Year of the Dunk (5 page)

Aug. 25, Eve of the Year of the Dunk:
No. of tortilla chips consumed at Polvo's, at roughly one every six seconds for nine and a half minutes: 95. Enchiladas de la casa, plump with gooey white queso: Tres. Plus rice and refried beans. Followed up with a root beer float at Amy's Ice Cream. Weight: 203 lbs. Hasta luego, dessert. 365 days to go
.

T
wo days into my grand test of human capability, on a muggy midweek evening in late August, it seemed obvious to me that my capabilities wouldn't budge. I felt like someone had unfairly reorganized my musculature. As if my biceps, my shoulders, my hamstrings had been jumbled up and then clumsily knotted back together. Muscles that I hadn't known existed ached in rebuke. I wasn't all that surprised. Those first couple of days I did four hours of weightlifting and squatting. The dumbbells might have been about the size my septuagenarian parents used, but they definitely qualified as weights. So unused was I to pumping iron, the very bones of my hands throbbed after the first set of repetitions.

Carving out the time was not easy. I had to slip away from work.
Get up early. Go in on a Saturday. Getting myself into dunking form wasn't shaping up as much fun. It was certainly a narcissistic exercise. I caught myself, half-naked, staring into mirrors, squeezing my sides to figure out if they had tightened up any. I examined my belly for any nascent signs of a six-pack. I turned profile to see if I was looking any slimmer.

I did my daily work at a gym set up within the newspaper where I worked. It was called the Press Room. The brass had installed it a couple of years earlier as part of a wider effort to make employees feel better about themselves. Me, it made feel weak and pathetic. But I had to give the publisher credit—it was an impressive gym, with lots of shiny equipment of the kind that I had studiously avoided the previous 33 years of my life. It also offered a small program of classes that I was determined to attend to increase my flexibility: yoga, Zumba, cardio club.

That first week I made sure to stop by yoga. Six women with their mats, led by Kandice. I stepped into their dimly lit room a couple of minutes late, just as Kandice was leading them in Horserider's Pose, a kind of lunge. I grabbed a mat and tried not to distract as I stomped about as lightly as I could manage.

Kandice's head spun around: “Your sneakers,” she hissed.

“What about them?” I whispered.

“This is yoga,” she scolded. “We don't wear sneakers.”

Well, then. I took my sneaks off as quietly as I could and struggled through simple postures like Downward Dog. A small redheaded woman was positively canine in her execution. I comforted myself with the following thought: No way can she dunk.

“Feel your internal organs,” Kandice told the group.

The only organ I like to feel is my external one. Otherwise, I prefer to think of my innards as a single blob, if I think of them at all.

“Move into Child's Pose,” she announced. In this exercise, you kneel on the ground, drop your butt toward your heels, and stretch
your head and hands forward. Except my butt didn't really drop. It just stayed up like a camel's hump. Kandice stepped off her pad to push my butt toward the ground. It didn't want to go. She shoved hard, and under her touch it stiffly moved toward my heels. She moved away, and, like a balloon just let go by a child, my bum began steadily rising skyward on its own.

I would need help cutting fat, too. I was still hovering over 200 pounds. Not bad for a guy my height, but not good if you want to dunk a basketball. Like domesticated animals, we have grown fattened and slow, far removed from our ancestral, lean hunting selves. Steve Austad, an expert in the biology of aging, tells me there's a marked difference between the athleticism of wild mice and lab mice. “Lab mice are lucky if they can jump two inches,” he says. “Wild mice can jump out of a garbage can. There's something in that domestication that leads to the loss of explosive abilities.”

I want to be able to jump out of the garbage can.

