Spring Chicken Read online

  Four years ago, a college classmate suggested Ron enter a Masters track meet. He got hooked on the competition, which reminded him of his days in the auction business. And he loved the training. Now he works out three days a week on a local track, all by himself, plus two days in the gym with a trainer. “It makes you feel good, the heartbeat and the butterflies in your stomach, and all that,” he’d tell me later. “And beating the other guy, of course.”

  One thing that struck me was that Ron and Don and Bernie all approached aging with the same discipline that they put into their training, as though aging itself were a kind of athletic event. Ron stays young, he said, by avoiding the “inflammables,” by which he seemed to mean foods containing dairy, wheat, and sugar. He’d been experimenting with this new anti-“inflammable” diet for the past six months, he said, and it seemed to be working. “I woke up one morning last year, and nothing hurt,” he deadpanned. “I thought I was dead. Now I wake up and nothing hurts because nothing hurts!”

  And come to think of it, he did look a little like Rodney Dangerfield. He also employed the services of a “concierge physician,” a high-end doctor who was basically on retainer. He could go and see him for anything, anytime, and stay as long as he wanted. Education, money, and access to medical care all correlate strongly with longevity, Jay Olshansky and other scholars have found. Ron, Don, and Bernie had all three.

  The trio planned to enter the 4x100 relay as a team, but they needed a fourth. I was secretly relieved to be four decades too young. Their real enemy, though, was not the other runners, but injury. And indeed, as we stood there chatting in the infield, the boys and I watched a seventy-five-year-old woman stumble during a hundred-meter heat, hit her head on the track, and get hauled off in an ambulance, still unconscious. In the very next race, a gentleman about the same age pulled his hamstring at the start and fell into the gutter, writhing in agony. “He pulled it bad,” said Ron with a grimace as the EMTs came trotting back out with their stretcher.

  Ron knew better. He warmed up carefully before every workout and every race, using a specific routine designed to prepare his eighty-one-year-old muscles and joints for sprinting. As his start time approached, Ron went through his warm-up routine, as always, in his red USA jersey and Lycra compression shorts, as the other age groups went off, one by one. Then it came time for the men’s eighty-through-eighty-four age group, and he sauntered into position as his name was called. Lane 6.

  “Take your marks,” said the starter.

  Ron crouched down, placed his fingers on the nubbly track surface, and set his feet in the starting blocks: front, then back. Two of the runners didn’t bother using the blocks; at eighty, it’s a bit problematic to spring out of a crouch, not to mention more dangerous. So they stood on the line, which was easier on their hamstrings but also removed them from serious contention. That left three runners in the mix: Ron, a lean African American man named Alex Johnson who had crushed him in qualifying, and another runner named John Hurd, from Florida, who had also beaten Ron in the past.

  “Set,” the starter said, and the runners froze. Down at the finish, a small knot of spectators—mostly wives and middle-aged kids of competitors—lounged in the stands, looking a bit bored.

  BANG!

  Ron burst out of the blocks, a move he practiced several times a week on the track near his home. Within two strides, he was fully upright, running as fast as he could, his arms slicing back and forth, his palms like knives to cut through the air while his legs whipped around like the blades of an eggbeater. And by ten yards out, he was leading, a stride or two ahead of both Hurd and Johnson. But Johnson came past him at seventy-five meters, devouring the track with his huge strides. Ron hung on for second place, clocking a time of 16.75 seconds, nearly a second faster than he’d run at Masters Nationals three weeks previously. He was happy, as he stood in the infield and tried to catch his breath.

  “I can’t wait for the next one,” he said, still panting.

  Athletes understand aging better than almost anybody, because they feel its effects sooner than the rest of us. A pro football player will be considering retirement at thirty; LeBron James is getting on in years at thirty-three. Endurance sports are more forgiving, but not much. Meb Keflezighi won the Boston Marathon at age thirty-nine, which was hailed as an amazing feat. The oldest rider in the 2014 Tour de France was forty-three years old. Jamie Moyer was fifty when he became the oldest pitcher ever to start a Major League Baseball game. He pitched two innings.

