Man! C-6 and C-10, the Weird Sisters of growth and decay, coursing through your body, doing their mysterious work. Idleness as a powerful signal to decay . . . yikes! Exercise as the one great signal to grow . . . to live well. Wow.
All right, with this surprising knowledge in your brainpan, you’re ready to start thinking about Harry’s Second Rule, which goes like this: Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life. The first rule still applies, of course. You still have to exercise six days a week. It’s just that four of the six have to be devoted to aerobic exercise, no matter what. (We’ll talk later about strength training on the other days.) Aerobic exercise, as you doubtless know, is the steady exercise that gets your heart rate up and keeps it up: biking, jogging, hitting the treadmill, speed walking and the like. It does not include doubles tennis and golf—wonderful sports and wonderful for you, but not aerobic. We’re talking about steady, endurance activity that elevates your heart rate and keeps it elevated.
Eventually, most of you will be doing four days a week of aerobic training (at different levels) and two days of strength (or weight) training. But for the first few weeks or months it’s going to be six days a week of aerobics. Most of that will be at fairly low levels, where you’re sweating but can still talk with comparative ease. This is what we call “long and slow” aerobics, during which your heart will be beating at 60 to 65 percent of your maximum heart rate. (Don’t worry about the details now . . . just take it easy.)
The reason for starting off with six days a week of long and slow aerobics is that most of us need, as a first step, to improve our ability to circulate blood around our bodies. More than any other single thing, circulation is the key to good health and to doing stuff. It controls our capacity to get fuel and oxygen to the muscles, where they are burned to create the power that keeps us moving. And—a matter of surprising urgency—it takes away the debris from the burning process. When you pant for air during exercise, this doesn’t mean your body is desperate for more oxygen; it’s desperate to get rid of the waste. Ditto the pain in your muscles: it’s not from torn or stressed muscle fibers, but from the buildup of “ashes” in the form of lactic acid. Finally, circulation brings the blessed tides of C-6 and C-10 to prevent heart attacks and strokes, generate great mood and all the other wonders Harry talks about.
I don’t know how you feel at this point, but I would guess you either want to close the book and watch TV or tear out the door and crank out a quick fifty miles on your bike. I wouldn’t do either. The best move right now—and Harry agrees passionately with this—is to make a realistic assessment of the shape you’re in today and then make a start that fits your condition. Start too easy and you’ll get bored. Start too hard and you’ll quit or hurt yourself. To help you position yourself, you might want to think about the early experiences of three very different people who started or continued exercise programs at Harry’s suggestion.
Start with my favorite, John, a patient of Harry’s who retired at sixty-five. (Don’t be put off because he’s a man; it’s a unisex story. I know it got my sister Petie to realize that all this stuff was for her . . . got her started.) Anyway, at his checkup, just before he stopped working, John was a hundred pounds overweight. He had dangerously high cholesterol, high blood pressure, low energy, and he was eating mountains of garbage. He was under a lot of stress at work and at home, and he was sick with anxiety about retirement, even though he was not mad for his job. He was in dreadful shape, and he was depressed. In other words, he was like a lot of Americans of his age and station in life. Not typical, maybe, but damn close.
John and his wife were moving to Florida and got a place a block from the beach. Harry was worried about him and started talking about exercise. John wasn’t having it. No, he said almost angrily, he was not an athlete, never had been one and had no plans to start now. Harry, in his understated way, said, “Fine, but there’s a good chance you will die soon if you don’t do something.” John reluctantly agreed to walk on the beach once a day, six days a week, for a while.
The first day, he walked about a half a mile and felt pretty good. The next morning, he felt as if he’d been hit by a truck. Everything ached, and he could barely get out of bed. But here’s the thing. He showed up the next day. Tottered out of bed, God bless him, took a couple of Advil and went to the beach again. He walked about a hundred yards this time and went home exhausted. The next day, he did the same thing. And for several days thereafter. Soon he was walking a couple of hundred yards; then more. He felt like a dope, waddling along the beach out of breath, but every day he got up and did his job. In a few months, he was walking a mile in that soft sand, and he was feeling significantly better. He had better energy, took more interest in decent food and felt more enthusiastic and optimistic about starting life over down there in Florida. That daily bath of C-10 was working its magic.
A year later, John returned to New York to see Harry for his annual checkup. He reported that he was walking five miles a day on the beach, seven days a week. He had lost sixty pounds. His cholesterol and blood pressure were within normal ranges, and he looked ten years younger. He felt great. He feels great today.
