Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

which is sort of the fitness equivalent of doing the haftorah at your bar mitzvah. It’d make a man of me.

When I looked online, I found hundreds of triathlons of varying lengths. Since their origins in 1902 in France, “tris,” as those in the know call them, have grown into a $500-million-per-year industry worldwide. (Incidentally, that first triathlon featured canoeing instead of swimming, which sounds much drier and more pleasant.)

Yes, there’s the famed Ironman triathlon—2.4 mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, twenty-six-mile run. But then there are also ones barely more strenuous than a jog around the block.

Julie’s right. I can do one. But which one? I was drawn to the triathlon that was conducted entirely indoors—treadmill, stationary bike, and lap pool. That seemed comfortable. But sadly, as we know, indoor exercise isn’t as healthy as outdoor exercise. I’d have to expose myself to the elements.

I found a race on Staten Island on June 5, just a couple of months away. It was eminently conquerable—twelve-mile bike ride, three-mile run, and quarter-mile swim in open water. It’s an oxymoronic challenge: a moderate extreme sport. My medical advisers were always yapping on about “everything in moderation.” So here it was, the healthiest triathlon possible.

The next day, I announced to Julie, my friends, and my sons: “I’m doing a triathlon.”

I call Julie’s friend Anna, a remarkable athlete and veteran of several triathlons. I tell her I’m joining her ranks and ask her for advice.

“I did a triathlon in early June,” she says. “The water is freezing. It’s horrible. I cried.”

That doesn’t sound moderate.

Fast and Furious

I’ve been reading Aesop’s fables to the boys. And I’ve developed a soft spot for the much maligned hare in the story of the tortoise and the hare.

(I’m also, by the way, a fan of the fox who rationalized that the out-of-reach grapes were sour. That was some good reframing, Fox.)

But back to the hare. The long-eared fellow might have been onto something—and not just because naps are healthy.

The hare’s method has advantages, especially when training for a triathlon. The hare was essentially doing what’s now known as High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). Instead of jogging at 60 percent of your ability for forty-five minutes, you go at 100 percent for a mere thirty seconds. Then you stop and rest for a minute. Then sprint again. Then repeat eight times. Total time: twelve minutes. Or less, if you scale back on the rest periods.

It’s an astounding time-saver. And growing evidence shows it might be just as effective as long, moderate exercise. Not just for elite athletes, but for everyone, including the obese.

The catch is, it hurts. “There’s no free lunch,” Martin Gibala of McMaster University, one of the HIIT experts, told me. It’s akin to the Band-Aid Removal Preference Dilemma: Would you rather rip it off quickly (intense pain, but over in a flash)? Or pull it off slowly (wee bit of pain, but drags on much longer).

HIIT is the aerobic cousin of the slow-cadence weights workout I did with Adam Zickerman. But it has more studies to back up its big claims.

To take one of the most famous: In a 1996 study by Izumi Tabata, a researcher at Japan’s National Institute of Fitness and Sports, athletes spent twenty seconds huffing as hard as possible on a specially designed stationary bike, followed by a ten-second rest. They did this for a total of four minutes, four times a week. At month’s end, they showed amazing gains in their metabolism—more than those athletes who pedaled at a moderate pace for forty-five minutes per session (what’s known as steady-state exercise, with a whiff of condescension).

The benefits are many: raised endurance, lower blood sugar, improved lung capacity, and weight loss. HIIT seems to alter the metabolism and muscle structure, so you burn more calories throughout the day. The idea of HIIT has been around for decades, but in the last couple of years it has inched closer to the mainstream. (Tim Ferriss writes about it in The 4-Hour Body.)

Tony gave me a HIIT session today. We used a stationary bicycle, since running full-speed can be hard on the joints.

We cranked up the bike all the way.

“Now go as fast as you can!”

Tony once told me that in some L.A. gyms, people keep their faces deadpan like Buster Keaton. They don’t want to cause wrinkles.

But today, I needed to grimace. And grunt. And shut my eyes and rock my head back and forth like Stevie Wonder.

I’m doing HIIT only once a week. First, because there need to be more long-term studies—such as whether it prevents heart disease as effectively as normal exercise. And second, because it makes me nauseated.

Checkup: Month 18

     Weight: 159

     Push-ups till exhaustion: 100 (though admittedly with a few breaks)

     Percentage of fruits and vegetables organic: 60

     Days I activated Freedom software (prevents Internet access, thus lowering stress and improving concentration): 19

     Days I rebooted my computer in order to short-circuit Freedom software: 15

My big accomplishment this month is that I set up an interview with Jack LaLanne. He’s ninety-six and still going. He’s not tugging seventy boats behind him as he swims across Long Beach Harbor, as he did on his seventieth birthday. But he’s still going.

The date has taken a while to nail down. He’s a busy man. When I first approached him, I got this e-mail from his assistant. “Jack has been in New Jersey all week, shooting a new juicer infomercial. We will get back to you next week. Healthfully, Claire.” As far as excuses go, a juicer commercial is in the top five I’ve ever received.

But now it’s all come together, and I’ve bought a plane ticket to see him at his home in Morro Bay, California. His house has two gyms and a swimming pool that he still uses every day.

I love researching LaLanne. I knew he was early on the fitness train, but I didn’t know what a rebel he was. “People thought I was a charlatan and a nut,” he said. “The doctors were against me.