Boomers

Beyond Male Dominance: Gender and Generational Hallmarks Compelling Baby Boomer Men Today

Never before in the history of this nation have so many men entered the 70+ life stage. A Boomer male turns 70 about every 15 seconds. This inexorable march to 70+ will continue until 2034, and then this generation’s longevity dash continues forward toward the ninth and tenth decades of life. Someday, millions of Boomer men will survive beyond the average life expectancy achieved by their grandfathers and fathers.

Demography by itself does not fully predict the future course for this generation. Values inspired by the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960’s and 1970’s add dimension to future scenarios. Here are four significant influences:

Being Boomer Male and Feminism

Boomer men were and are widely supportive of feminism, especially those aspects of the social movement focused on economic equality and full participation in institutional society.

Many recall early encounters with feminism during their teen years: perhaps a polite request not to open the door for a young woman passing by, or a more vociferous denunciation by being called a “male chauvinist pig.”

The experiences of feminism often served to confuse Boomer men; they wanted to please their female counterparts but did not necessarily wish to relinquish some of the privileges and territory of maleness as their fathers and grandfathers had defined it. Boomer men sometimes feel caught between opposing values about sexual roles: those celebrating full equality between the sexes, and those that honor the special privileges of manhood such as classic corporate and institutional power.

Many privileges under onslaught today spring from ancient religious traditions and time-honored customs when men practiced rituals of initiation, preferred separation from females during specific periods and seasons, and developed their own language nuances and culture.

Patriarchic traditions are under siege today in the cultural narratives expressed through books and movies. For example, an article in The Atlantic described how role reversals are impacting Boomer men, once-upon-a-time large and in-charge of romantic relationships:

“Up in the Air, a movie set against the backdrop of recession-era layoffs, hammers home its point about the shattered ego of the American man. A character played by George Clooney is called too old to be attractive by his younger female colleague and is later rejected by an older woman whom he falls in love with after she sleeps with him—and who turns out to be married. George Clooney! If one of the the sexiest men alive can get twice rejected (and sexually played) in a movie, what hope is there for anyone else? The message to American men is summarized by the title of a recent offering from the romantic-comedy mill: She’s Out of My League.”

It seems that Boomer men, out of choice in youth and out of necessity in middle age, have embraced the precepts and implications of feminism. Will women in the future embrace the possibilities of maleness as it finds new expressions in elderhood?

Boomer Men versus Health and Wellness

Baby Boomer men are dichotomous with respect to health & fitness. They grew up in a time when the adult population was largely ignorant of today’s diet and health maxims. For example, I recall consuming a steady diet of high-fat foods, prepared and presented by my well-meaning mother. My mother’s refrigerator was always stocked with cheeses, bacon, whole milk, bologna, and cheese casserole leftovers.

On the contrary, this generation also discovered outdoor sports and jogging in their twenties, influenced an explosion in the fitness facilities industry throughout their thirties and forties, and escorted many diet and weight-loss fads to popular and economic prominence. Thus, when it comes to health and wellness, this is a bifurcated generation. About 40 percent are overweight or obese; a smaller but nevertheless significant percentage is dedicated to maintaining fitness, with accelerating commitment to workout regimens. An entire new category of master athletes has become prominent in the last few years.

Marketing to Boomer Men as Healing

Boomer men are moving into a period of their lives representing unprecedented opportunities for growth, service, community, and fraternity. Along this path, dangers lurk: irrelevance, anger, depression, lack of appropriate role models, obesity, and a general dearth of purpose. The impact can lead some men to make abrupt and unwise changes, from quitting a job to leaving a marriage.

What might be the source for these challenges of male aging? According to Jed Diamond, PhD, author of Male Menopause, acting out by older males involves much more than external stresses.

“Often a man’s restlessness and irritability come from the pull of his inner world, not a pull from outside. He may think he needs to leave his family, have an affair, change jobs, run away from home, or leave the country. The real longing may be to fulfill his soul’s calling.”

These potential illnesses of the body and soul need healing, and this is the service that many companies in the future may provide. Marketing can be restorative when insights gleaned positively change the way men think about themselves as husbands, partners, fathers, grandfathers, and mentors. Just as marketers have been instrumental in teaching women about breast cancer, so can marketers take a leadership role in helping men understand their own needs and positive ways to address what they want through the choices they make as consumers.

Marketers can teach environmental awareness, the special role of fathers in the nation’s future, and how men and women can co-evolve, wherein both sexes share equally in the American dream. 

The most powerful marketing premise of the coming years will be healing. In healing the nation’s aging men, those insightful and courageous companies will also heal many ills besetting the nation and the globe. Along this hopeful path, enlightened companies will also experience the economic and psychological rewards of making a substantive difference, while elevating late-life manhood to a status worthy of esteem and aspiration by younger male generations.

