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  We compensate in mainly unconscious ways. For example, as the tumor grew inside Theo the dog, his heart compensated by working much harder, which is why he could still run around the block with me, just a week before he died. Or to pick a less awful example, studies have shown that people with a higher level of intellectual development—more education, more mental stimulation—are able to resist Alzheimer’s disease for much longer than those of lower educational level. Their brains have developed more connections, and this stronger network is able to keep up the appearance of normal cognitive function, at least for a while.

  But the most important domain of aging, Ferrucci believes, has to do with energy: how we store it, and how we use it. That was why Edgar had given me the mask treatment, that last morning. Our basal metabolic rate—how much energy one’s body consumes while at rest, like a car that is idling—turns out to be an important measure of energy efficiency. The higher one’s rate of “idling,” the less energy is available for other needs, such as fighting infection or repairing tissue damage. I’d seen studies that linked higher basal rate with an increased risk of mortality (that is, death), so I was not pleased to recall that Edgar had murmured in my ear, “You have a high metabolism, don’t you?”

  Ferrucci was obsessed with energy efficiency, which is why so many of The Blast’s tests measured physical performance, as if we were being scouted for the NFL—such as the quarter-mile hallway walk, for example, and the excruciating VO2 max test on the treadmill. One of the most important tests, and one of the earliest indicators of aging, is the balance test—standing on one foot for thirty seconds and so forth. According to Ferrucci, that fine sense of balance is one of the first things to go. “I can go out and run ten miles right now,” he told me (he’s sixty and quite fit), “but I don’t think I could do the balance test.”

  It may not seem like a big deal, but its ripple effect is felt literally for the rest of your life. As our balance weakens, we compensate by widening our stance, so to speak, placing our feet farther apart so as to provide a more stable platform. But this wider stance, in turn, makes walking and running much less efficient than our narrow, youthful stride. This, in part, is why older people seem to shuffle along, even when they are trying to run. As a result, we waste energy, and slow down even more. This is ultimately why walking speed—and walking efficiency—are so important, Ferrucci thinks. They are a sign of, basically, how much gas we have left in the tank.

  There is a tragic irony here: We have less energy as we get older—and yet we use what we have much less efficiently. I couldn’t help but think of my old dog Lizzy, who had by now passed her thirteenth birthday, which is pretty old for any kind of hound. She walked so slowly now that we sometimes had to step aside so that little old ladies with grocery carts could pass us on the narrow neighborhood sidewalks. She was running out of gas, right before my eyes.

  Mobility is key to survival: This came up again and again in my research. Interestingly, this holds true all the way down to primitive animals, like the lowly Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny, translucent, and sinuous little worm that lives in fruit. C. elegans is beloved by scientists because it contains all the major body systems that we do, yet is smaller than a comma, so it doesn’t cost much to feed. They’re also great for studying aging because they only live for about three weeks. In the lab, their death is always preceded by a phase in which they simply stop moving.

  Which explained why the quarter-mile walking test is considered one of the most important parts of The Blast: The slower you walk, the less energy you have in the tank (and, probably, the poorer your sense of balance). The real reason energy and mobility are so important, Ferrucci explained, is because they hint at other things taking place inside us that we can’t see. Things happening even down at the cellular level. We slow down because we have more serious problems inside, like that rusty old Chevette on the freeway that can’t seem to go faster than fifty miles an hour, even if its driver puts the pedal to the floor.

  “You work harder, up to a certain point, but eventually you can’t deal with it,” Ferrucci said.

  When we run out of gas completely, we reach a state called frailty, one of the end stages of aging. It doesn’t refer to just fragility, but rather to a state of weakness and exhaustion, often characterized by slowness, low levels of activity, and unintentional weight loss. You waste away, basically, and at that point, it doesn’t take much to push you over the edge.

