A Moment 55 Years In The Making
By
Leonard Zwelling
I don’t hold back much on the blog. So, I have to admit it. I was a fat kid. I was always struggling with my weight for as long as I can remember.
I always had a sweet tooth. That doesn’t help. I also simply ate too much. I never could get the cereal to milk ratio correct so at one sitting I took five shots at it—more cereal, then more milk, etc. I had contests with my best friend to see who could eat the most spaghetti. The Good Humor ice cream man (Google it) delivered pleasure to me on a daily basis.
Now, I did slim down in the summers when I went to camp because I was constantly active, playing sports, and waiting tables. Plus, there was no refrigerator in my bunk that I could raid on a whim. Every June I would finish finals overweight. I would head to upstate New York at one camp or another and lose fifteen pounds. By Halloween, it was back.
The worst was my freshman year at Duke. I gained about forty pounds in my first semester sitting, studying, and eating junk food from the vending machines. I was huddled in the basement of the medical school library at the end of rows of bound journals at a small desk pushing chemistry into my brain and M and M’s into my mouth.
When I pledged the ZBT fraternity in January of 1967, the fraternity president told me that I had to lose forty pounds by March or I would have to pull the chariot in the Greek Games, an annual ritual of inter-fraternity competition.
I went on a full liquid diet until dinner and lost the forty pounds. As a reward I got to chase the greased pig at the Greek Games. I didn’t come near the thing. One of the guys from the football fraternity housed next to the ZBT dorm section tackled the pig. I branded the whole exercise non-kosher and ran alongside the other men chasing the animal, never getting close.
The beginning of the new era in Len’s battle with his weight occurred in late October 1970. I was on a surgery rotation as a second-year medical student at the Durham VA. I had just completed my rotation in internal medicine which was intense, but intellectual. Surgery was intense and anti-intellectual. All the surgical residents wanted were more and more chances to operate. “A chance to cut is a chance to cure.” Not at the Durham VA. I’m not sure those surgeons cured anyone.
One afternoon, a fellow medical student, Rich Marion, asked me if I wanted to go for a run. I said sure and he took me to the cross-country course cut into Duke Forest and around the Duke Golf Course. It was beautiful in the fall with the trees changing colors. The path was packed dirt so easy on the knees and back. At the end of the trail is a hill about one-quarter mile up. I could not make it up the hill that first day.
We returned the next day. Still, I could not conquer the hill.
The third day, I tried to run the course myself and made it up the hill. My mind felt an elation it had experienced rarely in the past. I was intoxicated with the physical feat. I was hooked. I had become addicted to running.
Over the next two years I got in great shape, especially during my third year of medical school that I spent in the laboratory. I became a serious runner. I started to lift weights. I played a lot of basketball. I was in a physical condition that I had never been in before. I was fit. I had a measured heart rate of 40 and a runner’s heart on my chest x-ray.
Over the next thirty years I tried to stay in that shape by running. I ran a marathon at age 33 and finished in just over 3 hours. I ran competitive races around the Washington, D.C. area when I was working at the NIH. I did a training run with Tony Fauci. I ran on the C and O Canal past then-Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1981.
When we got to Houston I continued to run, but by age 50, my legs and back could no longer carry me. Stair Masters and Elliptical Trainers supplanted road running in my routine and I kept lifting weights.
I had good years and bad years with cardiac surgery, hernia repairs, pulmonary emboli, and back injections interrupting my training, but I kept at it. Having an aerobics and Body Pump instructor for a wife helped. I had to keep up.
Even at age 76, when my weight seemed to be stuck at too much, I used tirzepatide, a GLP-1 drug, to lose 23 pounds in nine weeks and have kept it off over the first six months without the drug.
All of this led to a Pilates class on November 24 at Club Pilates on Bellaire Boulevard. At the urging of my massage therapist, I had started Pilates 25 years before and never stopped. Without it, I am not sure I could get out of bed.
My regular conditioning session with my trainer had been canceled this Monday as he was away. So, I signed up for a Pilates class and this one was a level 2 F.I.T. class, which claimed to be advanced on the registration app. Max was the instructor.
Max was a big, but amiable man with an accent I couldn’t place. He started the class which, for the first time in my visits to this club, was not full. Every woman there seemed fit. There were no overweight attendees as there usually are at this club. This group was serious.
I was able to do the class as most of what Max had us do I had done before. After about twenty minutes on the reformer, Max stopped the class.
“Leonard,” he said, “I have to ask. How old are you?”
“77.”
All the women gasped and Max said, “I want to be like you when I get older.”
That was it. That was my moment 55 years in the making.
After all those miles, all the weights, all the x-rays, all the MRIs, all the steroid injections, all the diets, and all the pain, I had my lifetime achievement award.
Yes, it was worth it to be the oldest in the class by at least 30 years and to amaze the Pilates class leader who was from Moscow and a Body Pump instructor himself. He had on the Les Mills shorts and showed me a picture of him leading a Body Pump class in Moscow.
I have no idea how long I can keep working at this, but I’m going to try. After all, what other choice do I have?
But that moment said to me, “you made the right decision to keep trying to be fit.”
Other than marrying my wife, it was the best decision I ever made.
