When I first met Harry and Chris, the authors of this extraordinary book, I thought I might impress them by casually dropping the fact that I was going off on a five-day bike trip in Maine. Chris gave me a high five—“Fabulous!” He is a ferocious biker himself, who warms up in the winters by biking daily up and down the Berkshires so he and his wife will be ready to go howling around the mountains of Europe in summer, following Lance Armstrong’s practice route.
“What do I need to do to train?” I asked.
“How long do you have?”
“I just finished my book. I leave in three days.”
His rugged face collapsed. “You’ll just have to suck it up this time. But next time, you might enjoy it.”
The cycling outfit I toured with in Maine, Summer Feet, is small. I mean, really small. Only three cyclists showed up for the week: Chris Hedges, a fellow author and toughened war correspondent, his young and very tall wife, Kim, and myself. Our two guides, Norman and Rae, were both muscle-bound Mainers. First thought: These are all demon uphillers; I’ll either have to find the coastal evacuation route—it must be flat—or get off in the middle of the hill, throw my hand in the air, and shout, “Taxi!”
But it turned out that Christopher and Kim, like me, love books even more than biking. So we turned the trip into something like pedaling with Proust, thoroughly enjoying our twenty miles a day of cycling on the sylvan roads of Acadia National Park and circling the jagged fjords of Schoodick Island. Each day was pleasantly punctuated by breaks for reading and discussing our favorite authors. I came home without a single pain or strain.
But once home, foolishly thinking myself now fit as a biker chick, I plunged into a boot camp aerobics program at the YWCA. After the first day, a knee locked up, one hip listed, and every rib felt like a chicken bone poking in my sides. I went back to look at Harry and Chris’s book again.
“We urge you not to start gradually,” they had written. “You might think about a ‘Jump-Start Vacation’—a trip where exercise is the central activity.” They had even suggested going on a bike tour in New England. Okay, did that, then what? “It is far better to make a sharp break with the past and a serious commitment to the future,” they had written. “Jump in for the rest of your life.” Ah, that was the meat of their message . . . “the rest of your life.” Never mind the first few days of muscle protest; it will get better and easier.
I read the manuscript of this book while I was finishing a book of my own, and Younger Next Year for Women sounded as if it might be a companion volume. My book, Sex and the Seasoned Woman, is about sex, love, dating and new dreams among women over forty-five. It is based on interviews with over two hundred women who belong to a new universe of lusty, liberated boomer babes—some married and some not—who are unwilling to settle for the stereotypical roles of middle age. Today’s women in their mid-forties, fifties and sixties are at the peak of their lives. They consistently tell me that they are happier and more productive than they have ever been before. Among my subjects in their seventies to nineties, I have found many who are younger in mind and body than their average peers, and some who remain seductresses, dazzling to both men and women.
It is the seasoned woman who knows best how to resonate with her sexuality. Happily, Harry and Chris point out that committing to regular exercise is the foundation of positive brain chemistry, which leads directly to burning fat, heightening your immune system, improving your sleep and toning up your sexual desire and response. Sounds like a pretty good prescription for chasing away the menopausal blues!
Okay, you might ask, What do two guys know about menopause? As the author of The Silent Passage, I wondered myself.
Chris Crowley is a guy’s guy with a Dionysian flush to his face. He’s a recovery case, years younger at seventy than when he retired from a Wall Street law firm and began wondering who the hell he would be, once stripped of his professional status. He started the usual slide into fat and foolishness but caught himself and reversed direction. Seriously: he now looks like a fifty-year-old hunk.
Dr. Harry Lodge is only forty-seven, a rod-straight prep-school prototype, just as good-looking and intense as Chris, but a medical practitioner, teacher and man of science. He tells readers that after fifty we start to decay. Yes, decay. Unless we signal our bodies to keep growing by exercising six days a week—yes, six days—our bodies head downhill after fifty. Exercise provides the signal that jolts our cells into repairing and renewing themselves and releases the chemicals that bathe our brains in positive feelings. You may not want to hear this advice, but you know it’s true. Some need it more than others.
Kids, you know who you are.
