Drop Dead Healthy

The Back

The Quest to Stand Up Straight

MY LOWER BACK HURTS. Which doesn’t make me particularly noteworthy. I’m one of 65 million Americans with back pain, about twice the population of Canada. Back pain is the single most common reason people visit the doctor.

My backache is mild. It usually kicks in at the end of the day. But as I age it’ll get worse, especially with my posture.

What a disaster, my posture. I amble around looking like Hominid Number Three in those evolution charts. Partly, it’s out of laziness. But partly, it feels odd to me to thrust out my chest, almost presumptuous. During my biblical year, I learned that the Talmud suggests that we not walk in a jaunty, upright manner. Be humble in your posture, it says. Stooped shoulders were a sign of respect. So when my posture is criticized, I explain that I’m honoring my forefathers.

Unfortunately, bad posture exacerbates back pain. It puts pressure on the discs, and can also cause neck problems and knee problems. I need a spinal makeover.

When I comb the Internet for posture experts, I find a guy named Jonathan FitzGordon who was profiled in the health section of The New York Times. His website says he teaches yoga, but he’s most famous for his walking lessons.

FitzGordon came to my apartment the next week. I’m not sure what I expected an official Walking Instructor to look like—perhaps Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days, a fastidious Brit with a crisp bowler who said “Spit-spot!” John was not that. He’s a burly, sweatshirt-clad forty-eight-year-old who grew up in Brooklyn. He retains a bit of an accent.

“Do you have any experience with walking?” FitzGordon asked.

Um, yes? A little? I didn’t want to come off as too cocky, but the truth is, I’ve been walking for quite some time—decades even.

FitzGordon slipped off his shoes and observed me as I stood, then as I walked across my living room. If it’s possible to cluck your tongue with your eyes, that’s what FitzGordon did.

His verdict: I’m a sloucher. My pelvis juts too far forward, my shoulders lean too far back.

I shouldn’t feel too bad. I’m just a typical American. Thanks to our sedentary lifestyle, Americans don’t know how to walk and stand correctly.

FitzGordon fishes a photocopied cartoon out of his bag. It’s Robert Crumb’s famous “Keep on Truckin’” illustration, the one with the blue-suited man leaning so far back while walking, it looks like he’s lying on an invisible La-Z-Boy. He embodies America’s problem. We lean too far back.

“Walking should be falling forward,” says FitzGordon. That’s the way we were built. “Go to the playground, kids walk leaning forward. They turn their motor on.” FitzGordon walks across my living room with his body angled forward, like Wile E. Coyote about to break into a sprint.

The key is to stick your butt out, says FitzGordon. Kim Kardashian has the right idea.

“See how Julie is standing with her pelvis tucked under?” FitzGordon says.

Julie has taken a break from work to join us in the living room. I’m not sure she expected a critique of her pelvis.

“Release it, Julie. Stick your butt out.”

She tries.

“More. More. Nice.”

Julie, her rear protruding, is giggling. She says she feels like Mrs. DeLauria, her sixth-grade teacher, who was famous for her steatopygic figure.

But FitzGordon is pleased. “Moms tell their daughters, ‘Tuck under.’ Women feel like, ‘I’m walking in the street, I’d better hide my stuff.’ I say, you better strut your stuff.”

I try to strut. I walk past the couch with my butt extended, my body leaning forward, my arms dangling. “I feel kind of like a monkey,” I say.

FitzGordon lights up. “That’s exactly what I’m looking to hear. Go ape, young man! That’s one of my main phrases.” Gorillas have flat lower backs, so they can’t lean backward.

I look at Julie and give a faux-humble shrug, as if to say, “Who knew I’d be the teacher’s pet!” Julie gives me a faux smile.

I ask John what he thinks of traditional posture advice. It’s a mixed bag, he says.

Balancing the book on your head is a good idea. “You want to lengthen the back of the neck,” he says. On the other hand, “There’s no worse instruction in the world than to have your shoulders back.” When your shoulders are back, your breath gets shallow. You want to breathe from the stomach.

After he left, Julie and I spent the next few days trying to walk in the FitzGordon way.

We agree we like the standing-up-straight part. “Posture!” we’d say to each other as we passed in the kitchen. With my back straight, I felt more decisive, more confident, like I’m an admiral of a midsize navy. There may be a reason for the phrase “get some backbone.”

I ordered the kids around with decisiveness. “Please do not touch my computer,” I’d intone. And they’d back away, practically saying “yessir, yessir.” Would that have happened if I were slouching? Perhaps not.

I also loved FitzGordon’s suggestion of walking with shorter steps. It made me feel more efficient. It made me speed up, mentally and physically. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my experiments: The body affects the mind. The quicker the step, the quicker the mind.