  For professional athletes, remaining healthy with age is vital to their livelihoods, which is why former Yankees star Alex Rodriguez and some of his colleagues frequented South Florida “anti-aging” clinics in search of human growth hormone and other chemical magic that might help prolong their careers. For Masters athletes, though, the dynamic is reversed. They are no longer victims of age but combatants, battling with it as the decades slip by.

  “To become an athlete at age 47, or 50—or 90, I’m sure—is merely a way of saying ‘Wait!’ ” wrote the late John Jerome in Staying With It, his wonderful memoir about taking up competitive swimming late in life. “It is a way of grabbing time by the lapels, of saying stop, wait a minute, let me understand what is happening here. Maybe the point isn’t to fight age off but to let it come on, to get inside it, to find out just what it is.”

  Few Senior Games competitors had gotten as far inside aging as Howard Booth, whom I met later that afternoon in the “pits,” a grassy area where the jumping events were held. The men’s long-jump competition was in full cry, with gray-haired guys charging full speed down a narrow runway and launching themselves into a pit of sand. My knees throbbed just watching them. Booth distinguished himself with a very special jumping style: When he landed, he’d turn a quick little somersault and pop right back up onto his feet. This made the spectators and even the judges laugh every time.

  Booth was not only a former college gymnast—hence the tumbling—but also a professor of biology at Michigan State University, with a keen personal and professional interest in both athletics and aging. Compact yet muscular, with white hair and a clipped beard, he wore a skintight bodysuit that showed he was in enviably good shape for any age. His specialty is actually the pole vault, which is a bit odd considering he is not particularly tall, but what he lacks in height he makes up for with passion.

  He had pole-vaulted in college, but quit to pursue his graduate studies and his research. About ten years ago, a friend told him about the Senior Games, and for fun he checked out the pole-vault records for his age group. They seemed well within his reach, so he decided to pick it up again. He built a pit in his backyard, making uprights out of scrap lumber and a landing pit of trash bags filled with leaves. A maple sapling served as his pole, and another as the crossbar, and boom, he was a pole vaulter again. He’s since upgraded to a more professional-quality setup, and now his backyard pit attracts vaulters of all ages on Sunday mornings. He medals in national events on a regular basis.

  “You can wake up with sore muscles and ask yourself, Why am I doing this?” he said. Answer: “Because flying up in the air is really, really fun. Mentally, we’re kids playing.”

  There might be something to the “mentally” part. It recalls the famous experiment done by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, who recruited eight older men to spend a week together in a house decorated, in every detail, in the style of their 1950s heyday. Even the magazines and books were from that decade. The men were then instructed to imagine themselves as they had been in 1959, when they were in their prime (to aid this, all mirrors had been removed). They discussed 1950s sports and news as if they were in the present, and so on. She told them to “inhabit” their former selves.

  By the end of the week, the men had been miraculously rejuvenated, performing far better on Blast-like tests of grip strength and such, and even breaking out into a spontaneous game of touch football. They were miraculously rejuvenated. “It almost seemed like Lourdes,” Langer said later
.

  Hippocrates believed that exercise was medicine, and so did the physicians of ancient China. It went out of fashion in the early twentieth century, though, and was actually believed to be dangerous—coincidentally, just as heart disease was emerging as a leading cause of death. During the first half of the twentieth century, doctors typically prescribed bed rest for their patients with heart trouble. Oops.

  That changed in the 1960s, when the massive Framingham Study found that people who exercised regularly were far less likely to suffer heart attacks than those who did not. Those who smoked, on the other hand, were at greater risk. Since then, a tidal wave of exercise data has all pointed in the same direction. A recent analysis of statistics covering more than 650,000 individuals showed that people who kept to a normal weight and exercised moderate-ishly, the equivalent of a brisk walk for an hour or so per day, lived an average of seven years longer than the non-exercisers. There is a raging debate over whether or not more intense or long-lasting exercise confers proportionally greater benefits, but one study of Tour de France veterans found that they, too, lived about seven years longer than their peers. So did Olympic medalists, by three years, according to a study of more than 15,000 athletes from 1896 through 2010.

