobic exercise saw the size of the hippocampus increase by 1 to 2 percent in one year, while those who did toning exercises saw this area shrink. At this age, the average hippocampus shrinks 1 to 2 percent a year, so this represented a difference for the exercisers of as much as 4 percent.

“Essentially, we turned back the clock by at least a year on these people,” Erickson explains. “We reversed the brain aging. And as far as I know, there’s no pharmaceutical treatment that’s been able to show that same type of effect. Sometimes we spend a lot of money barking up the wrong tree. Sometimes, some of the simplest, most straightforward answers are right in front of us.”5

Why would exercise make you smarter? Scientists are still figuring it out, but they have some clues. They do know that exercise creates new brain cells in the precise spot that handles new memories; it’s called “neurogenesis.” Ordinarily, cells in this area simply die off.6 Scientists have also found that exercise greases the rails of white matter as it sends signals to various parts of the brain. It is like moving from a dial-up Internet connection to broadband.7

Until now, most researchers have recruited retirees for their exercise studies, because they have more time to participate. Erickson considers that a serious oversight. Midlife represents the fork in the road: One route leads to dementia, the other to healthy aging.

“This age range is a very critical time period for the development of risk factors for dementia,” he says. “We often don’t experience dementia until maybe our seventies or eighties, but a lot of the more basic biological pathways that often lead to cognitive decline are thought to occur several decades beforehand. If we can target a middle-aged population, we might have a more profound effect long-term down the road.”

The few studies that have examined exercise in midlife are enough to launch me, at least, out of my chair and onto the treadmill.

Consider your brain. Regular exercise during midlife appears to prevent the formation of the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s disease.8 Middle-aged athletes may be one third as likely to develop dementia in their seventies as non-athletes. And it is never too late: People who began to exercise in their sixties reduced their risk of dementia by half.9 Overall, longitudinal studies show, people who exercise—whether young, middle-aged, or older—score higher on cognitive tests than those who do not.10

Now consider your health: At least two studies have found that exercise may also be as effective as statins or other drugs in preventing heart disease and heart attacks.11 Regular exercise performs as well as Zoloft in treating men with major depression, and it is just as good as antidepressants for mild to moderate depression.12 And people who exercise have better sex lives.13

Given his own startling results with older people, Kirk Erickson has now turned his sights to the middle-aged group. In a new study, he is putting them through the same battery of cognitive tests and brain scans that the older adults received. But he is mixing things up a bit: Unlike his previous study, one group is exercising heavily, about 280 minutes per week. Another group (as in his previous studies with older adults) is exercising about 150 minutes per week. A third group diets—this is new—and a fourth group makes no changes to their routines.

Erickson’s new study asks the kinds of questions that midlife people with jobs and children are asking themselves: What keeps cognitive decline at bay as you age? Is more exercise better, or is going to the gym three times a week just as good as seven? Must you hop on the treadmill, sweat and toil, even if you hate it? Or is it enough to choose the lean fish over the Big Mac? In other words, does your brain care more about exercise or diet?

My own opinion is that more exercise is better, but after meeting Ron Becker and Nancy Ley, I was less certain.

Ron Becker appears to be in the diet group.14 Growing up in the Pittsburgh suburbs, with six sisters and five brothers, he was known as the “cleanup guy.”

“If there was a little bit left over,” the fifty-two-year-old construction worker told me, “I was the one that cleaned out the bowl of mashed potatoes or ate the last scraps of meat on the plate. I loved it.”

But as an adult, that proclivity pushed him to close to 245 pounds. Ron could barely stand up after installing ceramic flooring all day. He worried about heart attacks. He heard about Erickson’s study, in which researchers might put him on a diet or exercise plan and check out his heart: “I said, ‘That’s me.’” He was unaware at the time that they would be testing his cognitive abilities as well.

Over the past year, Ron has lost more than fifty pounds by eliminating meat, ice cream, and pasta from his diet. I try to imagine this trim, balding man with a gray goatee and gentle smile as lumbering and slow.

“I feel great,” he said. “It’s a moral victory. I’ve really impressed myself.”

“Do you feel mentally sharper?” I asked.

“Quite possibly,” he said. “My job does require a lot of measuring and thinking, adding and subtracting and this and that. And I feel I’ve been sharper at that, a little bit quicker and not having any problems, where maybe I did before, you know—just ‘Hey, why isn’t this working out?’”

A few moments later, I watched as Ron completed some standard cognitive tests on a computer, tests he felt quite sure he botched a year earlier. He raced through them, never missing more than one question. Maybe diet is the secret, I thought, remembering the pounds of Cheetos from NPR’s vending machine that I have eaten in recent years. I dearly hope not.

The next day, I met Nancy Ley, a petite fifty-four-year-old systems analyst at a software company, who also volunteered for the study. For the past year, she has spent 280 minutes a week playing tennis, dancing to workout videos, bike riding, and, after she broke her collarbone, walking. She dropped thirty-five pounds, and from dress size twelve to size four.

“I feel sharper,” she said. “I’m more alert, and I think that has to do with exercise. I do feel younger than I did a year ago.”