  Indeed, if my dog Lizzy reached the state of frailty, I would have to think about taking her on a one-way trip to the vet’s office, just to be humane. Grandma and Grandpa aren’t so lucky: For them, frailty marks the point where even a small problem, such as a routine illness or minor surgery, can quickly turn into a big problem, because the body simply can’t bounce back from it. Because of his frailty, for example, my grandfather’s routine urinary-tract infection set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to his death.

  Luckily for him, he wasn’t frail for long. He could take care of himself until pretty close to the end, and handle most activities of daily life, even cutting his toenails—one of the most difficult tasks for older people, because it requires clear vision, precise movements, and, most of all, flexibility. It was a blessing, in a way, that he passed relatively quickly, without a long decline. But it was still horrible.

  Meanwhile, his wife—my grandmother—is still alive as I type this, despite having barely done a single healthy thing in her life. Now aged ninety-seven, she lives in a nursing home in Florida and is nearly blind, yet still cooks and takes care of herself. Her breakfast is the same as it has been for decades: a sweet, delicious Danish pastry or, if she’s really feeling adventurous, a bear claw doughnut.

  I woke up the morning after my crab binge with a hop-tinged hangover and a mouth that tasted of Old Bay. It hadn’t quite worked; I was still wallowing in middle-aged self-pity. I had to snap out of it: One of the more interesting Blast findings has to do with attitudes toward aging itself. Young-middle-aged people (in their forties and fifties) with positive feelings about growing older—gaining wisdom, freedom from working, opportunities to travel and learn more—tended to enjoy better health, and better cognitive health later in life.

  Another significant body of research has found that overall, both men and women tend to grow happier with age. Some studies have actually pinpointed the mid-forties as the low point in terms of lifetime happiness—specifically, about age forty-six. It’s like a U-shaped curve, higher in youth and in older age, lower in the middle. The conclusions basically supported what my mother has been telling me, that each decade of her life has been better than the last. Why couldn’t I make myself believe her?

  I began to regain hope after I met my next-door neighbor, an elegant African American woman in her mid-seventies whom I’ll call Claudia. A retired federal employee from Washington, DC, which is also my hometown, she had been participating in the study for fifteen years, since she read about it in the Washington Post. Her presence alone was a mark of change: For its first twenty years, incredibly (or perhaps predictably), Dr. Nathan Shock’s aging study was open only to white men.

  But that was long ago, sort of; now the NIA actively recruited participants of both genders and all races, and Claudia was an old hand. We chitchatted about DC stuff for a while, and then she generously proceeded to give me the insider’s lowdown on The Blast. I soon figured out her true objective in talking to me, however. She was dressed in a sporty-looking Ellesse tennis outfit, because she had just come from the treadmill test, designed to measure maximum heart rate and VO2 max—how well the body takes in oxygen during intense exercise. It was the most feared test in the study, and also the most competitive. My turn was coming up, after lunch, and having done the test several times in the past I knew what kind of suffering it would entail. Yet Claudia hardly seemed to be sweating.

  “Don’t feel bad if I beat you on that test,” she said, giving me a look. “It’s pretty hard.”

  “I
t is?” I asked, my dread deepening.

  She nodded gravely.

  “You should know that they call me The Beast,” she added.

  Wait. Was I being trash-talked by a woman who was older than my mom?

  Yes. Yes, I was.

  But this was a good thing. In fact, it illustrated one of The Blast’s key findings. Although it had been set up to discover uniform markers of aging, it ultimately found that, in effect, there are none. Aging is too varied, too chaotic, and too idiosyncratic—it’s different for each individual, and the data reflects that. Initially, Blast scientists were dismayed by this fact; being scientists, they like their results to come out in nice, neat curves, with everyone basically falling in line.

  Instead, they ended up with a plot that looked more like a shotgun blast, with data points all over the place:

  Of course, being scientists, they like to draw nice, neat curves on their charts, but Ferrucci is far more interested in the huge variations among individuals: Some eighty-year-olds, for instance, are barely mobile, but others seem to walk just as fast as the average forty-year-old. Indeed, some octogenarians actually walk faster than people three decades younger. Not that this actually happened, but it may even be possible that certain seventy-four-year-old African American women could kick the behinds of certain forty-six-year-old Caucasian males on the treadmill test.