But as for the butt protrusion, it still feels odd, no matter how many times Julie and I do it. We stick out our bums, but within a few minutes, our bums have edged forward.

To make sure Julie and I were on the right track, I called up a more traditional back expert, Dr. Jeffrey Katz, Harvard professor and author of Heal Your Aching Back. His posture advice? It wasn’t as detailed as FitzGordon’s. Basically, don’t overthink it. “There really isn’t a lot of evidence-based medicine about posture.” AstraZeneca isn’t funding a lot of posture studies. The best we know is just to stand up straight and lengthen the back. So for now, at least, I feel better about ignoring the protruding butt recommendation.

In his book, Katz gives suggestions on relieving back pain, which I’ve road tested as well.

• Neck exercises. You should press your palm against your forehead for ten seconds. It’s sort of an extended “oy gevalt,” which is appropriate, because that’s the way I felt when I found out I’d have to be doing another set of exercises (hands, legs, neck—I’m over an hour a day).

• When sitting at the desk, keep your butt as far back in the chair as possible. A good reminder for both Julie and me, who sit like flour sacks.

• When lifting an object from the ground, bend the knees and keep the back straight, then push with the legs. This technique I knew about. But had I done it? Not really. It’s a revelation, an immediate relief from pain. I now avoid rounding my back in any situation. If I have to talk to Lucas about an important Yo Gabba Gabba! plot point, I squat down next to him, then I bounce back up. It cuts the usual I’m-an-old-achy-man feeling in half.

Squatting Revisited

I’ve become quite the squatting enthusiast, it seems. Which would make FitzGordon happy. He, and a surprising number of other people, believe we should all be squatting at bus stops and while eating dinner, as did many Asians of previous generations. There aren’t many studies on it, but I’ll bet it’s better than sitting. Almost anything is better than sitting.

The first time I tried squatting for a few minutes, I was in pain. I told Julie it felt like my legs had menstrual cramps. She found the description odd.

Turns out, I was doing it wrong. To do the proper “Asian squat,” you have to keep your feet flat, your legs spread wide, and your arms forward for balance.

I tried it at a bus stop after taking Jasper to school.

“There’s room,” said a man in a Yankees jacket, sliding down the bench to make more space.

“No thanks. I prefer squatting.”

He nodded stoically.

After a month of walking tall and squatting low, my back does feel better. The pain has receded to the occasional twinge. I still sometimes walk like a monkey, but mostly to scare the kids.

Checkup: Month 24

Weight: 159

Dogs petted: 12

Minutes singing per day (possible stress reliever): 10

Days practiced didgeridoo: 2

Frog calls memorized to keep brain sharp: 9

This month was the triathlon. Here’s how it happened: My alarm chirps at 3:30 a.m. on a Sunday. My stomach feels leaden, since I’d carbo-loaded the night before. According to my research, prerace carbo-loading has iffy scientific support. I didn’t care. I’ve been fantasizing for weeks about devouring a huge plate of fettuccine Alfredo, and I wasn’t about to let snooty science get in my way.

I take a subway downtown to the ferry terminal. Tony is waiting for me, and we wheel our bikes up a ramp and onto the 5:30 a.m. boat to Staten Island. There are two types of passengers on that boat. It isn’t overly difficult to tell them apart. There are those with lightweight bikes, aerodynamic helmets, and water bottles. And there are those with leopard-skin skirts and primary-color hair and thick mascara, teens returning from a hard night of partying in Manhattan.

“I’ve just got one question,” Tony says as we sit down in the ferry’s main cabin.

“What is it?”

“Why?” says Tony. “Why do people do this to themselves?”

“You mean . . .”

“Why do they punish themselves by doing triathlons?”

I’m not sure what to say.

Tony and I are seated across from a thirtysomething man leaning on his Cannondale bike. He has a thin red beard and thick quads.

“That’s quite a bag,” he says, nodding at my duffel.

“Thanks,” I say.

I believe I’m getting my first triathlon trash talking. Admittedly, the duffel—which was the only one I could find in our apartment—wouldn’t have been my first choice. It is camouflage, but for reasons unclear to me, the camouflage isn’t the traditional green. It is made up of bright pink and red splotches. Which I suppose would be helpful if you’re doing a commando raid on a nine-year-old girl’s bedroom but isn’t so helpful when you’re trying to look like a triathlete.

“It’s big, too,” says the bearded guy. “You got another body in there in case yours gets tired out?”

Tony turns to me. “I’m not sure I like this guy’s attitude.”

Tony, the former parole officer, could lay this bozo flat with one pop to the mouth. But I tell Tony we have to save our energy for the race.