“I wonder if your brain looks younger, too,” I said.

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

That’s what I’m hoping as well, although we will not know the answer for a few years. In the meantime, I’ve thrown out the tortilla chips and cookie dough ice cream. Just in case.

A CHAPTER WITHOUT PUNCTUATION

Saturday, July 13 (continued)

After Mike Adsit and I finished our interview, I wheeled my ten-year-old bike to the street. Mike lifted his sleek, light thoroughbred of a bicycle out of his SUV. He looked mine over, lifted it with a grunt, and with visible restraint, said, “Let’s go.”

I had agreed with some trepidation to ride with him around a twenty-mile loop. I attached a lavalier microphone to his shirt so I could record him for an NPR story while he rode up a hill, sprinted through intervals, and did whatever else he did to train for a race. Off we went. After about a mile, I said, “Okay, Mike, why don’t you show me an interval. Just talk me through it.”

“This is what we’re going to do,” he began.

“We?” I said, “I’m not doing the interval, you are.”

“Naw, let’s do it together. So, first, when we pass this sign, we’re going to stand up for three strokes and get as much momentum as we can, then sit down and go as hard as you can for fifteen seconds.”

I was still contemplating the “we” part.

He looked over. “Only fifteen seconds,” he said, then suddenly, “Now! Go go go!”

I pedaled my little heart out, ever the obedient girl, but also curious to see what I could do.

We shaved four minutes off my best time for the twenty-mile ride.

“You’re a good rider,” he said afterward. “You’ve got a very good foundation. That’s usually the hardest part.”

“If I wanted to consider going for the trials next year—” I began.

He cut me off. “What’s this ‘if’?”

“Okay, what would it take?”

“It would take a coach, and a lot of training,” Mike said, adding, “I coach several women.”

I was intrigued. I adore biking. A year ago, after running almost every single day for thirty-five years, I could barely walk up the stairs. The orthopedic surgeon who replaced my mother’s hip studied my X-rays and told me I had arthritis, and while it was too early to consider a knee replacement, it would not get better. I was fifty-three.

“So no more running?” I asked.

“No running,” he said, unaware that he was stripping me of my identity.

“How about biking?”

“Sure,” he agreed. “Arthritis doesn’t like pounding, but it does love exercise.”

I began to bike, and then take spinning classes when the weather grew cold, and I realized one day that all my knee pain had vanished. The muscles around my knee had grown so strong that I could sprint up the stairs without a thought. And biking temporarily vanquished another, more debilitating problem: When I am peddling, I never think about the chronic pain in my throat. This was a revelation. Those moments on the bike, I thought, might suggest a path to healing.

The physical relief was only part of it. You can get that with Percocet. Rather, there is something quickening about athletic competition, a psychological shot of adrenaline that Catharine Utzschneider described to me in an interview. Utzschneider is the author of Move!, a book and a training program for adults who want to compete at an elite level. A Ph.D. who teaches at Boston College, she is well known for coaching masters runners (middle-aged and older) and helping them compete nationally. Most of her clients, however, had never taken up a sport before meeting her. Most of them showed up at her office in the middle of, if not midlife crisis, then midlife malaise.

“Middle age can be a very disorienting time,” Utzschneider observed.

Childhood and early adulthood have an externally imposed framework: graduating from school, building a career, marrying, and raising children. But at midlife, when the children are leaving and the career is set, the chapters lose their beginning and end points.

“There are no periods, no paragraphs, there’s no punctuation,” Utzschneider said. “There’s no structure to give us a sense of order. So having an athletic goal provides an anchor, a structure to look at the years ahead, because adulthood has always gone on and on. And now it goes on and on and on and on!”

Her words hit their mark. After our conversation, I reflected on the quiet, seamless task of writing a book. I realized that as much as I loathed the unpredictability of the news business, I also missed the small victories that hitting those deadlines delivered. I recognized that I craved short-term goals, something to work toward. I wanted to stretch my physical abilities and prove to myself that midlife will not catapult me down the hill. Not yet.

I think I’d like to qualify for the Senior Games. I’d like to try to win them.

MUSIC FOR THE HEART AND BRAIN

Step inside Middle C Music and you vault back to 1965. Guitars hang by the dozens from the ceiling, drums crouch next to the amplifiers, just down from the keyboard pianos and several shelves of vinyl records. Here, on a bustling street in Washington, D.C., people dip a toe into their pent-up dreams.

Myrna Sislen, a compact woman with a direct gaze and authoritative touch—she persuaded me to try out a guitar even though I had come for an interview—saved the store from bankruptcy twelve years earlier. As we navigate to one of the practice rooms, I scoot sideways down an aisle crowded with instruments, children, and adults. Middle C teaches more than four hundred students a week, and almost half of them are adults. Sislen can pinpoint when middle-aged people began to arrive at the store for themselves, without their children.