Toward Relevance and Reinvention

Although late middle age has been traditionally associated with predictability, quiescence, and gradual withdrawal from mainstream society, Boomer men are poised to shatter these stereotypical expectations, challenging barriers to employment for those over age 60 or 70. The softer side of maturity is a quest for reinvention and self-actualization. Boomer men have spent decades focused on their responsibilities as employers, employees, fathers, husbands, partners, and business and civic leaders.

The stage of life after 70 presents renewed opportunities to reach for greater idealism and relevance in life. It’s a time to discover life anew, and this perpetually seeking male cohort will pursue later life with questions, a search for meaning, and by finding ways to bring life into perspective while leaving behind meaningful contributions to society. These Boomer quests will include new ways to create a more sustainable economy, ways to mitigate poverty and attendant diseases, and ways to build greater influence for the nation’s thousands of nonprofit organizations.

Excerpted from Generation Reinvention: How Boomers Today Are Changing Business, Marketing, Aging and the Future. 

How to remember and honor those who have died from Covid-19

When we depart this life, must the stories of our existence fade within the passing of a few years? That has been the fate of billions of mortals who have preceded today’s living.

Since the beginning of human history around 50,000 B.C., 108 billion humans have been born. Just over seven billion are living now, or 6.5 percent of all those ever born are still breathing—a tiny fraction when we consider the meteoric growth of world population today.

How much do we know of the 101 billion humans who have preceded us? The majority are nameless, forgotten as if they never lived, merely dust in the wind.

Except for a relative handful of kings, queens, heroes, political leaders, scientists, artists, writers, intellectuals, athletes, and celebrities who have been held in perpetuity through their works or historical documentation by others, the clear majority of human stories have just perished. We know nothing of those masses who have lived and passed on. Most of us do not know anything about the lives and times of our great-great-great grandparents, if even their names.

The First Immortal

Five thousand years ago, in Mesopotamia, the ancient lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers now called Iraq, something miraculous happened in the evolution of our species and its ceaseless battle against temporality. Humans discovered how to write.

Death could no longer silence people after departing their mortal bodies. The written word gave our species the power to reach through millennia and speak inside the heads of those living in the distant future.

Then something else happened, another miracle of self-preservation. Enheduanna, daughter of the first emperor in history, was also the first person known to sign her name to a literary creation.

She lived 4300 years ago, and her gift to humanity was the possibility of immortality that can be bestowed by the written word when assigned to a single visionary author. The writing was no longer nameless, codified thought but personal ownership in the future.

Enheduanna’s name means “Lady Ornament of the Sky.” For centuries after her death, the first author continued to set standards for culture, literature, liturgy hymns, poetry, and religion. Her legacy includes an extensive body of creative output, including forty-two poems, psalms, and prayers that have served as a template for poets, priests, and scribes throughout history.

We know that she existed at a certain point in time. We know what she dreamed. We are aware of her fearlessness and prescience. We know she was a great author, composer, poet, and High Priestess of the ancient Moon God Nanna at temples in the Mesopotamian city-states of Ur and Uruk (Iraq).

Enheduanna lives today, four-and-a-third millennia after she exhaled her final breath. She speaks to us through her creations—and when combined into a complete archive, we have her time capsule filled with revelations that we can contemplate at will.

Permanent Acclaim

A generation ago most unexceptional people, removed from the public eye, could not hope to persist beyond death, except perhaps as represented by a deteriorating marker bearing an irrelevant name, lost somewhere in a cemetery or mausoleum. Without notable personal achievements that would become written documents or audio or video recordings, it was not possible for the majority to survive beyond the grave.

With the advent of the digital age and the extraordinary power and memory of the internet, it is now possible for anyone to write and record their thoughts, dreams, and values for others to read, see, and hear—and with archival preservation, for thousands of years from now. Today, for the first time in human history, anybody can paddle beyond the grave, aiming for the distant shores of time.

Questions to contemplate about your “Immortality Narrative”

• Which of your life lessons are most important to share with your children or other young people in your life?
• Have you been inspired by classic children’s book characters, and, if so, which characters had the most impact on your views and values?
• Who would you most like to attend your last lecture and why are these people most important?
• If you were to be diagnosed with a terminal disease, such as pancreatic cancer, how would you prefer to spend your final months of “functional health,” if granted this time for closure? What would be your priorities?
• What tangible memories about you would you like to leave for future generations, and in what form would these memories be encapsulated? A book or other writing? A video? Artwork? A legacy website?

Excerpted from Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at a Time of Loss by Brent Green, Copyright 2017. All Rights Reserved.

A beautiful hit song by Kansas, a progressive rock super-group, helps drive home the point of this blog post. Kerry Livgren, the song's writer and guitarist, was my high school classmate. Kerry has recently published his memoir entitled Miracles Out of Somewhere.

 

To order your copy of Questions of the Spirit, visit the book's Amazon page.