Here’s the obvious point: Don’t feel like an idiot if you can barely stay on the treadmill for fifteen minutes at low speed the first day. That’s serious for you, and your feet are already on a sacred path. It is not struggling on the first day or the thirtieth or sixtieth that’s going to work. It’s showing up every day and doing something. Do something every day for a week, and at week’s end you’ll be doing twenty minutes. Or thirty. Whatever. Push yourself a little, but don’t push yourself over the edge. You get full credit if you change into your workout duds, go to the gym (or out on the road) and do some aerobic activity. The tide runs every day. So do you, if you want to stay young. Before too long, you should get up to doing forty-five minutes a day of aerobic exercise. Throughout the book, when we talk about doing a day of this or that, we mean at least forty-five minutes of actual exercise unless we say otherwise.
At the other end of the spectrum, consider my pal Patricia. She has been a pretty good athlete all her life, but she decided to crank it up in her late fifties. She had had some health problems along the way and wondered if she could really go for it at that age. She checked with her doctor, and he said, You bet. Go for it. Which she conspicuously did.
For her, that meant a carefully structured exercise program, focused on a series of seniors’ bike races, which had her doing an average of two hours a day of heavy biking and other aerobics—often with her own trainer—and some serious strength training. And it worked fine. This summer, at sixty-two, she got a silver in a big seniors’ bike race out west. Next year, or the year after, she’s going for the gold. It will happen; she is a solid athlete, she works like crazy at it and she loves it. She is one of the fittest women I’ve ever met of any age, never mind sixty-two. This book is not designed for women like Patricia—they don’t need it. But keep her in mind when you worry that maybe you’re doing too much. You’ve probably got a little room yet, before you catch up with her. I promise you I do. I don’t intend to try.
Incidentally, it may be worth stressing that even good athletes like Patricia occasionally have some serious illnesses. You may ask, How come? How come they get sick if exercise is such a cure-all? The answer is that there is a randomness to disease and death, just as there is a randomness to life. There’s genetics, which matters much less than people think, but still matters some. And then there’s rotten luck. But the point is, following the regimen that we’re pushing enormously improves the chances of good health and a great life. I mean improves them by 70 percent. You don’t get a guarantee—you still have a chance of picking up a fatal case of this or that—but 70 percent is not bad. There is not a pill or a course of treatment in all of medicine that comes anywhere near that.
When I first talked to Harry, I was in much better shape than John, in better shape than most of Harry’s patients, but not on the same planet with real athletes like Patricia. In response to Harry’s urging, I took up spinning, which means joining a class of twenty to thirty people (mostly women, it turns out) pumping away on stationary bikes to the accompaniment of music and the exhortations of a leader. I already liked to bike, and I had heard spinning was great exercise. Also, if I was going to follow Harry’s Rules, I had to find something I could do every day in a manageable chunk of time. I thought spinning might be it.
So here I go. I am at the gym. I have signed up for a year at shocking cost, and I have gotten the spin class schedule. It’s six-thirty in the morning, and I am feeling very, very shy. Because I am very old, I am forty pounds overweight and I do not look becoming in my biking costume. The instructor, an alarmingly pretty woman with a slight Euro accent, sees me looking helpless; she comes over to my bike and shows me what to do. The bike has a huge flywheel in front with a brakelike thing that can make it easier or harder to pedal. It’s hard to get it started and really hard to slow it down. I feel as if I could wreck my ankle if I got off wrong. Maybe break a leg.
The room fills with beautiful creatures in their twenties and thirties. One or two old numeros, but no one as old as I am. The music starts . . . a din with a heavy, compulsive beat. The instructor has a mike, and she starts telling us how to pedal . . . how fast and with how much resistance. My hearing has gone to hell, but I follow as best I can. Speed up, slow down. Tighten or ease the resistance with a knob on the frame. I do not fall off, but I feel as if I could. And I do not break my leg trying to slow the damn flywheel, but I know I could do that.
“Out of the saddle!” the instructor shouts, and everyone stands up, pumping like crazy.
“Resistance!” she shouts, and everyone takes a turn to the right on the resistance knob. My quadriceps, which I thought were strong, start to scream. How many seconds can this go on? Actually, it goes on for about three minutes, but I don’t. Did I mention that the walls are all mirrors? Well, they are, and I have just caught sight of my own face. I am so frightened that I sit down. (The instructors often urge novices not to stand for long.) My face is purple, a bad purple, and I am sweating in a way that suggests the onset of serious illness, not good health.