  Regardless, the point is this: We all age differently. Very differently. In fact, as Ferrucci observed, the paths we take in later life are far more divergent than the highly programmed process of our development. And the older people get, the greater the variation among them. Two random twenty-year-olds will have much more in common with each other, biologically, than any two seventy-five-year-olds.

  And yet, as The Blast has shown, the differences are already there in middle age: In a recent study, Ferrucci looked into the medical histories of Blast participants who had been newly diagnosed with diabetes, looking for early signs of the disease. He found that the warning signals were present decades before they were diagnosed; even 30 years ago, the diabetics had been subtly different, in terms of certain blood biomarkers, from their peers who had remained healthy.

  In fact, a large body of research shows that one’s aging trajectory is largely determined by how we are in middle age. Not only diabetes, but future cardiovascular health and even dementia can all be predicted, with pretty good accuracy, much earlier in life. To pick just one example, a four-decade study that followed thousands of Japanese American men in Hawaii found that their late-life health was directly tied to certain key midlife risk factors. Those with lower blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, blood glucose, and body-mass index (BMI) in their forties and fifties, the study found, stood a much better chance of living to age eighty-five without any major health problems. By contrast, another large study found that obesity, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure vastly increased the risk of developing dementia later in life.

  What’s interesting is that all of these markers are pretty malleable; they depend largely on behavior and choices. Which tells scientists that much of aging is variable, and thus possibly changeable. “That’s a wonderful thing; it’s a window of opportunity,” says Ferrucci. “If everyone was on the same deterministic biological trajectory, there would be no hope that we could change it. But the incredible variability shows that the potential to age well is there for everyone. And a few people are showing us the way.”

  I wanted to seek out those people, the seventy-year-olds who look, act, and test out like they are fifty or younger; those were the ones I wanted to draft for my senior-citizens-league softball team. And then I realized that I already knew at least one such individual extremely well: my own father.

  Chapter 5

  HOW TO LIVE TO 108 WITHOUT REALLY TRYING

  If you live to be one hundred, you’ve got it made. Very few people die past that age.

  —George Burns

  I was standing on a street corner in Lower Manhattan one day a few years ago, waiting to meet my father for lunch, when I spotted what looked like a scarecrow walking toward me. His dark suit hung off his shoulders and flapped in the breeze as he walked, but even from a block away I recognized my dad’s distinctive swinging gait.

  We look a lot alike, my dad and I. We share the same thinning blond hair, same khaki-based white-guy style, even the same name. As he plumped up in middle age, I would inherit the pants and jackets he’d gotten too stocky to wear. Decades of worldwide business travel and late-night Manhattan restaurant dinners—literally, 250 to 300 a year—will do that to a guy. The man walking toward me now could have been a completely different person. And in some ways, he was.

  When he reached his mid-sixties, my father made a series of radical life changes that he seemed to hope would help him beat some of the effects of aging. He had reason to worry: His own brother had died suddenly of cancer before he turned fifty, and his parents had not fared very well, either. After sixty-nine years of eating a steak-based Midwestern diet, and a lifetime of chain-smoking, his father had found out that he needed triple-bypass surgery—one of the surgical “fixes” that have helped push life expectancy beyond the traditional first heart attack in one’s fifties. He survived the operation, and my grandmother cared for him for two years. Then one day, as she got ready to take him to a doctor’s appointment, she lay down for a quick nap and died of a massive, unexpected heart attack, at just seventy-one.

  We haven’t really talked numbers, but my impression is that my dad would rather check out closer to age one hundred—killed instantly by a flying golf ball, perhaps. He’d already had one scary brush with illness, not long before our lunch, and while he seemed to be out of the woods, he not surprisingly hates the very idea of getting old, of sickness and death. There will be no going gently into that good night. His end-of-life care plan, in case he ever ends up incapacitated or demented in a nursing home, unable to recall who won the 1963 U.S. Open, consists of three words: “Just shoot me.”