“It was about four years ago, and a middle-aged man walked in,” she recalls. “He came over and he said, ‘Is it okay if I play the trumpet?’ And I said, ‘Excuse me?’ I mean, he was whispering. He was not even speaking. And he whispered again, ‘Is it okay if I play the trumpet?’ I said, ‘Of course it’s okay if you play the trumpet.’ And he started taking lessons.”

Around that time, she says, more people between forty and eighty years old began picking up instruments.

“I think it’s the baby boomers saying, ‘I’m going to do what I want to do, when I want to do it. And now is the time.’”

Sislen, who taught classical guitar and played professionally for years before buying Middle C, says it feels almost magical to watch a middle-aged adult take up the saxophone and, little by little, progress from no sound or random sounds to playing a tune. He may never achieve greatness, but it doesn’t matter.

“I think it is satisfying something in each person’s soul,” she says. “Sure, it helps with your dexterity. It helps with your memory. But if it’s not going to feed your soul, you’re not going to do it, because no instrument is easy. At any stage of life, that’s important, and as you get older, it’s even more important.”

A few moments later, I slip into the tiny practice room where Dana Sebren Cooper and her instructor are warming up. When she was a girl, Dana played flute with a passion: Since her dad was in the military, her family moved often, and her flute was the only constant.

“I used to withdraw into my music. It was the one thing I could count on that was always going to be there.”

In high school and college, Dana regularly performed as a soloist in concert orchestras. But then came law school, marriage, and children, a career in the U.S. Senate and the Clinton White House. She dropped her former love for twenty-seven years. Her children began taking music lessons at Middle C, and she would think, I should do this, I should begin playing. But then she’d think, I’ve got asthma. I’ve got arthritis in my fingers. Not now. Not yet.

“And the reason I picked it back up was, I had a very close friend who died of brain cancer suddenly at fifty,” Dana says quietly. “And it made me realize: Life is short. I’ve been talking about this for a decade. If I’m going to do this, I have to do it now.”

She cringes at the memory of her first few lessons.

“It was just awful. I was forty-eight years old, and I couldn’t puff a single note. And these rooms are not soundproof, let me tell you,” Dana adds, laughing. “You had to swallow your pride and you had to be willing to go back to baby steps. It was a long, hard slog.”

Three years later, her fingering is back, as is her breathing. And while Dana’s concert solo days are behind her, her music, as imperfect as it is, is something she owns. It is hers, hers alone.

“I’ve worked very hard in my very noisy life to have any personal peace. That’s not a bad thing. I love my life. But this—it makes my soul soar,” she says.

Dana pauses, and in her words I heard my own thoughts, maybe the thoughts of anyone in the middle years.

“It’s maybe a little bit of Peter Pan, but I want to go back to that feeling I had when I was seventeen and I could, you know, belt out a solo with our orchestra. I wanted to have that little bit of youth still in me before it’s just too late.”

Ed Angel carried around the symbol of his youth for decades.

“I actually bought my guitar in the 1970s,” he tells me, a few minutes before his lesson. “I tried to teach myself, and that didn’t go so well, but as I moved around, I always kept the guitar with me.”

The guitar represented the volcanic and unbounded promise of the sixties, a time when music and antiwar protests wove together to create something singular, unrepeatable. Ed has a photo of himself marching with folk singer Pete Seeger. And one day, about a year and a half ago, he was reflecting on how disappointed he was that his kids were practicing so little for their lessons at Middle C.

“Then I thought, Well, I can’t really be disappointed with them if I’ve been carrying this guitar around for forty years and haven’t picked it up,” he says. “So I brought it in here one day when I took the kids to a lesson. They said that it was in very good shape. I let them go ahead and fix it and started taking lessons.”

Ed founded a firm that conducts historical research for attorneys, government agencies, and documentary filmmakers. Over the past thirty years, his firm has opened offices around the country. Ed did not take up the guitar to add to his list of achievements. He took it up because this is one area where, no matter how clumsily he plays, it simply doesn’t matter.

“Everybody has to perform daily. Everybody has to perform before clients, coworkers, employers,” he says. “This is something you can do for yourself. You can close the door, pull the guitar from the case, and just wail away. If it’s not perfect, you still get enjoyment.”

I turn to his tutor, John Linn, and ask if teaching adults requires more patience.

“In some ways, they’re easier,” Linn says. “Music is a language, so they already understand the concept of language really well. Some of my students are six. They barely read English. To teach them another language is really something.”

When Gary Marcus took up guitar at age thirty-eight, he held out some hope that this might be true, that adults might bring something to their lessons other than clumsy fingers, duller memories, and slower processing speed. His was a gossamer thread of hope, given the “critical period” theory, which states that complex skills, such as playing the guitar, must be learned within a particular window of time—and if you delay past, say, age six, you can forget it. Marcus was also haunted by his own musical abilities as a child.

“I had a rhythm deficit,” Marcus confesses, one that thwarted his fervent attempt to learn the beloved guitar as a child and throughout his life.

Then Marcus, who is now a cognitive psychologist at New York University, decided to spend his sabbatical year giving guitar one more concerted effort. He immersed himself in his music, practicing for hours a day, taking lessons, and finally attending a week-long music camp for kids called DayJams. Marcus was the only adult student. He quickly saw that his preadolescent bandmates had some advantages: They could concentrate for hours on the same musical section, and their finger-work outshone his.