After that, I only do some of the things the instructor says to do. But I hang, man. I stay there until the end, all forty-five minutes of it. There are stretching exercises when it’s finally over. My color is still peculiar. As I totter out of the room at the end, the instructor comes up and says, “Nice going. First time?”
“How could you tell?” I give her a wan smile.
She just nods and says again, “Nice going.” I stumble home, bathe and go to bed. It is now 7:45 A.M., and my day is over. It is good that I’m retired; I could not go to work like this.
Okay, spinning was a bit intense, but the beauty of it—for a person of my ridiculous temperament—is that it caught my attention. It was hard. It was interesting. It was a challenge. And, with a touch of dread, I went back the next day. And every day for a long time after that. I was there this morning. And yesterday. And the day before. I’ve been doing it for years now, and I still get a kick out of it. And I’m in very, very good shape, at least for a guy who loves to eat and drink and is congenitally unathletic. I sometimes feel guilty for not doing more, but from Harry’s more rational perspective I am one of the success stories. He says I’ve probably achieved about 70 percent of my potential fitness (as opposed to Patricia, who is 85 or 90 percent, or Lance Armstrong, who is 100 percent), but that’s fine. That’s as far as I’m going. I can do everything I want to, and I feel great almost all the time. Gotta love that.
In the long run, too, you want to push yourself but not go completely nuts. Patricia has the character and temperament to stay at her present, hectic level for years. But a lot of people burn out. A happy problem, you may say, but a real one for some. Our modest advice: find the right level for you. I do not urge you to go out and push yourself to the point of purple on the first day, and Harry is appalled by the idea. But I do urge you to get into pretty heavy aerobics eventually. Remember, that walk in the sand in Florida was heavy for John. You have to do what’s heavy for you. My early spin regimen would have been too easy for Patricia, too hard for most Americans in their sixties and near-fatal for John.
Harry and I are now of one mind on how to start. Start slow. Slower than feels good. But hold at that level only until you get your feet under you. Take it up as you get more comfortable. Feel your way, but eventually give yourself a little push. Don’t go so slow that you get bored. Get heavy for you, but only after you’ve been at it for a few weeks and feel comfortable. You’ll know.
But just in case, here’s some good advice from someone who is, finally, old enough to know better. Set a sensible fitness goal. Get there. And be happy. Don’t make yourself crazy thinking, “Gee, that was easier than I thought. I bet I could . . .” And so on. Don’t do it. Don’t wreck and abandon what you’ve achieved with a huge effort for something that’s not that much better. This is not competition, this is not athletics, this is lifestyle. This is feeling good. All the time.
I exercise six days a week. Always. I exercise pretty hard (60 to 75 percent of my maximum heart rate every day, 80 to 100 percent a lot of days). I am pretty good about the stinky weights. As a result, I can do all the stuff I like to do. I can walk around without pain. And can ski like a mildly gifted fifty-year-old. And ride the amazing Serotta bike that I gave myself this spring, high into the Rockies. Row my single scull in pretty waters. And I feel great more or less all the time. My legs are probably stronger than Old Fred’s, and I am in better aerobic shape than most fifty-year-old men, all of which is astonishing and way more than I had dared to hope when I started.
But I am still ten pounds overweight. My arms are weak, and I have these little wattles under my chin, which is not a good look. And every Masters athlete in the country is better at whatever he or she does than I am. My thought is this: Fine.
This is good enough for me. Much better than I expected and plenty good enough. Although way below what a real athlete like Patricia would want. There is a point where the lines cross: effort and time on the one hand, condition and feeling good on the other. Forty-five minutes to an hour and a half a day is about right for me. I could go beyond that, and I do sometimes. But that’s about enough for me. There are times when I get the bit in my teeth and want to train for a marathon or the Triple Bypass Bike Ride in the Rockies. And I may, if I feel like it. But probably not. This is the level, I believe, which I can keep up for the rest of my life. I’m stopping here. So I won’t stop completely.
My advice to you: Do all this stuff for a year. Maybe two. And then think hard about where you want to be and how much effort you’re capable of putting in. And decide when to say, enough. Intensity reaps great and sudden rewards; I love the feeling after a 70-mile bike ride. Or a hellish climb. But please remember this: Consistency trumps intensity every single time. It is far, far more important to find a good level for you—and stay there for the rest of your life—than to dip too deep into the intensity experience.