Harry the doctor provides solid data and vivid descriptions to back up the two major points in this book—points I make in my own book and illustrate with dozens of women’s life stories: Seventy percent of aging after fifty is governed by our lifestyle. Half of all of the sickness and serious accidents we are told to anticipate after we turn fifty can be virtually eliminated, if we learn how to live younger.
The authors of this book and I are on the same page when we project a vision of women’s years after menopause. I call it a Second Adulthood. Harry and Chris call it “the Next Third of your life.” They project that there are “thirty years to live after menopause and [that] they can be some of the best of your life.” We differ only on the numerical projection.
Why only thirty years?
The fastest-growing segment of the American population is people over one hundred. This population will only swell, driven by boomers who have the good fortune of unprecedented levels of education, income, a keen awareness of good health habits and access to cutting-edge medical resources. The MacArthur Foundation’s studies on aging predict that, of the seventy million boomers born between 1946 and 1964, approximately three million will live to the age of one hundred, or beyond.
Will you be one of them?
You could be if you honor the house that you live in—your body. As an eighty-five-year-old marathon runner once told me, “We are all like snails, we carry our houses with us.” Our body holds the remarkable ability to repair and renovate itself, provided we help it rather than letting it go to seed. If, as we age, we concentrate on the three “F’s”—Family, Friends and Fun—and keep our minds alive with new challenges and new vistas, there’s no telling how long the current generations of women might live.
My own profession is one of the most prone to physical deterioration. A writer sits, tensely hunched over the keyboard, for hours at a time, butt spreading, gut wound like a garden hose and lungs hanging limp as yesterday’s balloons. All of us sit too long in front of our computers, at work and at home. Sure, we promise our physical therapists and ourselves that we’ll get up and do cat stretches every hour. But honestly, how often do we unwind?
I developed a good habit in my fifties: When I finished writing a book, which was every two or three years, I would go to my favorite health ranch for a week. But after finishing a harrowing book about the families of 9/11 victims, Middletown, America, I didn’t go. It was a big mistake. More than ever, I needed rejuvenation, spiritually as well as physically, as we all do after a period of great emotional exertion. Instead, I kept getting worse. I had a cranial sacral treatment, where a practitioner listened with her hands and felt the energy and rhythmic patterns in my body’s fluids. She looked grim.
“Have you had a trauma lately?”
“No.” (It didn’t occur to me that I had experienced a vicarious trauma.)
She told me that the important fluids that are supposed to circulate between my head and tail were moving very sluggishly, indicating that my immune system was very weak. My husband asked, “Why don’t you go to the ranch?”
Off I went. It was winter, but Rancho la Puerta is in Mexico and always mild. This is the ur fitness camp, started in the 1940s and spread over several miles beneath a spiritually charged mountain rendered sacred by Native Americans. I’ve always enjoyed hiking the mountain before dawn and walking to classes along the paths of the ranch, swooning from the potpourri of herbal shrubs. But on the first day of that stay, as I reprised my old routine, I was in for a rude surprise. Dinner ended at seven-thirty that evening, as usual, and I had about a quarter of a mile to walk back to my villa. Halfway there, I completely ran out of gas. I seriously considered lying down on the ground and going to sleep. That was a shock. But a good shock.
I made a vow then to come to the ranch once a year to get that physical jump start and spiritual refreshment I missed after finishing the 9/11 book. My new annual retreat would act as a reminder of all the good habits of mind and body I have learned at the ranch over the years. I experienced, firsthand, that the aftereffects of giving my body daily aerobic exercise, making my muscles dance, rising early and retiring early are the best medicine for depression. They are also natural and powerful stimuli to pursuing a more passionate life.
So this time, after finishing my latest book, and after my cycling trip and the painful introduction to aerobic boot camp, I decided to act on the powerful message in Younger Next Year for Women. I went to Rancho la Puerta for a week and “jump-started” the exercise program I’m committed to continuing through my Second Adulthood. (Well, maybe modified a little.)
My bag didn’t arrive. I had to sit in the San Diego airport for five hours waiting for it. By the time I finally arrived at the ranch, my legs were tingling from the lack of movement beginning at four that morning. So I went for a brisk two-mile walk around the ranch, picked some of the purple grapes ripening on the vines, sat and read on my terrace, had a banana and a glass of water, and lay down at 8 P.M., thinking that I’d just catch a catnap. I didn’t stir until four in the morning. It was wonderful.