“But I knew more about music just as a lifelong active listener,” he said. “I had a knowledge base that they didn’t that was really very helpful.”

For his band’s final performance—playing a number they had created in front of all the other campers, their parents, and his—Marcus shaped and structured their song.

“I would be like, ‘What if we repeat this part?’ and they would be like, ‘Great!’ ‘And how about if we have this guy who knows how to do the classical piano stuff, put that at the beginning of our rock song, and then you over there, you’ll smash on the drums.’ And they would be like, ‘Great!’”

Marcus’s obsession with guitar extended beyond the personal. As a researcher interested in developmental learning, he wanted to test the critical-period theory, using himself as a guinea pig. That theory has strangled the dreams of many an adult who wanted to learn to play the piano or speak French, learn chess or take up tennis. But Marcus suspected that the theory was overrated. He plunged not only into guitar but the research on learning, writing up his journey in his popular book Guitar Zero.15

True, Marcus found, children do pick up everything more quickly and better. Children can develop perfect pitch in a year; adults rarely can. Children are better at rote memorization, partly because their brains have more synapses, or connections between brain cells, and partly because they have a clean slate. But Marcus concluded that children get their edge less from raw ability than from “time on task.”

“If they’re interested, which is a big if, kids have much more stick-to-itiveness,” he says. “I’ve seen kids at this camp who play the same thing over and over. And I’m like, you know, ‘I’ve got bills to pay. I can’t keep playing this thing.’”

Marcus found his greatest encouragement, and a road map for his own guitar playing, from barn owls. Barn owls are not quite as blind as bats, but they do rely heavily on sound. When they are born, they calibrate their eyes with their ears, which allows them to use sound cues to navigate their world. In 1990, Stanford biologist Eric Knudsen, curious to see if their brains were “plastic,” put prisms over the eyes of barn owls, which shifted their world by twenty-three degrees. The young barn owls quickly adapted. Unfortunately, the adult barn owls had a tough time in their new world. Bad news for the middle-aged team.16

“If that were the only paper I had read, I would have given up guitar right there.”17

Then he stumbled upon Knudsen’s follow-up study, where the biologist gave the older barn owls a second chance.18

“It turned out that if you gave them prisms that were smaller—you deal with the smaller problem, then a medium-sized problem, and then a hard problem, do it incrementally—adults do it almost as well as the young barn owls,” he says. “And so what that said to me is that this critical-period theory stuff is not etched in stone.”

Some barriers can be overcome: by the way you train, the number of hours you spend working specifically on your weaknesses, and your willingness to take each step incrementally.

“So I decided I was going to take baby steps, like those barn owls.”

By the time he went on book tour, Marcus was good enough to play live on the BBC, a “terrifying” experience.

I asked him what advice he would give to a middle-aged adult who wants to take up a new pursuit.

“If you’re thinking about doing something like this, do it,” Marcus says. “If you can accept that I’m doing this so that I can see how well I can do it—so that I can enjoy it rather than so that I can play in a big band or be the world’s greatest golfer, but you’re just doing it for your own enrichment—I think it can be really satisfying.”

“What do you think happened to your brain?”

“I clearly got a lot better at rhythm, and that may have involved some rewiring in my cerebellum, perhaps,” Marcus speculates, but he did not have his brain scanned before and after, so he does not know for certain.

“Do you think you’re sharper?”

“As a human being?”

“Yep.”

“I think I’m happier as a human being.”

TEACHING ADULTS TO LEARN A DIFFERENT WAY

Fear of dementia, it turns out, sells a lot of foreign-language training courses. When fifty-something adults began signing up for Rosetta Stone’s language courses in surprising numbers, the company queried its customers about why. People mentioned travel and business, but as often as not, they spoke of a dull dread: They looked at the future and saw dementia. They thought that learning Turkish could save their brains. Company officials heard this so often, in fact, that they bought a brain-training company, Fit Brains, to attract more baby boomers to their programs and see how they might meld neuroscience with language.

Learning a second language does not prevent dementia, but researchers believe it does help people cope with the symptoms, perhaps by creating alternate neural routes and greater cognitive reserve. In one of the only studies on adults and bilingualism, British researchers found that people who learned a second language as adults raised their IQ levels and slowed the aging of their brains.19 Other researchers speculate that the cognitive tasks involved, such as working memory, sound discrimination, and task switching, are precisely the brain areas linked to declines in old age.20 The earlier you start, the easier it is, but no matter when you tackle the new language, you will create new pathways and sense the difference.

Jane Gantz was only vaguely aware of this evidence when she walked into Spanish 100 at Indiana University at the age of fifty-nine. True, she had watched her mother suffer the intellectual indignities of Alzheimer’s disease and hoped to avoid the same fate. But dementia did not drive her into that classroom: Like virtually every person I interviewed who seriously pursued midlife hobbies, Jane saw her new passion as renewing her spirit, springing her out of her rut, ushering her into a new world with new mores and new friends. The brain stuff—that was a bonus.