Dr. Mark Crooks, A 57-Year Cancer Survivor, A Life Dedicated to Showing Adults How to Age Well

Brent Green has written and published a biographical novel inspired by Dr. Mark Crooks, his long-time friend and fitness mentor, entitled: WARRIOR: The Life and Lessons of a Man Who Beat Cancer for 57 Years. His buddy died ten years ago, on July 8, 2010, and this is Brent's tribute to Mark and his lasting impact. 

Mark Crooks, PhD, an exercise physiologist, sports psychologist, fitness pioneer and daredevil, risked everything to survive five bouts of cancer spanning 57 years. 

The stony truck driver was exhausted following his overnight drive from Chicago to Kansas City. He had kept himself awake by drinking a thermos full of coffee and taking several No-Doz. His eyes burned from staring at dark, isolated highways. Even morning chatter on his radio did not perk him up for the final leg of his long haul to Salina, Kansas.

His eighteen-wheeler raced across the Paseo Bridge spanning the Missouri River. The weary driver ignored a crudely hand-lettered sign held by one of Dr. Mark Crooks’ assistants. The sign demanded: Slow Down, Jumper Ahead.

A warning sign about a jumper threatening to hurl himself into the angry Missouri should have been sufficient to cause any alert driver to pause. But the trucker could only think about the number of miles he must still drive to finish a tough haul to Salina. At that moment, he didn’t care if another idiot might be threatening a suicide jump.

Focused on the river below, Dr. Crooks stood outside the guardrail at the apex of the bridge, the roiling river ten stories below — the distance to impact easily sufficient to break his back and end his life. Several nearby assistants grasped the situation, understanding that this eighteen-wheeler would throw off sufficient wind draft to push the fitness expert out of a carefully practiced vertical pose and force an awkward angle that could snap his back. The truck’s diesel engine issued a throaty rumble, but Mark could not hear anyone’s warnings not to jump.

Instead, he gazed into the choppy, brown water below, envisioning his carefully selected landing spot, a deep gulch running through the river bed where his scuba diving surveillance mission had discovered this place of optimum depth, free from impaling junk. At six-foot-four inches tall and 215 pounds of sculpted muscle, he stood on the bridge ledge above the river as if a Greek god surveying the Aegean Sea from mighty cliffs of weathered limestone. He wore a midnight-black diver’s suit, which might offer some insulation upon impact, perhaps binding his anatomy together as the force of water, hard as concrete, made contact with his feet.

Mark’s intractable goal was to leap from the bridge and will himself into a perfect vertical posture soon after reaching the apex of trajectory. Then he would press his arms to his side so that they would not be dislocated or broken at impact. If his calculations were correct, buttressed by six months of dogged preparation, he would slide into the water without damaging himself, being the first human not to die by a jump from this precarious location. His focus had become so intense to have rendered awareness of impending danger irrelevant.

With three full breaths to oxygenate his system and prepare for the plunge, he pulled his arms behind him as if an artistic highdiver and leapt. The errant trucker rumbled by Mark’s jump location at forty-five miles an hour — five-miles an hour above the speed limit. The draft off the truck flung small rocks and paper liter behind it, and gusts caught Mark’s back as he reached jump apogee, pushing him head first into an uncontrolled, awkward freefall. His assistants gasped as they watched Mark cascade downward, his legs and arms flailing to return his body to a vertical posture.

Will Tests Life.

At the beginning of my second year of graduate school at the University of Kansas, several students and I were visiting a professor at her home. Her boyfriend stopped by, a man of imposing stature. At six-foot-four-inches and with a chiseled jaw, Mark appeared to be a stereotypical jock, albeit one who could have also posed as a male fashion model. I learned that he was a PhD candidate seeking double degrees in sports psychology and exercise physiology.

Mark’s extraordinary fitness and friendly nature caused me to confess that I was then having concerns about my health. By the early 1970s, the connections between cigarette smoking and cancer were gaining wider acceptance in spite of persistent denials by tobacco companies. I knew my long-term health was on the line. Mark invited me to go jogging with him and though hesitant I accepted.

The next Saturday we ran in a city park in Lawrence, and at first I kept pace, being young and lean. But as the miles stretched out, Mark’s graceful stride left me in the background. He jogged effortlessly ahead in the distance. Because health was what I wanted more than anything after a childhood of illness, I quit smoking four days later, on September 14, 1973, an auspicious occasion more important to me than my birthday. Mark never scolded or lectured me about smoking but caused me to seek health because of his example.

As our friendship grew, I discovered that he also had confronted severe illnesses in childhood but to a degree far greater than my own tribulations. When he was an infant and living with his mother in Mexico City, relentless intestinal bleeding threatened his life; but his mother persevered until she found a physician with knowledge of nutrition who prescribed a life-saving diet of soy instead of cow’s milk.