  My siblings and I are pretty sure he is serious.*

  So at age sixty-seven, he had fled New York City and its stresses and moved back to his native Illinois, where he essentially remade his life. He now spends his days pursuing his great passion, which is golf. An accomplished chef and former devoted carnivore, he has switched to a largely vegetarian diet, à la Bill Clinton, hoping to avoid the calamitous death rate associated with meaty, fatty Western fare. Unlike Clinton, he’d never liked Big Macs, but I was shocked to learn that my father had also largely given up wine; after all, this was a man whose idea of the perfect father-son trip was to drive around Burgundy, feasting at Michelin-starred restaurants. (I was sixteen at the time.)

  I was lucky; I grew up with the prototypical hipster dad. Embarrassing as it is to admit, he introduced me to some of my lifelong favorite bands when I was a teenager and he was in his forties. He was a devoted early adopter, always bringing home the latest technological gadgets, such as the huge, brick-like Motorola cell phone that Michael Douglas brandished in the ur-’80s movie Wall Street. A lifelong information junkie, he researched his various interests obsessively, and over time he had amassed a formidable library, including hundreds of books on food and cooking, and more than 1,000 volumes on golf. It rubbed off on me: Instead of throwing me a football, he took me to the public library, where I buried myself in books and developed the strange urge to one day write them.

  Now he had become obsessed with his health, seeking the latest diets and anti-aging strategies to extend his lifespan and, more important, his healthspan. Four times a week or so, he hops on his new bike and rides over to the local rail-trail, where he’ll hammer across the prairie for an hour and a half. On the other three days, he might go to his golf club to play a fast-paced round (walking, never in a cart). Or, if the weather is bad, as it often is in Chicago, he will abuse his rowing machine for a solid hour while watching DVDs of college lectures. For dinner, he and his age-appropriate lady friend will eat something veggie-based, or per
haps split a six-ounce piece of fish plus a salad. As for snacks, he eats precisely twenty-three almonds every day.

  At lunch, he asked if I wanted any of the pants that he was now too skinny to wear. I thought I detected a smirk. Instead of legal papers, his briefcase was loaded with supplements, including fish oil, coenzyme Q10 (thought to be good for heart function), as well as resveratrol, the powerful compound found in red wine that has been shown to extend lifespan in obese mice. He subscribed to an array of health-related magazines and newsletters, including Life Extension magazine, which ran long feature articles touting various supplements (and is published by a company that sells those same supplements).

  His latest find was curcumin, a derivative of the spice turmeric that is a staple of traditional Ayurvedic medicine. More recently, curcumin has racked up some fascinating results in the lab, suggesting that it might work against a wide range of ailments, from diabetes to irritable bowel syndrome to some kinds of cancers, including colorectal cancer. There have been encouraging preliminary studies, particularly against inflammatory conditions; and in the lab dish at least, it also seems to zap cancer cells. But the evidence is far from conclusive, and there have been no large-scale randomized clinical trials in humans; the jury is still very much out. Nevertheless, better safe than sorry: Dad takes eight grams of it each day, or about half a tablespoonful, which seems like a lot.

  He certainly seemed healthier than the last time I’d seen him; his skin sort of glowed, although the only discernible effect of all the curcumin was that it turned certain bodily functions bright yellow. (I was sorry I asked.) Was it also beating down any incipient cancer genes that might be lurking in his cells? Who knew. Still, who could blame him for fearing decrepitude, disease, and a long-suffering death? If his somewhat odd new habits help stave off the dreaded “just shoot me” day, then it will be well worth it. Certainly, they can’t hurt, although Jay Olshansky would point out that he also benefits from the two most powerful anti-aging drugs known to man: money and education.