“I don’t know if my brain is sharper, I just know that I’m happier,” she tells me, echoing Gary Marcus.

Jane had wanted to learn Spanish ever since her family hosted an exchange student when her children were in high school. She had been waiting and waiting, and when she retired early from her post as senior associate director of admissions at Indiana University, she leapt. Without knowing it, she employed the very principle that, according to Gary Marcus, allows children to excel at everything from cello to Chinese: sustained and focused attention. She learned like a child.

“As a mature person, I was not going to do this in a haphazard way,” Jane recalls. “I was going to learn it right and I was going to learn the grammar and I was going to nail it every class. So here I am in classes with freshmen, and I had this routine. I’d go to class every morning—I always took early classes—and I’d go to the library and I’d study for three hours.”

After moving through the 300-level classes, Jane decided to step onto the high wire without a net: She booked a trip to Costa Rica for an immersion course.

“The night before I left, I cried and cried, I was so afraid,” she says.

Jane worried about traveling alone, worried that she would fall functionally deaf and mute as Costa Ricans rattled away at her for three solid weeks.

“And it changed my life,” she laughs, delighted by her own temerity. “Spanish has changed my life. I think about this almost every day because of the connections that I have made, not only in Costa Rica, but people I meet at my school, Latinos in my community who are now my friends, the conversation groups that I go to. And I pursue this very vigorously even now because I’m terrified that when I’m not in Costa Rica, I’m going to lose it and I’m going to sound like Tarzan.”

The language has seeped into every corner of her life: She watches Spanish television, she meets with Spanish-speaking friends five times a week, she works with a tutor. She returns to Costa Rica for six weeks every winter. It infuses adventure into what could be the blandest of years. It has turned back time.

“I love to get out of my comfort zone,” she notes. “I don’t do risky things. I don’t climb mountains, I don’t jump out of planes, I don’t ride motorcycles. But traveling! I’ve learned that I love traveling by myself.”

You may be thinking, Who in midlife has the time for this? To which I say: Maybe you don’t now, but you probably will at some point. And how will you spend it? Frittering away the time? Or in full-throated pursuit of a passion? Even if you have full-time work and children at home, as many people in midlife do, you still can take small steps to punctuate the days and weeks with a hobby that gives you a little zing every time you think of it.

Jane’s story offers some key insights for pursuing a new passion as an adult. True, the critical-period theory—that learning a new language is easier for children than for adults—is well established. But it is not the only relevant fact. A six-year-old American can acquire a native French accent; the average thirty-year-old almost certainly cannot. A study of more than two million people found that the older you are, the harder it is to learn a new language: It is harder at fifty than at forty, harder at thirty than at twenty. But no one has ever identified an age when a healthy person cannot add Chinese to his repertoire, if he is willing to put in the time.21

Learning anything new past the age of thirty is an upward climb: Researchers find that your cognitive abilities (and in particular, processing speed) begin to decline in your twenties and thirties.22 In midlife, you are slower at memorizing new foreign words, and much slower at retrieving them when you need to say something. This parallels the middle-aged brain’s retrieval problem with proper names: Just as there is no semantic reason Angelina Jolie should be called Angelina Jolie—which creates a big problem for the brain—there is no obvious reason that a mouse should be called souris in French.23

In a cruel act of betrayal, the middle-aged brain even turns its singular advantage—our experience—against us. “Interference” occurs whenever we accumulate expertise in one area.24 It explains why changing from a PC to a Mac makes people homicidal: You have to learn a new operating and key-command system, something your brain and fingers resist.

“If you have a lot of expertise in one language and then you’re trying to learn a new one, you have to say, ‘No, two is not dos anymore, it’s zwei,’” says Sherry Willis at the University of Washington. “Interference actually increases from midlife through old age because your store of knowledge—the number of file drawers you have to go through to get to the relevant information and refile the information—increases with age.”

And yet even at midlife, “the more languages you know, the easier it is to learn more,” insists Lisa Frumkes, who heads the language-learning-product group at Rosetta Stone. Adults have an edge over young children because they not only understand the structure of language but also understand concepts.

“So when you’re somebody like me who likes to collect languages—I’m about to start on my twelfth language—you have a lot more concepts,” she notes. “You didn’t know when you first started studying Chinese, for example, that every time you talk about ‘sticks,’ you have to use a special word like ‘chopstick’ or ‘baton.’ But once you come across that kind of concept again in another language, like Indonesian, you think, Well heck, I already know what this is. I can relate it to something.”

I guess she’s right. I’m still fixated on the twelfth-language part.

Adults have another advantage over children: desire. Adults are not required to learn a new language, as schoolchildren are, but they will if they want to travel to Italy, or read War and Peace in the original Russian, or sell iPhones in China. Jane Gantz did not sit in Indiana University’s library each day because she was dying to conjugate Spanish verbs. She sat there because she wanted to travel, to make new friends, to embark on new adventures, and the conjugation—well, that was a means to an end. And she did it methodically, carefully, religiously, just as children study if they like the subject—which is the key to becoming proficient at any age.

