How to Live a Lifetime

My immortality story begins a few days after Christmas 1978, in my junior year at Yale. It was dawn in the stone stadium at Olympia in Greece, where I sprinted the length of the infield and decided along the way that I would become an Olympian and write a book about it. So powerful was that story that it worked. At age 21, I became a 1980 U.S. Olympic oarsman, “immortal” in one of the most physically demanding sports, and author of The Shell Game. Since then, rowing has remained my yoga, my meditation, my breathwork, my satsang.

Rowing is a disciplined practice. You show up for the crew. On time. Or you get on your rowing machine. The goal is excellence, fluidity, concentration, complete relaxation of every muscle that isn’t working at full capacity. The rules are strict and fair even when the conditions are not. Enlightenment is the effortless unity of as many as eight bodies exceeding the capacity of each individual in the pure joy of speed over water. Over time, you become a connoisseur of embodiment. Nowadays, there are so many clubs and camps and of course rowing machines that one can learn to row at any age.

Over decades I have won age-group world championships, and at 49 I competed in the 2008 Olympic Trials. I kept racing past 60, until I learned my heart was in constant atrial fibrillation and I decided to quit competing. So I have stories related to being maximally alive over a long period of time. My plan here is to revisit some old stories and perhaps learn something new. It’s another installment of what I call an earth-indigenous elder story, the attempt to recount one’s “hero’s journey” from the beginning of time.

A Girl’s Superhuman Strength

Before I was an oarsman, I was a high school football player and student body president and so found myself on the school stage assisting a hypnotist during a performance. As his grand finale, he convinced a slender freshman that she was as strong as steel, and then a classmate and I lifted her up and placed her feet on one stool and her head on another. She didn’t bend. Then the hypnotist stepped up onto her midsection, and still she didn’t bend.

I was so amazed by her strength that, after the show, I put myself in the same position between the stools and asked a friend to stand on my belly—and I collapsed. When I made the Olympic team, I tried the experiment again—and still I collapsed. I don’t doubt that if I had really needed to become that stiff—if my child’s life depended on it, for example—I could have done it. But the simple fact is that a trained Olympian tried and failed to do what a slender girl did without trying—without even knowing or remembering what she did. Had the hypnotist stood on her much longer, she would have been badly broken.

That almost superhuman burst of strength seems part of the myriad survival systems that we typically can’t access through normal consciousness. I now believe such evolved survival systems are not necessarily about our own survival. We are, after all, expressions of a chain of DNA that has remained unbroken through countless forms of life over billions of years. Ultimately, it seems, my life is not about me, but the unfolding of a larger story.

The Half-Hour Olympian

More questions about extreme performance and not breaking came front and center as I trained for the 1984 Olympic trials. My problem was that I loved my job as fitness editor of American Health magazine, a more than nine-to-five commitment, but I also wanted to compete at the Olympics in Los Angeles. My hypothesis was that typical athletic training regimens are like advertising budgets: At least half the effort is wasted. But which half?

My quest became to discover the absolute minimum training time to become an Olympian, and then my friend Ned Frederick, Ph.D., head of research at Nike, came up with an answer: just 30 to 40 minutes of interval training—every other day!

There was a catch. Each brief workout went to a pace and a place beyond where the body was meant to go—consciously holding for minutes where the slender girl went for seconds—or the shame of not getting there. And it worked. Almost. My rowing partner and I got back to Olympic level fitness remarkably fast, and we won the semifinals of the trials (but not, alas, the finals). Looking back, however, I don’t recommend the regimen. It was horrible. But the real secret to the success of the program was in the rest—to not do any more work than those few minutes every other day. That rest was both to ensure the integrity of the work and to ensure our connective tissues stayed connected. When I failed to push to real failure in a workout, the time off felt worse because the effort seemed for nothing.

Looking back at those lessons, probably the most useful thing I learned—what kept me essentially uninjured until the A-Fib—is the importance of recovery. In the years that my workouts included running, for example, I hardly ever ran two days in a row, even while training for a marathon. Why? Because I weigh more than 220 pounds and need 48 hours for my joints to recover. At 65, I still dance vigorously twice a week and my joints are fine.

Reelin’ in the Years

A similar lesson is that if something starts to hurt, stop. Unless you have a seriously good reason, don’t allow your body’s survival systems—in this case our endogenous painkillers, endorphins—to mask the pain and enable you to damage yourself. So stop! Figure it out. Pain caught early can be fixed by stretching or poking into sore places or taking a brief rest; otherwise, humans would never have survived.

When you need more serious realignment—years before a joint replacement—find a healer who is slow and gentle and not building a repeat business around you. Meanwhile, figure out why you are out of alignment. My right hip taught me I needed a new truck with more legroom. Cheap desk chairs are really expensive. So are bad shoes. Ironically, the most dangerous activity for me is yoga. I try too hard and hurt myself. I then row to fix it.

One of the first writers I ever edited at American Health was a man named John Jerome who was becoming a competitive swimmer. He wrote that becoming an elder athlete is like being a fish on a line. By training hard, he could pull out the line from the reel and regain real freedom. But if he stopped training or if he overdid it and had to recover, the line would be reeled back in. He could pull the line out again—but he never got quite as much line.

I think that’s right. The decades-long reeling-in is gradual but inexorable. Meanwhile, the wonderful thing about competing in your age group is that races can feel as good as ever. My one remaining race is in an eight-oared shell with old Olympians at the Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston, where I feel 21 again. That’s how aging should be: objectively slower but not subjectively worse. I also vividly remember racing then-current Olympians in 2008, when I was 49. Within 20 strokes, any illusions about actually restoring youth and immortality vanished.

Another jarring awakening was at a press event at a wellness center in China, where I was tested on a new Chinese Medicine scanner—and then whisked off to a cardiology lab. I felt fine, but that’s when I learned of my A-Fib, an irregular heartbeat that turns out to be common among lifelong competitive rowers. My arrhythmia could have been fixed at least temporarily with shock therapy or surgery. But I feared the interventions as much as the arrhythmia, and I also felt my body was telling me something. A door was closing. Pushing so hard for so long got me to A-Fib, so I should stop. I felt sadness but also relief.

Then a local cardiologist convinced me to take beta-blockers to slow my heart, and I found that I had to pause to gather myself before walking up stairs. I gained weight and began to reflect on what a great life I have had—and being okay with it ending. Three months later, I was told to stop the beta-blocker before an echocardiogram—and I woke up born again! I threw the beta-blockers away and went to the Sports Cardiology Center at Oregon Health Sciences University, where Bradley Petek, M.D., explained to me that aging athletes don’t easily tolerate the sense of heaviness or weariness beta-blockers cause. Apparently, many aging Americans are fine with these medications because they are used to feeling heavy and weary as a result of a sedentary lifestyle and the standard American diet (appropriately abbreviated SAD) of processed and fast foods, too much sugar, and high levels of sodium. Petek got me training again, A-Fib and all. He said I needed to add weights.

Now I think of my mentor, T George Harris, the World War II artillery scout who launched Psychology Today, American Health, and this magazine. A quintessential journalist, Harris was still smoking and drinking at age 57, when he hired me to help start American Health. Then he had a scare and gave up cigarettes and bourbon and put a stationary bike in front of his television. Each morning for the next 30 years, he pedaled for 30 to 40 minutes with only brief time-outs for heart attacks, strokes, and cancer. I came to believe he could pedal through anything. One of my few regrets is that I could never convince him to row.

This article appeared in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of Spirituality & Health: A Unity Publication®. Subscribe now.