summarize this "Eventually, my patients get it. Together, we come up with a list of ten or
fifteen events in their personal Centenarian Decathlon, representing their
goals for their later decades. This then determines how they should be
training.
The beauty of the Centenarian Decathlon is that it is broad yet unique to
each individual. Nor is it limited to ten events; for most people it ends up
being more, depending on their goals. My version of the Decathlon is tailored
to my own particular interests, such as swimming and archery. It’s also fairly
aggressive, I admit, reflecting the importance of a high level of fitness in my
life. So I would probably add in some of the following events:
11. Swim half a mile in twenty minutes.
12. Walk with a thirty-pound dumbbell in each hand for one minute.
13. Draw back and fire a fifty-pound compound bow.
14. Do five pull-ups.
15. Climb ninety steps in two minutes (VO2
 max = 32).
16. Dead-hang for one minute.
17. Drive a race car within 5 to 8 percent of the pace I can do so today.
18. Hike with a twenty-pound backpack for an hour.
19. Carry my own luggage.
20. Walk up a steep hill.
In the end, most people’s Centenarian Decathlons will probably overlap to
a degree. Someone who enjoys stand-up paddleboarding, for example, would
perhaps choose “events” focused around building core and cross-body
strength. But she will likely be training the same muscle groups as I am doing
for archery, and maintaining a similar degree of stamina and balance.
The Centenarian Decathlon is ambitious, no question. A ninety-year-old
who is even able to board a plane under her own power, let alone hoist a
carry-on bag, is doing extremely well. But there is a method to the madness.
These individual tasks are not out of reach. There are octogenarians,
nonagenarians, and even centenarians right now who are running marathons,
racing bicycles, lifting weights, flying airplanes, jumping out of airplanes,
skiing the Rocky Mountains, competing in actual decathlons, and doing all
sorts of other amazing things. So all these events are within the realm of
possibility.
One purpose of the Centenarian Decathlon, in fact, is to help us redefine
what is possible in our later years and wipe away the default assumption that
most people will be weak and incapable at that point in their lives. We need
to abolish that decrepit stereotype and create a new narrative—perhaps
modeled after the old-school fitness guru Jack LaLanne, who kept doing his
usual rigorous daily workout right up until his death at age ninety-six. Unlike
most very long-lived individuals, he didn’t just get there by accident or luck.
He built and maintained a high level of fitness throughout his life, beginning
in the 1930s, when very few people exercised regularly and “fitness centers”
did not yet exist. As he got older, he set out very deliberately to defy the
stereotype of aging as a period of misery and decline. He did the work, and
he succeeded, giving us a glimpse of what an older person is truly capable of
achieving.
If we are to follow in LaLanne’s footsteps, we must stop pointlessly
“exercising,” just because we think we are supposed to, banging away on the
elliptical trainer at lunch hour. I promise, you can do better. I suggest you join
me and start training, with a very specific purpose, which is to be kick-ass
one-hundred-year-olds. When my patients say they are more interested in
being kick-ass fifty-year-olds than Centenarian Decathletes, I reply that there
is no better way to make that happen than to set a trajectory toward being
vibrant at one hundred (or ninety, or eighty) just as an archer who trains at
100 yards will be more accurate at 50. By fixing our aim on the Centenarian
Decathlon, we can make every decade between now and then better as well.
With the Centenarian Decathlon as my goal, I now work out with the
focus that I once directed exclusively toward cycling, swimming, or boxing.
It’s not about being great at any one pursuit, but about being pretty good at
just about everything. As Centenarian Decathletes, we are no longer training
for a specific event, but to become a different sort of athlete altogether: an
athlete of life."