Let’s say you want to take up a new hobby. Let’s agree that your experience can give you a leg up. But you still face another enemy: your own mental habits.

“We like our routines,” neuroscientist Paul Nussbaum explains. “It’s hard to change routine. Why? Because you don’t have any neural circuits set up yet to make that new thing easy.”

Nussbaum cofounded Fit Brains, the brain-training company bought by Rosetta Stone. He says by middle age we run our lives on autopilot. He says most of our day involves “procedural memory.” What learning a new language or new musical instrument does is shift you toward new, directed learning.

Nussbaum tells me the story of a man whose hippocampus was removed because he had a history of seizures. He could not remember what happened seconds before. A famous neuroscientist, one of Nussbaum’s dissertation advisors, played golf with the man one day.

“They come up to hole number one,” Nussbaum says. “They stop the cart, he gets out, he goes around the back, picks up a club, tees up, hits the ball really beautifully down the fairway, at which point he picks up his tee, goes back, puts his club in the golf cart, sits down in the golf cart. And immediately, he stands up, goes to the back of the golf cart, takes out his club as if he had never hit the ball.”

This illustrates the difference between what is called “episodic” (or “explicit” or “declarative”) memory—that is, remembering details of one’s life, what you had for breakfast, whether you already hit the golf ball—and “procedural” memory, that is, relying on skills we know by heart, such as driving or walking or hitting a beautiful drive down the fairway.

“So if you do something you are really good at, it’s procedural,” Nussbaum says, adding that routine is not very helpful to the aging brain. “But if you’re going to try to learn the guitar or Spanish, that’s not going to be procedural at all. That’s going to be a whole different memory system, a whole different learning system.”

“So, if I read The New York Times every day, I’m using my brain but not challenging it?” I ask, hoping Nussbaum will say reading The New York Times is good enough to keep my brain sharp.

It isn’t.

“My question to you is: Is reading The New York Times novel and complex for you?” Nussbaum asks. “No? Okay, let’s get you something that is novel and complex. Another way of saying that is: Tell me what you are not good at. Tell me what you don’t want to do. That’s where we want you to be.”

I do not have to give up my talents, he reassures me. But my talents are overly learned. They have a very short span of time between one neuron firing information and the other receiving it.

“Doing something novel and complex is going to take some time, it’s going to be painful, it’s going to hurt, you’re going to cry,” Nussbaum says, a little tongue in cheek. “But as we clear out that brush, we develop new neuron connections, and you’ll say, ‘This isn’t so hard.’ Those are words that are literally describing what is going on in the brain: I’m actually building some neural circuitry, speeding up the amount of time it takes for me to fire and receive. As a result, I am feeling a little better about myself.”

Mercifully, for I have no desire to put myself through the misery of learning a foreign language, not everyone agrees with every part of what Nussbaum says.

“There’s one caveat to that, and this is what I call the ‘crossword puzzle problem,’” Benjamin Mast says. Mast is an associate professor of psychology and brain sciences and a clinical psychologist at the University of Louisville.

“Many people have heard that crossword puzzles are good for maintaining brain health and therefore, regardless of whether they enjoy them or not, they continue to do crossword puzzles daily. I don’t enjoy crossword puzzles, and so for me the question is: Are they helpful enough that you should do them even if they’re unpleasant? You should pick something else that stimulates you.”

He says there is little evidence at this point that learning Spanish helps your brain more than, say, dancing, or listening to lectures, or (happily) writing a book.

“In terms of science, the bottom line so far seems to be that staying mentally active and engaged is key.”

In the end, you need to find that magic combination: a hobby that stretches your brain and gives you something to look forward to each day or week. Not a grand endeavor, but a little purpose in life. That, Jane Gantz believes, is the secret of midlife.

“It’s pursuing my passions. It’s finding something that I enjoy, and doing it well,” she says. “You know, I don’t want to just sit around and drink wine. I want to be doing something and planning, and I feel with Spanish I have found the perfect project for me because it will never end.”

WALTER MITTY MEETS DELIBERATE PRACTICE

I think of myself as a Division III type of gal, good but not a standout. For example, I won the Illinois Division III state track championships in the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races in the late 1970s (before transferring to Williams). But when I entered a Division I race in Chicago, I felt certain that someone poured cement into my racing flats. At least, that is what I told myself after the gun went off and the other women disappeared around the first curve as I was barely out of the starting blocks. I was a Shetland pony in a field of thoroughbreds. I don’t think they lapped me, but they came close.

But in my early fifties, I yearned to recapture a piece of my youth. I wondered: If I trained hard, could I become a competitive athlete again? I called K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State University, probably the best-known researcher on expertise. For those of us with moderate talent, Ericsson offers a glorious message: It’s not about talent.