This is getting a little elaborate, but here’s some good related advice. Inevitably, there are going to be cycles in your training and in your passion for it. You will crank it up in the spring, say, as you head into summer. Or slack off in mud season in the fall. I think that’s a positive, a good thing. Too consistent and you’ll go nuts. But remember: No matter where you are in the intensity swing, work out six days a week. You may default, more days than not, to Long and Slow rather than sprints. Okay. But do some damn thing every day, six days a week. And always for at least forty-five minutes (once you get started). You can dog it some of the time by just loping along at 60 percent for forty-five minutes. But never quit early. And never stay home. Ever. Or you’ll start to slack off completely. And turn into that little old lady you struggled so hard to leave behind.
You’re going to get this twice, once from me and once from Harry. It is not pro forma advice, it is real. See your doctor before you embark on any of this. It is possible, at your age, that you have a condition you’re totally unaware of that could make a sudden, new exercise program a grave threat. Don’t take the chance. By now, you should be seeing your doctor once a year anyway. Do it before you start a serious exercise regimen.
In the same vein, let me join Harry in urging you not to overdo it on the first day. I did, but I am a bit of a wackadoo and have to take extreme measures not to be bored. Harry has a lot of war stories about people who went nuts on the first day and were knocked out for a week. Or never went back. Remember, we’re talking about being younger next year, not younger tomorrow. Feel your way. You are a slightly old girl now. You have Blacky Carbon and Gummy Sludge in your circulatory system. And your muscles and joints are not ready to go full bore. Take it easy. Sounds banal, but it’s good advice.
The menu of aerobic activities is long and pleasant, and it doesn’t make any difference at all which ones you choose, as long as you like them. Or can bear them. If you have some favorites, start with those. If not, here are some thoughts.
A surprising number of women like the endurance machines at the gym . . . the treadmills, elliptical machines, stair-climbers, skiing machines and the like. This may make sense. They’re easy to use, it’s easy to regulate the “dosage” and the process is bearable for most. You can wear headphones and listen to music or watch TV, which helps a lot of people. The best one for me is the elliptical machine, with moving arms as well as feet, so I get both upper- and lower-body exercise.
The simple treadmill seems to be the most popular, but here’s a hint: I think you do best to crank the angle of the treadmill up a ways and get your exercise by “walking up a steep hill,” rather than trying to trot or run on the flat. Better workout for your leg muscles, less jarring on your joints, and you get a serious cardio workout much sooner. Rowing machines are great, and I do see more women than men on them. But only about seven women in the country have the sterling character necessary to keep them up long enough to do any good. If you’re one of the magnificent seven, excellent. Same thing on cross-country ski machines: NordicTrak is a great workout for the people who can keep it up (including the endlessly virtuous Harry), but I cannot, even though I love cross-country.
Running is fine if you’re up to it. Most people my age tell me their joints cannot take it, but there are plenty of lucky exceptions. If you try it after years away, go at it carefully to improve your chances. Do as little as fifteen minutes the first day. Hurting your knees or your shins or ankles at this stage is the work of minutes, but the consequences last for months or years. I hurt my Achilles tendon riding on a damaged bike in 1982 when I was forty-seven. It took me a year to get back into biking, and I couldn’t run until 2004. Tendons are a slow heal. Being bored is much better than getting banged up and quitting. Run every other day. Or even every third day. Do something else in between. And continue to go slower than feels natural. This is not to say you should dog it forever. Eventually, you’ll want to get a heart monitor and make sure you’re doing it hard enough. But not the first week or two.
Let me give a brief, heartfelt plug at this point to the blessed . . . the heavenly . . . the healing sports. Some sports, like tennis, pull you apart because they’re centrifugal. Others, like running, beat on your joints remorselessly. But a few actually knit you together. Your muscles and especially your joints feel better when you’re done than when you began. Biking is peculiarly like that. Swimming, cross-country skiing and rowing, too. They are the healing sports, and you ought to have at least one of them in your repertoire.
There is no machine more beautiful, more perfect in the form-follows-function line, more ideally suited to your purpose than the bicycle. In my thirties, after getting divorced, I kept my bike on the mantelpiece, the only piece of art in a dismal little apartment . . . a symbol of virtue and beauty in a chaotic life. New bikes—the composite/titanium beauties—are miraculously improved over the models of only fifteen or twenty years ago. If you’re rich, run right out the door now and get one. For five thousand bucks. Maybe ten! But you most certainly don’t have to. You can get a super road bike, with modern gearing and brakes, for a few hundred bucks. If you’re more or less a beginner, you may want to get a “combination” bike; it’s more comfortable and doesn’t cost much, either.