After disembarking, we know we’ve arrived at the right place. Speakers blare Bruce Springsteen’s anthem to exercise, “Born to Run.” The field is covered with hundreds of bikes propped up on long steel racks. Helmets, towels, packets of blackberry energy gel are scattered everywhere. I hook my bike onto the bar next to a twentyish blond woman zipping up her wet suit.

“Have you done this triathlon before?” I ask.

She nods.

“How’s the water temperature?”

“Oh, you’ll panic. You’ll hyperventilate.”

A few minutes later, on the line to the bathroom, I ask another veteran racer, a man with orange goggles perched on his head. “Oh, you’ll panic. You’ll hyperventilate.”

We line up on the beach nearby, and at the whistle we wade into the dark Raritan Bay.

The icy water slides down the back of my wet suit and up my sleeve. It’s unpleasant, like swimming in a Slushie. But . . . here’s the strange thing. I don’t panic and I don’t hyperventilate. It’s not that I’m particularly manly, despite my now-average testosterone. It’s just that I had built up the ice swim so much in my mind, the sixty-degree reality seemed manageable.

Maybe my calming techniques help: I do my stomach breathing. I lie on my back. I curse, since I know that this scientifically cuts down on the pain. I try some Buddhist distancing: “Now, this is an interesting sensation on my skin!”

I splash along in the choppy water, popping my head up every thirty seconds to get oriented. Eleven minutes later, I curve around a spherical orange buoy and head to the beach. All that angst for eleven minutes.

I run dripping to my little plot of land to strip off my wet suit. Here’s one thing I didn’t realize: how much of a triathlon involves wardrobe changes. It’s like a strenuous version of a Broadway musical. After I peel off the wet suit, I towel dry, put on bike shorts, socks, shoes, and suntan lotion. It is a ten-minute production.

“Phase two,” Tony says as we mount our bikes.

We pedal along a car-less road. It’s been shut down for the race. We pass drugstores, a couple of dentist’s offices, a field with a half-dozen turkeys. We zip through delightfully meaningless red traffic lights. We ride in silence.

Though the silence is broken by frequent calls of “On your left!” Which means some man or woman hunched with their chin on the handlebars whooshes by.

Thirty-three minutes and two sugary blackberry energy packs later, we dump our bikes and start jogging on a boardwalk by the beach.

“I’m not in any hurry,” Tony says. “So don’t feel the need to sprint on my account.”

“I don’t have plans either,” I say.

We plod along without a word. I’ve got a rhythm going—one inhalation for every four steps, one exhalation for every four steps. I’m tired, but not exhausted. I think I may make it. I trained enough—overtrained, in fact. As I say, fear of public humiliation is a great motivator.

I watch the water lapping against the piers. I listen to the cheering bystanders. “Almost there!” says a bald guy who already finished the race and has joined the crowd. I don’t even mind his mild condescension. I’m kind of liking this. I’m finally feeling what Chris McDougall calls the joy of running. I finally have the answer to Tony’s prerace question: “Why?”

We cross the finish line and give each other a bro hug. We walk down a wooden ramp back to our bikes. Tony turns to me: “We did it.”

And I say two sentences that, even as I was saying them, sound strange issuing from my mouth: “It was kind of fun, no? I’d do it again.”

On the ferry back, Tony and I try to figure out whether the triathlon was, on balance, healthy or unhealthy. There were many unhealthy things about it. First of all, there was the postrace pancake breakfast, at which everyone (including me) shoved his or her face full of simple carbs. There was also the lack of sleep, the noise, the three mouthfuls of microbe-filled Staten Island beach water that I swallowed during the swim, and the unknown toxins from the Magic Marker with which our number was scrawled onto our hands and legs.

On the other hand, it had its healthy parts. It spurred me to exercise every day. And as for the pancakes, at least one of my fellow triathletes offered me sugar-free syrup, which is marginally better than Aunt Jemima’s. It allowed me to socially connect with Tony, and for a few weeks there, I had a purpose, however absurd.

When I get home, I drop my pink camo bag in the hall and engulf my sons in a hug. “Did you win?” asks Zane.

“Well, I beat a lot of people,” I say.

He seems pleased.

“But I lost to hundreds of others.”

That he doesn’t like.

(Note: This was not the last triathlon I signed up for. A couple of months later, I paid a hefty, nonrefundable entry fee for the New York Triathlon. I’d be swimming nearly a mile in the Hudson River, biking twenty-five miles, and running six. Training was going well, I was feeling confident. And then, two weeks before the race, Tony sent me this e-mail:

Did you see that there was a fire at a sewage plant on 135th Street? Five million gallons of raw sewage spilling into the river every hour until they fix it. The city is urging all New Yorkers to avoid contact with Hudson River water. I beg you to reconsider.

He didn’t have to beg too hard. There’s the thrill of a challenge, and then there’s 200 million gallons of human waste. I’m currently signed up for next year’s triathlon.