For four decades, Ericsson has studied internationally ranked chess players, world-class athletes, musicians, writers, scientists, foreign-language interpreters, and even typists, to see why some rose to the top while others remained good but unremarkable.25 His theory has been incorrectly abbreviated to suggest that genius springs not from genes or innate abilities but from practicing for ten thousand hours or ten years.26 He believes many more factors, such as family support and mental discipline, contribute to exceptional performance. People who begin training earlier (as children) are more likely to reach the elite level, suggesting that Ericsson is not a critical-period denier. Equally important is whether the student works with an exacting trainer or coach who can identify his weaknesses. And most important of all: Does he engage in “deliberate practice”—that is, focusing on his weaknesses until he masters them? These controllable factors make for exceptional performance. He says with one exception—body size—genes matter little.27

“What is surprising with all the work done on mapping out the DNA,” Ericsson says, “is that people have been unsuccessful in finding individual genes that somehow would explain why some people get very good, whereas other people don’t.”

Obviously, plenty of researchers argue that IQ or natural talent determines who will become a singular cellist like Yo-Yo Ma or a tennis champion like Serena Williams.28 I do not want to wade into that debate here. My more pressing question involves midlife pursuits. Can a middle-aged person have any hope of excelling at a hobby, whether guitar or cycling—or is it too late?

Ericsson believes that the drop-off in performance of adults has nothing to do with age and everything to do with shifting priorities. An eighteen-year-old elite pianist can spend hours each day at the keyboard, while a thirty-six-year-old is pulled away by his job, his family, his daughter’s travel soccer team. Even if he does practice each day, he is unlikely to do focused, deliberate training. If he does, he will not lose his edge. Ericsson has found that when older pianists keep up deliberate practice, they perform almost as well as younger ones, even though their fingers are less nimble and their brains a little slower.29

The same principle applies to athletes. “I have looked at masters athletes who are competing in their fifties, sixties, and seventies,” he says. “I found once you equate the intensity of training that they engage in, little [of the decline] can be attributed to age directly.”

When he compared the performance of young athletes with that of older ones in 5,000-meter races and marathons, “we could not find physical declines that were not related to practice,” he says.

The difference boils down to one thing. “Younger people train harder,” Ericsson notes. “I think it’s almost an excuse for some people: ‘Okay, I’m old. I don’t really need to be held responsible here for being able to perform at a higher level.’”30

This pleased me but did not persuade me. What about the role of talent? Specifically, what about my friend Mary Breed? Mary began competitive cycling when she was thirty-six, and after two years of racing, she captured the national championship title for her age bracket. She can ride more than thirty miles an hour for nearly a mile. Many people, including her coach, consider her the best natural athlete they have ever seen. I am not. I am a plow horse. True, Mary is eighteen years my junior, but the yawning chasm in our performances cannot be blamed on age or training; natural talent must account for some of the reason she leaves me, and many professional cyclists, watching awestruck as she bolts away into the horizon.

I mentioned this to Neil Charness, who is Ericsson’s colleague at Florida State and also an authority on the science of expertise. Charness asked if Mary and I train the same way: Do we put in the same miles, and practice with the same intensity?

“I’m not sure that I find talent a very helpful construct,” Charness said, “in part because of the way it’s so poorly defined. Usually it’s: I know it when I see it. But you have no idea how much training, or the type of training, that person engaged in, which I think is probably far more important.”

I told Charness about my Walter Mitty dream of competing in the National Senior Games. He suggested I try to do the same training regimen as Mary. With the idealism of one whose goal is more than a year away, I vowed that I would ride the same number of miles (two hundred to three hundred a week) and punish myself with the same speed workouts. In fact, I told Charness, I was thinking of hiring Mary’s coach, Pete Lindeman, who seemed to turn every cyclist into a champion.

“I bet you do a lot better than you did a year ago,” Charness said. “It’s an empirical question.”

Later, I reported my bold plan to Anders Ericsson, who likes these sorts of real-world experiments. He cautioned me against overreaching: Go slow, build up gradually, because as much as my head denies my chronological age, my body is dealing with biological reality.

“Everything I’ve seen when it comes to older runners and other athletes is that nobody goes [quickly] from twenty percent to ninety-five percent training without bad things happening.”

I would soon learn what he meant.

IGNORING THE WISDOM OF A CHAMPION

Saturday, July 20

The National Senior Games opened today in Cleveland. My first stop was the Cleveland State University swimming pool, where Liz Hogan is competing. I interviewed Liz a few weeks ago. She is fifty-six years old, with approving, mischievous eyes, a broad face, high cheekbones, and dark hair and bangs. As a child, Liz swam six hours a day and qualified for the U.S. Olympic trials when she was fifteen and nineteen. As a senior in high school, she was ranked number one in the United States and number two in the world for her age. A few weeks later, she was in a movie theater watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when she collapsed from a bleeding ulcer caused by a birth defect. A few months later, while she was still recuperating, her brother died. She never regained the lost ground, and after swimming one year on UCLA’s team, she quit—for twenty-seven years.

What ended the long hiatus initially almost ended her life. A car accident left her with a broken femur, pelvis, and hip, two broken ankles, and two broken wrists. After she had been in the hospital for three months, the physical therapist suggested she rehabilitate in a pool. She began swimming again. A few weeks later, she approached the coach of the masters swim team in Annapolis, Maryland.