When Mark was two, he suffered from severe sinus infections, and a then-experimental therapy involved X-ray radiation. By today’s standards, Mark received an unfiltered radiation overdose fifty times what's recommended for an adult, predisposing him to cancer.

When he was eight, a tumor appeared on the left side of his neck; the diagnosis: neurogenic sarcoma. Surgeons removed muscle, lymph and nerve tissue, including the sternoclydomastoid muscle, which is responsible for assisting with head and neck rotation. Instead of becoming handicapped relative to his peers, Mark tenaciously worked out, played football, and ran in track while in high school, earning letters in both sports.

Because he had lost muscle tissue on his left side, throwing his physical symmetry out of balance, Mark also became committed to resistance training until he built himself up to the physical stature I first witnessed at my professor’s house. He joined the marines after high school, surviving the mental and physical ordeals of three months of training at Parris Island, South Carolina: “the ultimate rite of passage into manhood.” He also wanted to dispatch a lingering threat of cancer’s metastasis.

Mark may be the only marine in history who was also a pre-induction cancer patient, enduring rigorous training at Parris Island while receiving an Honorable Discharge after three years of service. In the Marine Corps, he also learned to love running since new recruits ran everywhere as they fulfilled daily duties.

Mark worked tenaciously to get his PhD, and discoveries during his education, as well as life experiences, became the foundation of his book entitled Achieving Wellness through Risk Taking. This book preceded many of the health and fitness trends of the 1980s and articulated now-commonplace ideas about nutrition and fitness. His premise is set forth in the book title: human beings can achieve greater states of health by taking measured risks.

While working as a health consultant in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mark performed a number of experiments to test his own physical and psychological endurance, as well as to demonstrate principles set forth in his book. The feat of greatest impact to me was his jump from ten stories off the Paseo Street Bridge in Kansas City, into the swirling Missouri River below.

Mark prepared for months, enlisting support from scientific and medical advisors. The physical challenge for him was to enter the water vertically. Since the upper half of the human body weighs more than the lower half, the body has a tendency to tumble forward when falling from great heights.

If he did not hit the water exactly upright, he risked breaking his back. Several tortured people had already committed suicide from the location of his jump. Mark spent many weekends jumping from successively higher cliffs in the Missouri Ozarks until he perfected ways to achieve vertical orientation in midair.

Practice did make perfect, and, after making mid-jump corrections due to draft from the passing eighteen-wheeler, he landed artistically, making a small splash and emerging from the depths of the muddy river unscathed.

On another harrowing adventure of five days duration, Mark swam and floated from Kansas City, Kansas, to St. Louis, Missouri, in the Missouri River. Not only did he encounter man-made dangers, such as fishing lines and barges threatening to pull him into their wake, he also struggled with severe hypothermia since the muddy river relentlessly sucked away body heat.

I understood these experiments as true testimonials to the power of mind over body. Their enactment stood as a metaphor for Eros, the life force.

Mark didn’t choose to live in a safe, predictable groove; his early encounters with mortality caused him to stare death in the face — by his accounting — thirty-nine times. To Mark and many people lucid about the exigencies of mortal existence, this aggressive, gentle man chose to challenge life on his terms.

In 1992, Mark called me to let me know that the area around his Adam’s apple had swollen twelve times normal size. The diagnosis of thyroid cancer, undoubtedly a residual of his overdose of X-ray radiation, did not bend his knees for more than two days. Surgeons removed the cancerous gland, and forty-eight hours later Mark ran 2 ½ miles through wooded trails around his home. Again, this aggressive activity wasn’t rash; Mark had prepared with weeks of conditioning for the surgery and rapid return to extreme activity.

Mark called me nine years later to tell me that while running his usual path he felt tightness in his chest. He finished the four-mile run but continued wheezing and coughing over the next few weeks. One day while running he coughed and tasted blood. After a carousel of medical tests, surgeons recommended evasive surgery to remove a cancerous egg-shaped tumor.

Mark spent six weeks getting into peak condition for one of the most difficult and painful surgeries imaginable. The week following his operation was excruciating; removal of his left lung also required breaking ribs.

As he told me, “Getting to the bathroom was like running a marathon (and I refused to use a bedpan). Tubes hung from everywhere: a venous line, an arterial line, a needle in my low back delivering titrated morphine, an oxygen tube in my nose, and drainage tubes under my left armpit.”

Mark reflected on the irony of his own medical history: “I have never smoked, and I avoid others who smoke. I was a running pioneer, doing it way before it became a social norm. I could not rationalize this happening to me. I had crafted my body into 215 lbs of toughness, and this was not part of the plan.”

Nevertheless, Mark struggled out of his bed, where it was so much easier to lay anesthetized by pain medications, and began to fight At first he walked hesitantly. Then he set physical goals. His one-year post-operative celebration included running three miles nonstop. His goal for the next year was to run four miles nonstop, which again he accomplished. Then he ran three miles in thirty minutes.