  That may be due to all the wine, at least in the cyclists’ case, but it’s more likely because of the fact that exercise itself is literally like medicine, as a growing body of evidence is beginning to show. In a detailed and revealing comparison, the Stanford scientist John Ioannidis paired more than three hundred randomized clinical drug trials with the results of fifty-seven studies of exercise, and found that in nearly every case, exercise proved just as effective as the medications, and sometimes better, at staving off death from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.

  “If you could put the benefits of exercise in a pill, it would be an astonishing pill,” says Simon Melov, a researcher at the Buck Institute who has studied exercise extensively. “The data is now coming out on the effects of chronic exercise, and it is astonishing in terms of its ability to prevent all sorts of age-related disease, everything from cancer through to neurodegenerative disease to heart disease, even arthritis. All of these things have vastly lowered risk in people who exercise regularly—and if that was in a pill, it would be insane.”

  As a biologist, Howard Booth already knew this. After college, he’d kept active by running and biking, so he was still in relatively good shape, but he was getting bored. He took up pole vaulting at age sixty in part because he knew he would need a new challenge when he retired from teaching. “I reflect on my father’s generation, where the idea of retirement was that you’ve worked really hard all these years, and now you deserve to do nothing,” he told me. “Not something else, but nothing.”

  That wasn’t for him. Neither was golf, once the sole socially acceptable pastime for men in their sixties. “Just a step up from watching paint dry,” he scoffed. Though he’s not fully retired from teaching (and coaching) at Eastern Michigan, training and competing in pole vault gave him another goal, or as the Okinawans call it, ikigai, a sense of purpose. The stakes are low—at the Senior Games, he stood to win a cheap alloy medal, at best—but at the same time, they couldn’t be higher. “Even if it’s a two-dollar ribbon, and you spent thousands in travel and overnights,” he said, “it makes no sense—but it makes huge psychological sense. You’re not on the sidelines, you’re really participating.”

  Something similar was taking place biologically, inside him. He was participating. As he perused the results and record books, he grew curious: Just how good was it possible to get? Could an older athlete ever equal his prime? Could he or she come close?

  Booth had his students survey his peers on the senior track-and-field circuit, and found that dedicated athletes in their sixties could perform about 80 percent as well as they could in their prime. That is, if they could vault fifteen feet in college, they were hitting twelve feet in their sixties. National records also bear this out: In the men’s hundred-meter dash, for example, the best time recorded by an American sixty-through-sixty-four-year-old in 2012 was an astonishing 11.83, barely 2 seconds slower than Justin Gatlin’s Olympic gold medal–winning 9.79. Among runners a decade older, seventy through seventy-four, the fastest man takes just a second longer (12.90), which is still pretty fast.

  Top-level performance drops off pretty drastically after age seventy-five, but the really interesting fact that Booth uncovered was that his “controls”—that is, average sedentary adults of the same age—had retained only 22 percent of their physical capacity. This told Booth that the stakes were much higher than simply breaking records and winning medals—both of which he did with relative ease. It was more about staying in the game, about not giving up. “Most people just aren’t basically healthy at this age,” he said. “And the idea that well, it’s natural and you’re just an old man now—that isn’t natural! That is the default. That’s where we get to by not challenging ourselves. Exercise is a continuum: The more you do, the less you’re going to lose.”

  Booth had finished his events for the day, and we were sitting in folding chairs, relaxing in the sun and talking about the science of sport. His wife, Luanne, sat nearby as he talked, nodding. “We can show it in muscle protein production; in nerve junctions, that tend to fade away; and the rate at which muscle fibers return,” he continued. “All of these basically respond to increased exercise, by slowing the rate at which they would naturally decline. And the greater intensity you can put into that package, the slower you will lose performance.”