In fact, if you haven’t biked seriously for a while, or ever, give some serious thought to a combi, a bike with slightly fatter tires and an easier ride. I took a ride last weekend with my son Tim, who is about to turn fifty. He’s a serious aerobic athlete, but he hadn’t biked for a while and he astonished me by saying that modern racing bikes, with clip-on pedals and shoes, are hard to ride. I’ve been at it so long that I had forgotten this simple and obvious truth. They are delicate, they take some balance and they’re a little ditzy . . . they dance around a little bit, compared to their stodgy brethren. It doesn’t take long to get used to them. Not like a pair of hot skis. But it takes a while.
So don’t hesitate to begin with a more user-friendly combi for a few hundred bucks. They still have great gearing and brakes, and they will give you more exercise, if anything. And graduate into the stunning road bike when you’re a little further along and can appreciate it. But not on day one.
Oh, and get a comfortable women’s seat. There’s a period, early on, when women—and a lot of men—experience some discomfort, as they say, on a bike seat. There’s a certain amount of bunching or some damn thing down there, and women do not like it. And they do not have to have it. Some of that discomfort goes away with familiarity, but the hell with it. Get a good women’s saddle on day one. If you turn into a crazy later on, you can get one of those little skinny-minnies some women like, but not to begin with.
In the same vein, get a decent pair of biking shorts with the right seat (with some extra padding built in). Maybe bib-top shorts. They make a huge difference from the very beginning. Look nice, too. Lycra bib-tops are super comfortable, and they act just a teeny bit like the girdles my sisters were wearing in World War II . . . you’ll appear to drop an instant eight pounds and bike better, too. Gotta like that.
Three other biking points: 1) You already know how to do it. 2) It’s wildly good for you. 3) It’s great for your legs. Later on, we make the point that building up your legs is particularly important in the Next Third. Failing legs are what can put you in the walker or in the chair. When in doubt, default to exercise that helps your legs. Like bicycling.
Or go swimming. It’s cheap and easy to do. And if you go at it with some energy, it’s great aerobic exercise. Swim fans often say it’s the perfect exercise, and we can see why. You use almost every muscle in your body, it’s aerobically demanding and it also stretches you out in a healthy way, like yoga. You see swimmers’ bodies and think, hey, that’s perfect . . . just what I want for the Next Third. My son Tim, who was once a bit of a triathlete, used to combine a weights workout with a half-hour swim. He says a half-hour swim is a very serious aerobic workout, all by itself, and the combination is ideal. If you really get into it, there are Masters race organizations all over the country. And the equipment consists of a tank suit and a pair of goggles. If you don’t look so great in the suit, just keep your goggles on.
If you’re anywhere near snow, do not miss cross-country skiing. Even if you’ve never done it before. For one thing, it’s bone-easy. After exactly one day, you’ll be doing fine. It is a species of walking, after all. And once you get the hang of it, you can give yourself a massive dose of the very best aerobic exercise there is in some of the most beautiful places in the world. There is nothing better on earth than sliding gracefully along, under trees heavily laden with fresh snow, up a rise in the Rockies . . . down a country road in Vermont . . . over the golf course in your hometown. The only sound the hiss of your own sweet skis. Sneak off alone and try it. You will thank me for the rest of your days.
Of course, that first trip to the gym may not be a congenial one. After all, you’re probably not in sensational shape. And it is at least possible that you are a big fat piggy. You may not look your best in gym clothes. (I weighed a slobbery 200 when I really got into all this and looked nasty.) And, of course, you are slightly old. This may be your “new job,” as Harry and I insist, but the gym sure doesn’t look like the office. You don’t know your way around, you don’t know how to behave and you’re probably a bit of a loser by local standards, whatever the hell they are. One thing’s for sure, almost everyone at the gym is younger than you. And some of them are absolute gym rats . . . in great shape and proud as peacocks. You have the strong feeling that they’re looking at you funny. Or with contempt.
Well, the hell with ’em. You are here to save your life, not to make pals with a bunch of weirdo hard-bodies. So suck it up, be strong and do your job. Think about John on the beach the first day and where he is now. This works so much faster than you can believe when you’re beginning. Just tough it out for a couple of weeks and you’ll be fine.