Mark believed his survival through so many adversities was due to a determined effort that never waned. “It comes from winning all those little confrontations with oneself. Once I’m standing on a treadmill, I know that I have won. This is how I survive.”

Getting old isn't part of the plan for many Baby Boomers, a generation noted for its youth-seeking character. But the human condition demands that we age, and we have two fundamental choices for how we do it: to surrender to aging, allowing the body to unravel with the mind and spirit; or to confront and fight aging, as was the path of Dr. Mark Crooks, who faced the diseases and accidents of aging long before his contemporaries.

In November 2009, Mark learned that lesions had appeared in his liver. Resolute as always, he began exploring how he might receive a liver transplant. Medical policies required that patients be declared cancer free for at least five years before a transplant could be scheduled.

When it became clear to Mark that this would be his final confrontation with Thanatos, he accepted his fate and continued exercising in whatever form he could manage, even pushing an IV cart in front of him as he circumnavigated a hospital floor. He never stopped challenging himself until one week before his death — a week spent in the Kansas City Hospice. He died on July 8, 2010.

What have I learned about aging from Mark? Any excuse not to stay in the best shape possible is insufficient. Any excuse not to keep setting and fighting for goals is inadequate.

Life is a test of will demanding that we make conscious daily choices to prevail and thrive. Mark’s approach to living is also an optimistic metaphor for a generation getting older and coming to represent societal conceptions of the aging process.

We can choose Thanatos and allow our bodies to perish due to sloth and gluttony, bad habits and dependencies, or we can choose Eros and get in shape physically and mentally, redefining the meaning of aging. We can confront media forces aimed at tearing apart aging spirits and demonstrate that this generation is not narcissistic, self-absorbed, fatuous, or any other condescending label.

To the media and to ourselves, we can resurrect an aphorism from our youth: “Hell no, we won’t go.” Against all odds, we won’t go passively to Thanatos. We will go on.

Enjoy an intense and uplifting story inspired by Mark's life through Brent Green's biographical novel, Warrior, which focuses on the protagonist's steadfast commitment to health and fitness while fighting cancer for 57 years. 

Click on this link to order your copy of Warrior on Amazon.

All photos and videos, Copyright 2020, Brent Green. All rights reserved.

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Two Major Boomer Wellness Goals: End of Sarcopenia, Compression of Morbidity

Two Major Wellness Goals for Your Aging Body: End of Sarcopenia, Compression of Morbidity

The aged man struggled to get out of his recliner. His leg muscles could not lift his weight into a vertical position, so he fell back into the chair, exhausted. He sat there for a few minutes, trying to command his weak muscles to help him stand. He barely had strength to push upwards with his hands against armrests.

Finally in a single determined push with arms and forward momentum from rocking, he stood, though unsteadily. It took a few seconds for him to find his balance so he could then shuffle from his recliner to reach the bathroom. There he would need to sit again, and he knew that leaving the stool would be equally arduous — maybe impossible. How he dreaded the idea of becoming immobilized and unable to escape the prison of sitting.

One morbid challenge confronting Boomers as they age many not ring familiar to you. But when you think about it, you might consider aging from a different perspective.  Called sarcopenia, this challenge involves muscle wasting due to aging.

Sarcopenia derives from the Latin roots, "sarco" for muscle, and "penia" for wasting, making it a “muscle wasting disease.” Sarcopenia is a byproduct of the aging process, the progressive loss of muscle fiber that begins in middle age. The process starts in our 30s but, unchecked, leads to rapid deterioration in strength and endurance in the mid-60s. Without intervention, adults can lose as much as 8% of muscle mass every ten years.

Sarcopenia propels a cascade of other medical problems. Less muscle mass and strength leads to faster fatigue. Chronic fatigue leads to less physical activity and a more sedentary lifestyle. Less activity results in fat gain and obesity. Excess weight contributes to glucose intolerance, type II diabetes and a condition called metabolic syndrome. This syndrome can then cause hypertension and increasing risk for cardiovascular disease. The end-state of sarcopenia is death.

Muscle wasting contributes dramatically to eldercare costs. Once older patients become incapable of the activities of daily living, such as rising unassisted from a recliner, they are usually institutionalized in nursing homes and assisted living facilities where most remain until death.

I participated in an Innovators Summit: “a unique forum where leaders representing a variety of sectors join together to design new business models, network about possibilities, and spawn new insights around the aging marketplace of the future.” Staged at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, where I was formerly advertising and public relations director, the Summit brought together professionals involved in aging services, home healthcare, architecture, homebuilding, academics, medicine, technology, wellness, retailing, and of course, marketing. Participating organizations included Ecumen, Eskaton, IDEO, GE, Pfizer, Intel and AARP.