  He had chosen pole vaulting because it requires not only basic fitness, but physical skill and fine coordination, which—as The Blast has shown—decline even faster than aerobic capacity. The fast-twitch muscle fibers used in jumping and sprinting tend to disappear earlier than the slow-twitch fibers used by endurance athletes. “The more you use them, for fine detail—the precision of a fine overhand in tennis, or a jump shot—the fast-twitch fibers in particular will have greater numbers of motor units [a combination of muscle fiber and the nerve that triggers it] in the areas you have used and worked on,” he said. “And if you quit doing those things, they decline.”

  While I was working on this book, nearly everyone I told about it wanted to know the same thing: “So, what’s the secret to aging?”

  So far, the “secret” seems to be: Use It or Lose It.

  Which sounds simple, even simplistic. But it kept coming up, almost like a mantra, not only in conversation but in high-level research: It applies to your cardiovascular system, your muscles, your sex life, and your brain. Howard Booth had it all figured out.

  By contrast, not using it can have dire consequences. Even retiring from working—the capstone to the American Dream—can be dangerous to your health. A paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a prestigious private think tank, found that “complete retirement leads to a 5–16 percent increase in difficulties associated with mobility and daily activities, a 5–6 percent increase in illness conditions, and 6–9 percent decline in mental health,” over the next six years. Although early retirement has been found to decrease mortality risk, at least in Europe, newly retired people often report a loss of their sense of purpose—the Okinawans’ ikigai, again—which can be hard to replace.

  As everyone since Brown-Séquard has noted, physical parameters like strength and VO2 max tend to move in one direction with age: downward. But it’s not the same for everyone. A recent study of aged Scandinavian cross-country skiers found that the older athletes had preserved much of their aerobic capacity, relative to their youthful selves; and they were far ahead of the age-matched control group, a bunch of sedentary older guys who live in Indiana.

  Which seems like the ultimate unfair comparison—Nordic ski gods versus Midwestern couch potatoes—but who would you rather be? The skiers had done a better job preserving their ability to pump blood efficiently, the elasticity of their arteries, the suppleness of their lungs. Biologically, they
were simply younger. On a practical level, this meant that they had an easier time walking around, climbing stairs, and as Howard Booth put it, participating in life. They’d never stopped using it, so they didn’t lose it.

  If you look at older athletes’ muscles and bones, the contrast with their sedentary peers becomes even more dramatic. One of the hallmarks of middle age—and one of the first things I noticed—is that it becomes much more difficult to gain and keep muscle. We begin to lose muscle mass gradually at around age forty, and as time goes on we lose it more rapidly: Between fifty and seventy, we say good-bye to about 15 percent of our lean muscle per decade. After that, it jumps to 30 percent per decade. “You could make the case that aging starts in muscle,” says Nathan LeBrasseur, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic who studies muscle.

  But even as we’re losing muscle in middle age, we don’t lose weight overall (duh). That means our muscle is gradually, insidiously being replaced by fat. More fat and less muscle means your metabolic “engine” runs at a much slower rate; you have less muscle, which means you have fewer mitochondria, which means your body is less efficient at burning the sugar out of your bloodstream. Not coincidentally, most new cases of diabetes appear in people in their mid-forties and older.

  The reasons for this are not fully understood. Lower testosterone levels have been singled out as the culprit in middle-aged muscle loss, but hormonal changes aren’t the only guilty party. Older people are up against an even more powerful enemy, something in their own bodies. Experiments involving parabiosis have revealed that in older mice (and presumably also in older humans), muscle stem cells or “satellite cells” have a harder time activating in response to injury or stress, because of something that circulates in old blood—or is missing from old blood. As if that weren’t bad enough, our bodies also produce a hormone called myostatin, whose job is actually to slow muscle growth—to keep us from growing too big and thus requiring too much food, according to LeBrasseur. (Thanks, evolution.)