“I was on a cane,” she recalled, laughing. “I said, ‘I’d like to join your team,’ and he kind of looked at me. So he had me go in, and I swam down a length, and I swam back. And he goes, ‘You’ve swum before, haven’t you?’”

Liz joined the team, and the first time she competed in the Senior Games, she won all six races she entered. That was 2007. Competition stiffened in 2009, and more still in 2011. Now, just before her first race in the 2013 Games, Liz sat quietly on a bench, gathering her thoughts, while other competitors chatted nearby. She seemed nervous; she told me she had been traveling constantly for work and had barely trained. She placed fourth in her first race, the 200-yard individual medley: a clear disappointment. But she won her second race, the 100-yard butterfly. I asked her how she felt about swimming now, when she had once been the fastest young woman in the country.

“If you decide to go back to something that you haven’t touched for a long time, just take it as ground zero,” she told me. “Whatever you do as you improve, you’re getting better. I’ll say, ‘Oh, my time’s a little bit slower than six months ago,’ and people will say, ‘Well, you are getting older.’ I say, ‘No, not until I put myself really out there am I going to use that as an excuse.’ I’m looking forward to retirement to see how fast I can get. I don’t ever expect to be what I was when I was young, but I don’t really care. I just want to enjoy it.”

In that instant, I realized Liz had revealed wisdom that I desperately needed, an insight about relinquishing youth and enjoying the moment. I scanned these competitors in the Senior Games. I did see a few lean men and women. Indeed, some of the fastest men and women were swimming at the level of college students. But mostly, I saw way, way too much white flesh. What did I expect? The sinewy bodies of Michael Phelps or Missy Franklin? These people were more than a half century old, for Pete’s sake.

I left feeling sober. In that pool, I had seen my future and it was not appealing, or skilled, or (aside from a few people like Liz) particularly inspiring.

I grabbed my bike. I found Cleveland’s famous towpath, which runs all the way to Akron. I rode furiously for two hours, without slacking, eighteen, nineteen, twenty miles an hour, pedaling to prove I was not old, trying to outrun the future. I am not ready to be old. I am not even ready to be middle-aged.

I wonder if this is because I do not have children of my own, where I can gaze at them and recognize that my DNA is essential to the future. My DNA means nothing to the future. So I pedaled a little harder. I know this yearning, this ambition, should have settled by now. I should be more mature. But I am not. Instead, I want to be—for a little while longer—young.

NOT OVER UNTIL IT’S OVER

Thursday, July 25

Hundreds of cyclists are warming up in this wooded park outside Cleveland. It is perfect weather for eight minutes of sheer pain. At least, that is how quickly Mike Adsit expects to cover five thousand meters in today’s race. Mike rides up to me looking happy and confident. We chat. I want him to win so badly. We all love Hollywood endings, but this is more, this is about cancer and survival, death and victory.

“You don’t seem nervous,” I observe.

“No, I’m not nervous at all,” Mike responds.

“Because I’m nervous as hell,” I laugh.

“I’ll tell you why I’m really loose,” Mike says. “I’m so thankful to be here. I’ve lost a lot of friends along the way, fighting this same battle. November thirteenth, I had zero immunity, and here I am, walking and talking.”

“What’s your goal for today?” I ask.

“I’m here. So I met my goal. Whatever happens is kind of academic to me.”

A few moments later, Mary Emmett and I are standing near the finish line, waiting for Mike to barrel around the last turn and streak across the line. Mary, I suspect, is Mike’s “next chapter.” A slim, vibrant sixty-seven-year-old, Mary is the mother of Mike’s cycling coach. When Mary’s husband of forty years died suddenly a few years ago, she felt set adrift, purposeless. She decided, at age fifty-eight, to bicycle across the country, from Oregon to North Carolina, averaging ninety miles a day, exhausted, furious at fate, sometimes screaming at the wind.

“My body was killing me, and I just had nowhere to go,” she told me. “I didn’t want to go home. I had no direction in my life. So I just stayed on the bike,” stayed on until she reached the Atlantic Ocean.

“And you are never the same after that,” she said. “There is a well that you draw from that you don’t even know that you have. You just know you can pretty much do anything if you want to do it.”

Mary found her new passion: She is turning the apple orchard she owned with her husband into a sustainable farm, using organic practices.

“I just think it’s the key when you’re aging to not allow yourself to settle. You have to just push yourself, whether it’s on an intellectual level or physical level. You set a date. You set a time and let’s just see if you can make it.”

Mike comes flying down the hill. It was a good, swift ride for someone who could barely walk eight months earlier, but not fast enough for the top five. Not on the podium this year.

We sit at a picnic table while Mike recovers his breath.

“So what’s your new goal?” I ask Mary, turning on my digital recorder.

“Well, these senior races intrigue me,” she says. “And if you’re in, I’m in. You’re on the spot, Barbara.”

“I really wish you hadn’t said that on tape,” I observe.

I turn to Mike. “Will you be coaching her?”

“Oh, yes,” he says. “I’ll be coaching you, too.”