A significant part of this exercise in “deep conversation” involved forming interdisciplinary innovation groups addressing seven topical areas, including “home based care,” “new financial models,” “dementia and cognitive health,” and “livable communities.” I joined a group discussing the future of “prevention and wellness,” an area that his interested me for decades and has involved clients of Brent Green & Associates, such as Experimental and Applied Sciences, Men’s Fitness magazine, the Institute for Health Realities, Men’s Health magazine, and Nestle.

Although wellness encompasses a vast array of subspecialties, from nutrition to socialization, I suggested we focus our discussion on sarcopenia. Knowing that this clinical-sounding word needed a more innovative title, a preventative medicine physician on our team suggested “Strong Muscle, Strong Living” as a friendlier, more benefit-oriented statement of purpose.

From this starting point, the innovation team began envisioning business possibilities. We summarized our innovation as follows:  “An integrated package of products and services with substantial media messaging dedicated to empowering the 50+ market to maintain muscle strength and mobility across the life span. This package includes assessment, nutrition science, exercise technology, positive messaging, mobility health and education.”

Imagine a public service media campaign developed to help adults 50+ become more aware of the hazards and risks associated with unchecked muscle wasting. What if the alien word “sarcopenia” or a friendlier euphemism became as familiar to the public as ED — erectile dysfunction? Could this campaign reduce healthcare costs by focusing 50+ adults on muscle maintenance long before the pernicious downward spiral toward frailty begins?

Our innovation team then imagined some business implications of sarcopenia mitigation as a public health priority. The first obvious area of opportunity lies in nutrition science.

Abbott, for example, introduced a brand extension of Ensure, its nutritional beverage supplement often associated with eldercare institutions. The company has named its new product Ensure High Protein. Flavored shakes include 16 grams of protein, 24 vitamins and minerals, and a quixotic new ingredient Abbott calls “Revigor,” an amino acid metabolite.

Beta-hydroxy beta-methylbutyrate, popularly referred to as HMB, is a supplement that may act as a “protein breakdown suppressor” and thus can serve as a performance facilitator for resistance training such as weight lifting. According to some proponents, HMB boosts strength levels, enhances gains in muscle size and strength, and prevents post-workout muscle tissue breakdown. Clearly, nutrition science can become the wellspring of future supplemental food products that lessen sarcopenia progression while improving strength and endurance in older adults.

Proponents of HMB and other supplements insist that nutrition by itself will not prevent muscle wasting. Thus, opportunities abound for fitness equipment designers to develop machines and training regimens that can help Boomers work out more effectively and frequently. A fitness machine has yet to be invented that takes a lot of the work out of working out, thus helping users push through psychological resistance to resistance training.

The next successful video workout program may be waiting for a superstar proponent. For example, Jane Fonda’s Workout has been credited for launching the fitness craze among Boomers who in the 1980s were arriving in middle age.

The Oscar-winning actress introduced in 2010 a DVD set targeting older adults called Jane Fonda Prime Time. Two videos are entitled “Walk Out” and “Fit and Strong,” with the first focused on aerobics and the second on strength training. This regimen is heading in the right direction, but the exercise level required to participate is more suited to those already experiencing handicapping physical limitations. The most on-target innovation may be a hybrid series of workouts: less aggressive than youth-oriented P90X and more challenging than Fonda’s tamed-down workout for folks already significantly limited by disabilities.

Sarcopenia, a mystical word not to be confused with a Greek isle in the Aegean Sea, stimulates grand possibilities for innovation… in nutrition science, fitness equipment, video training programs, retirement community social engineering, public education, consumer products, and marketing budgets to sell all the aforementioned opportunities. Our innovation team agreed that not only can a national focus on sarcopenia potentially mitigate premature aging and death, but this agenda could further reduce spurious healthcare financial burdens confronting the nation.

Strong muscles mean stronger, sometimes longer lives. Through sarcopenia mitigation, Boomers can compress their morbidity — thereby lessening the burdens of old age illnesses by compressing an unwanted time of life into the shortest period possible before the final exit.

To visualize this cultural and business revolution personified, think of Jack LaLanne, a pioneer in fitness and strength training, who had a robust and productive life until age 96, dying from pneumonia after just a few weeks of illness. Strong muscles, strong life, quick death from natural causes. The circle of life doesn’t come full circle any better. 

Gender and Generational Hallmarks Influencing Boomer Men

Middle age, edging toward old age, presents many unique challenges for men, and these momentous changes—biological, social and cultural—become greatly magnified when around 5,500 men cross the threshold of 65 every day. For eighteen years, beginning in 2011 and until 2029, roughly two million men can be expected to traverse annually the journey across the age 65 horizon. Being 65 and beyond can be viewed, in a sense, as an enormous population of men experiencing the same lifestage at once. They are simultaneously dealing with the idiosyncratic vagaries of physiological changes (such as andropause, obesity, and diseases of aging), while confronting a social milieu that is often ageist and unaccommodating. The U.S. is evolving into a nation addressing an old age imbalance for the first time in its history.