If you haven’t biked for a while, you may want to remind yourself that you are forty or fifty or sixty, not twenty, and that you have to be a hair more cautious. Wear a helmet all the time. I still bike in New York City traffic, but frankly, it’s starting to scare me and I don’t think it’s a great idea. In fact, if you’re just getting back into the sport, I’d start someplace pretty calm and bucolic. And, as with skiing or any “movement” sport, look around a lot more than you used to. Most important in biking and skiing: Be predictable. Go in predictable lines, and don’t veer off without making damn sure there is no one behind you. You want to have fun, but you want to come home, too.
In the next two chapters, we’ll crank it up a bit, but for now just stick with “long and slow”—the pace at which you’re breathing pretty heavily and sweating some but not killing yourself. You can talk while you’re doing it, and you can keep it up almost indefinitely, once you’re in decent shape. Pick your activity and go do it for twenty or thirty or forty-five minutes a day for a week or so. Or a month. However long it takes to feel okay.
One of the great barriers to success in this business is lying. People lie to themselves about what they’re doing. They are absolutely delusional. They insist that their endless minutes walking to the john or whatever are all the workout anyone needs. Some women tell me of the many, wonderful hours they spend with their dear friends on the golf course, sometimes even working up a bit of a sweat, God bless them. Well, that’s nonsense. Golf is wonderful, but it is not aerobic. Gardening is wonderful, but it’s not aerobic. Quit lying to yourself and sweat. You’ve got to get out there and do stuff.
I talk to women about this book all the time, and the single constant in all those conversations—actually, with men or women, young or old—is that almost at once the person I’m talking to starts to tell me about her own exercise regimen and how wonderful it and she is. It’s ridiculous. These are big, fat women who have to take a deep breath in the middle of each sentence. Hopelessly puff-faced pudgies who obviously couldn’t run a step. Women in such hideously bad shape, it’s scary. They all tell me that they agree entirely about exercise and are already hard at it. Well, that is nonsense! Outrageous nonsense! Please, please, please, whatever you tell me, whatever you tell Old Fred, whatever you tell your God . . . quit lying to yourself! You are not doing anywhere near enough if you’re fat as butter. If you’re short of breath. If you look like hell. Do not lie! You are getting in your own way.
Here’s an interesting aside from Harry on that delicate point. For years, there was this neat little anomaly in how hard people said they worked out and their mortality. In surveys, there was a clear correlation between how much men said they worked out and how early they died. The results were: Work out more, die later. Makes perfect sense. But for women there was no correlation at all. Weird. So they did tests to correlate actual fitness, as measured by stress tests, and mortality. This time, there was a near perfect correlation for men and women. How come? Women lied more about how much they worked out.
Men lied some. Women lied a lot. Just tuck that away, girls, and listen to me later when I tell you to go get a heart monitor.
The message of this book is probably least agreeable to people who, like me, were skinny and weak as kids or had the wrong body types to be good at sports. Or older women who predated Title IX and the surge in women’s sports. None of you are old enough for this next bit, but there was a time in this nation when there was a serious body of thought that exercise was bad for women. My very own mother experienced it. One day, up there in bucolic Danvers, Massachusetts, perhaps in 1900 or 1902, when mother was six or eight, she came home to this serious scene. Her mother and an acquaintance were waiting for her in the formal parlor of the Conant Street house. Because, as the man had told my grandmother, “I saw Lurana running this morning.” He thought my grandmother ought to know. She was told not to do it anymore. In the fifty years I knew her, I never saw her do a single athletic thing. Not one. Pa, either, come to think of it.
Anyhow, I have a huge soft spot for people like you and me who never cared much for sports or weren’t any good at them or whatever. And some heartening news. In a funny way, people like us have an easier time with this regimen than the athletic gods of our childhood. There are two reasons. First, it’s surprisingly hard for real athletes to come to grips with the fact that they are nowhere near as good as they were at twenty or whatever. They sulk. They refuse to play. They go to hell. I don’t know what it’s all about; it’s not my problem. Or yours, probably. If you were not athletic as a kid, you don’t have to get over yourself. Just doing it is fine. Congratulations.
Second, if you were not an athlete as a girl, there is every reason to anticipate that your Personal Best is still ahead and that you have years and years of getting Younger Every Year. A personal story: I am seventy-one years old, and I have never skied better in my life. Literally. I was not much of a skier at twenty-eight, to be sure, but now I am a god. Better than, say, 60 percent of the people on a serious mountain on a given day. Do you have any idea what fun that is? To come sweeping down those hills with a turn of speed and a touch of grace at this late stage in the day? I grin for the pleasure of it. Ridiculous old fool? You bet. Shamefully behind people who can really ski? You bet. And I love it. Race you to the bottom!