To cut weight, I turned to my friend Phil, whom Rebecca affectionately calls the Incredible Shrinking Man. We went to high school together, where Phil, in his good-natured way, struck a character both jovial and cutting. He was witty and quick and, famously in our circle of bleeding-heart liberals, an unabashed Reaganite. The man actually had a framed photo of the Gipper in his Westchester bedroom. He was unathletic and a little overweight, but he was a nasty Ping-Pong player. He played like a stick figure, getting the lines of his body just right, if a little rigid, to put away most shots. His parents kept a table in the basement of their home, and I blamed my never-ending losing streak on this fact. (I similarly put my mediocre
basketball skills down to my not having a hoop in my driveway. Not that we had a driveway, for that matter.) Once I almost beat him. I had a lead late, and was about to serve, when Phil told me that a girl I'd obsessed about for years was interested in me. My game was shattered. Phil would become a white-collar criminal defense lawyer, using his fine theatrical instincts and formidable will-to-win to represent insider traders, wayward military contractors, and big-ticket fraudsters. If you read about them in the newspaper and shook your head about the nogoodniks of this world, he or his firm may well have represented them. (
Alleged
nogoodniks, Phil would winkingly say.)

He also carried around with him that extra weight. He didn't mind it, as far as I knew, and, of course, no one else did, either. But a few years ago, a few of his officemates decided to put together a betting pool on who could lose the most weight, as a percentage of total body weight, in six months. The competition of it aroused Phil. He would, he quickly decided, obliterate them. “Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife,” Emerson wrote in
Self-Reliance
. A shrill piercing noise evidently rang in Phil's ears those six months: He shed sixty pounds—more, really, than he had to lose—with a diet of granola and nonfat yogurt in the mornings; a salad with light oil and balsamic vinegar, tossed with avocados, for lunch; and a dinner of lean chicken sausage with grilled peppers and onions—no oil added, of course. “It was really boring,” he says. “But I wanted to win.”

His advice to me was straightforward: Cut the carbs, and work out an hour each day
—like it's your job
. For me, working out had always been sport; sweating was something I happened to do while playing with a soccer ball, a Frisbee, or a basketball. I would have to endure smaller, healthier portions and a steady diet of zero-fat yogurt and nonfat milk—the devil's water, I call it. Now, it was becoming
clear to me, what had begun with the feel of a lark was growing occupational.

And so it was, that fall, on the lookout for a spot outfitted with some of the equipment lacking in the Press Room, that I found myself stepping for the first time inside a commercial gym, one wedged, like so many things in Austin, into a strip mall, between a Taco Bell and an X-ray clinic. It was a miserable place. Humans, in all their wonderful messiness—rolls of fat, knock-knees, wonky postures—were groaning to transform themselves into efficient robots. Here was a bank of treadmillers, running like a row of pistons,
ker-plunk
,
ker-plunk, ker-plunk
. There, a man was seated on a black, sweaty, faux-leather stool, swiveling unhappily away on an abs machine. Heavy bass throbbed from overhead. Most people were expressionless, drained of their humanity. Maybe they were thinking about the memo they had to write their boss or the groceries they needed to buy on the way home. Or maybe nothing.

The chief giveaway that these were humans: their stupid T-shirts. “And your point is…” was written across the front of one. A pale-faced 50-year-old who looked like Lieutenant Data from the
Star Trek
TV show wore a shirt that said “What part of ‘shall not be infringed' don't you understand?” One youngish, pimply-looking guy doing triceps dips—as if that wasn't enough, he had tied a chain to his waist from which hung a 25-pound weight—wore a cut-off tee that said, “Nice story, babe. Now go fix me a sandwich.”

I tried not to stare. The beefcakes were just so damn beefy. Stone-faced men with stony bodies and bouldered shoulders. Women, too,
with enviable flexibility. There was a martial artist who finished her workouts with roundhouse kicks and weird, low-to-the-ground cartwheel, helicopter-like flips. I got a little light-headed just watching.

Going to the gym is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the introduction to his 1889
Book of College Sports
, famed football coach Walter Camp derided the zeal of “
the new Professor Dumbbell, who drags you willy-nilly through a complex system of chest measurement and pull-prescriptions.” Three-quarters of a century later, suspicion of the weight room persisted. I once heard Bill Bradley say of his basketball career: “There's one thing we were told never to do: ‘Never lift weights. It'll mess with your shot.' ” He then deadpanned: “I was thinking maybe
I could have had more wins if I had lifted weights.” Of course, the notion of self-improvement through weightlifting and gym work eventually won out. It's big business nowadays. Aging baby boomers and the growing number of companies that encourage employees to work out means gyms are now more common than McDonald's.