Marketing implications include the rise of grandfathers as a market force, as well as other markets demanding new strategies from companies to take advantage of patriarchy.

Being Boomer Male and Feminism

Boomer men were and are widely supportive of feminism, especially those aspects of the social movement focused on economic equality and full participation in institutional society. Many recall early encounters with feminism during their teen years: perhaps a polite request not to open the door for a young woman passing by, or a more vociferous denunciation by being called a “male chauvinist pig.” The experiences of feminism often served to confuse Boomer men; they wanted to please their female counterparts but did not necessarily wish to relinquish some of the privileges and territory of maleness as their fathers and grandfathers had defined it. Boomer men often feel caught between opposing values about sexual roles: those celebrating full equality between the sexes, and those that honor the special privileges of manhood such as classic corporate and institutional power. Many privileges under onslaught today spring from ancient religious traditions and time-honored customs when men practiced rituals of initiation, preferred separation from females during specific periods and seasons, and developed their own language nuances and culture.

Boomer Men versus Health and Wellness

Baby Boomer men are dichotomous with respect to health & fitness. They grew up in a time when the adult population was largely ignorant of today’s diet and health maxims. For example, I recall consuming a steady diet of high-fat foods, prepared and presented by my well-meaning mother. My mother’s refrigerator was always stocked with cheeses, bacon, whole milk, bologna, and sundry cheese casserole leftovers.

On the contrary, this generation also discovered outdoor sports and jogging in their twenties, influenced an explosion in the fitness facilities industry throughout their thirties and forties, and escorted many diet and weight-loss fads to popular and economic prominence. Thus, when it comes to health and wellness, this is a bifurcated generation. About 40 percent are overweight or obese; a smaller but nevertheless significant percentage is dedicated to maintaining fitness, with accelerating commitment to workout regimens. An entire new category of master athletes has become prominent in the last few years.

Marketing to Boomer Men as Healing

Boomer men are moving into a period of their lives representing unprecedented opportunities for growth, service, community, and fraternity. Along this path, dangers lurk: irrelevance, anger, depression, lack of appropriate role models, obesity, and a general dearth of purpose. The impact can lead some men to make abrupt and unwise changes, from quitting a job to leaving a marriage.

What might be the source for these challenges of male aging? According to Jed Diamond, Ph.D., author of Male Menopause and The Irritable Male Syndrome, acting out by older males involves much more than external stresses. “Often a man’s restlessness and irritability come from the pull of his inner world, not a pull from outside. He may think he needs to leave his family, have an affair, change jobs, run away from home, leave the country. The real longing may be to fulfill his soul’s calling.”

These potential illnesses of the body and soul need healing, and this is the service that many companies in the future can provide. Marketing can be restorative when insights gleaned positively change the way men think about themselves as husbands, partners, fathers, grandfathers, and mentors. Just as marketers have been instrumental in teaching women about breast cancer, so can marketers take a leadership role in helping men understand their own needs and positive ways to address what they want through the choices they make as consumers.

Marketers can teach environmental awareness, the special role of fathers in the nation’s future, and how men and women can co-evolve, wherein both sexes share equally in the American dream.

The most powerful marketing premise of the next ten years will be healing. In healing the nation’s aging men, insightful and courageous companies will also heal many ills besetting the nation and the globe. Along this fruitful path, enlightened companies will also experience the economic and psychological rewards of making a substantive difference, while elevating late-life manhood to a status worthy of esteem and aspiration by younger generations.

Toward Relevance and Reinvention

Although late middle age has been traditionally associated with predictability, quiescence and gradual withdrawal from mainstream society, Boomer men are poised to shatter these stereotypical expectations, challenging, for example, barriers to employment for those over age 65 or even 75. The softer side of maturity is a quest for reinvention and self-actualization. Boomer men have spent decades focused on their responsibilities as employers, employees, fathers, husbands, partners, and business and civic leaders. The stage of life after 65 presents renewed opportunities to reach for greater idealism and relevance in life. It’s a time to discover life anew, and this perpetually seeking cohort will pursue later life with questions, a search for meaning, and by finding ways to bring life into perspective while leaving behind meaningful contributions to society.

Excerpted from Generation Reinvention: How Boomers Today Are Changing Business, Marketing, Aging and the Future. Now available on Amazon. 

Baby Boomer Men, Aging, and Three Kinds of Friendship

Healthy Aging Requires Men to Grow Up and Learn to Become Better Friends

An accepted pillar of healthy aging involves fostering nurturing affiliations with others. The late Beatle John Lennon counseled, “Count your age by friends, not years.”

One of the ruthless risks of aging is social isolation. Career contacts disappear. Older family members pass away. Nearby friends retire elsewhere. Children relocate to pursue blossoming careers. Some friends die too soon.