Starting off with that mini fast and the restful eight hours of sleep, I attacked the day with a tremendous appetite for every kind of movement the ranch could offer. After a three-and-a-half-mile hike around the mountain, I went to circuit training for a combination of strength-training with little aerobic bursts; from there to Pilates for tightening in the core; then off to yoga for seventy-five minutes of breathing and stretching. By lunchtime, I felt strong and happy but—surprise!—not hungry. So I skipped the soup, had a little jicama and edamame salad, and a rice-stuffed pepper. Then on to Tai Chi and a nap by the pool.
That night, I gave an hour lecture and still had enough gas left over to read myself to sleep at eleven o’clock. The wonderful paradox I’d discovered is that the more calories I burned, the less I seemed to need. As long as the body’s metabolism has a new spark plug, all batteries are recharged and you’re in an enthusiastic, supportive and aesthetically pleasing environment, it’s easy to exercise and eat well. You know you’re going to get enough sleep and you’re not going to be asked to speed up finishing that report, so you can do without the third cup of coffee, the glass of wine, or the chocolate-chip cookie.
The next afternoon I was somberly doing Tai Chi, rocking silently from foot to foot, when I heard something far more primitive going on in the gym next door. The women who emerged after that class were all laughing uproariously and practicing a noise that sounded like Roxie Hart in Chicago: “AAGGHggghhhhmmmmmmmm . . .”
“What were you doing in there?” I asked.
“Strip dancing.”
The next day I decided to let the Tai Chi people levitate into higher consciousness; I wanted to get down with the girls who strip-danced. The teacher, Demetrius, a young African American man with an impish smile, told us right off the bat: “Strip off your usual identity. Throw it away. Decide who you’re going to be today. Is it going to be Beyoncé? Gypsy Rose Lee? Whoever . . .” He pulled on a wig: “I’m Ginger.”
Demetrius gave us a chair to make love to. We had to choose a gauzy wrap and strike a sexy pose behind a folding metal chair. Then he put on music from the movie Moulin Rouge and taught us to do those moves you’ve seen a thousand times.
At five foot four, with enough years on me to rate senior movie fare, I’m never going to move like Nicole Kidman. Neither, presumably, are you. But it didn’t matter one bit. There were women in the class who were in their seventies and eighties, along with a lot of beauties who were celebrating their fiftieth year. And nobody was looking at any of us—we only had eyes for Demetrius and ourselves.
With one hand on the back of our chairs, we listened as Demetrius counted down, “Five-six-seven-eight,” and we were off strutting a Janet Jackson walk around the chair, then hanging off the back of it, grinding our hips to one side and the other and then down in a hammocky swivel.
Well, every woman in the room began to shake her booty, dangle her ornaments and toss her head in that slave-to-love swing, all while stroking her chair like Brad Pitt was sitting right there. Before you knew it, we were on our backs, kicking our legs and pulling up with a long, erotic moan, “AAGGHggghhhhmmmmmmmm . . .” You have never seen so many middle-aged women vamping. With the sarongs wrapped around our fannies or swirling around our necks, we shamelessly stroked our hands up and down our inner thighs, over our tummies and breasts, flinging our arms high in the air with squeals worthy of Marilyn Monroe.
Ladies, under the skin, we are all natural strippers. So why not show it?
Demetrius told us stripping is good for releasing your inner goddess. I say, it’s more of a release for your inner harlot. And it’s a heck of a lot more fun than doing squat thrusts in a sweaty gym.
Invite your husband to watch you chair-dance. I guarantee you will feel younger. And so will he.
So, make up your mind to follow the gung-ho practices this book recommends and then find your own ways to jump-start growth. (I know I’ve found mine!) But whatever you do, don’t let this become just another exercise book, gathering the dust of unread guilt. Use it as a kind of bible; reread a few pages now and then, to remind you of the central commandment:
Jump in for the rest of your life.
Gail Sheehy
East Hampton, New York