Terry Todd, a stiff-necked, thick-muscled 70-something former Austin weightlifting champion who had kindly been giving me advice on my training, claimed that an “ideal workout” awaited me each time I set foot in the gym. The trick would be to find that workout, he said. Maybe, I thought, it's like going to a video store. Somewhere in that mess of DVDs there's one that suits your mood perfectly, from which you will derive the most satisfaction. But if you have nothing in mind beforehand, you might find yourself wandering around aimlessly.

I was determined not to become one of the beefcakes striding around the gym. Impressive, yes, but too much. I had a purpose, I told myself—and getting all out of proportion was not part of the plan. Besides, it's difficult to add muscle when you're my size. I mean, that's a lot of territory you're trying to cover. That's what I
told myself, at least. And did I really want to add much upper body power? Big forearms are not going to help me get off the ground.

My gym routine opened with a fast jog to loosen up. I ran a 7:30 mile on a slight uphill on the treadmill. Then I stretched, steadily dripping sweat onto my mat. I guiltily wiped it up, then did a set of plyometrics: a series of high-knees, skipping, and jumping. I would do 600 jumps—from a standing position, small, bouncy jumps from my ankles, the sort tennis players sometimes perform before they crouch down to receive a serve; then rapid jumps with only slightly bent knees, in which I tried to get as high as possible; box jumps, in which I jumped two-footed onto and back down from a platform, quickly, quickly, quickly, to develop my explosive ability; and, worst of all, because they really burned up my legs, power jumps from a quarter-squat position, springing into the air and landing back in the quarter-squat. In addition to workouts prescribed by Polly and Jamie, I followed a regimen I bought online called Air Alert that promised its followers a higher vertical. It seemed geared toward bullied teenagers: “
Never allow others to interfere with what you strongly believe,” read a Zen-inflected booklet that included the regimen, trademarked as Habitual Jump Training. (“Jumping literally becomes effortless like that of a kangaroo.”) “Do not allow others to tease or mock your goals or training. Do not allow them to discourage you. Attending to the negative things people may say will convince you to believe that what they are saying is true.” The whole thing had a
Karate Kid
kind of feel.

And then the lifting. I did heavy lifting with my legs on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, giving my muscles time to recover between workouts. (“Let your muscles rest, like fields left fallow,” advised Josh, the older of my two brothers and a former marathoner.) I worked my way up the squats, as Tyler, my guru from Central Park, had directed: Each time I showed up at the gym I
completed five sets of repetitions at a weight five pounds heavier than I had completed two days earlier. I did single-leg presses, in which, supine, and with much grunting, I pushed a weighted platform away from my chest. I performed so many Bulgarian split squats and Romanian deadlifts that I began imagining that the people of those nations, even the babushka grannies, sported massive thighs and tended the fields in tight-fitting singlets. I did hip exercises, the kind that Polly and Jamie suggested, that had me shuffling from side to side with a giant rubber band tied around my ankles; I did glute bridges, in which I clenched and unclenched my butt cheeks, as if I were dry-humping an invisible creature; I did embarrassing things on an exercise ball, desperately trying to keep my balance as I writhed on top of it, or looking like a hairy, obscene, rhythmic gymnast as, back on the ground, I tried to trade the ball between my feet and my hands. In New York, Jamie had told me that we would “reawaken my glutes.” I wasn't sure that was fair to them. All these years, they had slumbered nicely, cuddled up to one another like burger buns. Even asleep they had seemed to do a fine job. Who was I to rouse them? The glutes, along with my quadriceps, abductors, sartorius, semimembranosus, psoas, soleus, and gastrocnemius—among other muscle groups, each more scary-sounding than the last—would be “recruited” for the jump, explained Jamie, as if my body were a Times Square Army office.

Now I seemed to be spinning back the biological clock, growing stronger, slimmer, fitter. Everywhere, I sweated. It was nicely air-conditioned in the gym, but I was like a square foot of rain forest, bearing with me my own zone of tropical precipitation. Undertaking my leaping exercises—up-and-down, up-and-down—I felt like a malfunctioning suburban sprinkler, the sort that pops up irrepressibly and shoots willy-nilly. I was hardly embarrassed; to me the sweat manifested effort, and I couldn't help but feel some satisfaction each time I swept a towel across my ruddy face.