A “third age” without rewarding friendships can make us sicker faster and even contribute to an early demise. A recent article in Nature reported on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which concluded that “limited contact with family, friends and community groups predicts illness and earlier death, regardless of whether it is accompanied by feelings of loneliness.”

Feeling lonely may be an existential fact of living that we can survive; being socially isolated, however, may be a death sentence. It follows that one key to healthy aging comes from real male companionship.

Yet, some friendships gathered over a lifetime, we learn, are not real. Those friends become frustrating and exhausting. They don’t have time or desire to burden themselves with our problems. Some want social activities to be all fun, all the time and others need friendships to be all about them.

Now that I’m moving into the “third age” of life, I recognize the necessity to abandon unhealthy friendships and nurture those who are committed to the joys and responsibilities that true closeness can bring. I have learned to think more critically about quality of friendships, not merely quantity.

Convenience Friendships

Many friendships germinate because of circumstances. Research from the field of social psychology validates that physical proximity is the most significant factor contributing to relationships of substance. The proximity principle suggests that we form close relationships with those who are geographically near us. People who encounter each other frequently develop stronger bonds.

Thus, we pick up convenient friendships as we travel through life: childhood neighbors, school classmates, people we work with early in our careers, and associates we meet through professional and civic organizations.

And while convenience friendships can be miracles in our lives, knitting together decades of shared experiences, sometimes these relationships survive as old habits growing tattered. Friendships based on convenience can fall out of balance, even growth restricting.

I learned about the shortcomings of a convenient friendship early in life. One boy from the neighborhood was a year older, taller, and became the alpha male in our relationship. We spent a lot of time together, inseparable.

Whatever was on his agenda became a priority for me. He found a job delivering newspapers to earn spending money; I scrambled to do the same. He began smoking cigarettes; I took up the habit. He became rebellious toward authority as a teenager; I too became a budding iconoclast.

As we grew older, I eventually realized that the power in the relationship was skewed toward him. He sometimes could be psychologically menacing. He taunted me for being smaller and less athletic. He teased me about my clothes as he became hyper-conscious of rigid adolescent fashions. He sometimes dismissed me when other friends his age came to visit.

I eventually realized that this boyhood relationship, while convenient, did not offer me much fulfillment. I grew weary of his dominant personality and unwillingness to give me credit for having unique value. So when he moved away to start his career after college, I let him go his own way and haven’t been in touch for over forty years. He has never reached out to me either, so I guess he also realized that when proximity ended, so did impetus for us to stay in touch.

Cosmetic Friendships

Earlier in my career I was responsible for managing significant advertising budgets. I was popular with media sales representatives, and one of them charmed me with his wit. He became a fun friend, and we would often meet for cocktails after work. He escorted me to the ski slopes and helped me become a proficient downhill skier, a personal triumph, much appreciated. My fondness for him grew, and he seemed genuine in his positive regard for me.

Eventually I left the job with oversight of substantial ad budgets that benefited this friend, who worked as a sales rep for a radio station. He soon became scarce and unavailable. And finally an insight came to me: He was not my friend because of positive feelings for me; he acted as my friend because I could benefit him financially and status-wise within a cloistered media community.

Most men have had cosmetic friends similar to my example. Our job status made them feel more important while providing access to our social networks. We could help them achieve a goal, financial or otherwise. When our status changed, they abandoned the friendship. Gone and forgotten.

Interdependent Friendships

Interdependent relationships are the healthiest. Both parties contribute and receive. Both are available to share the benefits of closeness and help shoulder the burdens that appear as we age. They are committed to mutual growth and positive adaptation along the uncharted journey through life. 

One of my closest friends, whom I met during college, was this kind of person. Sometimes our contacts would be infrequent because of geographical distance, but we would periodically reach out to each other and be available for support as needed. I helped him through a divorce as a sympathetic advisor, and he helped me embrace a wellness lifestyle that eluded me when I was a cigarette smoker.

Many years later I helped him manage the injustices of cancer, reminding him of his innate strengths and wisdom. I helped convince him to accept hospice care when it became clear that further heroic medicine would not extend his life. He showed me how to die with grace.

As I’ve grown older and wiser, I’ve become more aware that not all male friendships are created equal. Convenience friendships may benefit from shared history, but sometimes these attachments were never appropriate in the first place.

Cosmetic friendships are usually fleeting: when our status or value to the other man diminishes, they can depart without even saying goodbye.

Interdependent friendships can be one gift of maturity: the few extraordinary friends we can count on when we become distraught or disillusioned. They are the guys who lift our spirits and in return welcome a sympathetic shoulder during their tough times.

As I reflect upon my friendships through life, I accept that I have not always been above self-centeredness and pretense that can inspire convenient or cosmetic friendships. Maturity compels me to accept and correct my own relationship deficiencies so that I can become a better friend. Aging has taught me that less can be more as I aim for interdependent friendships, solid and sustainable.

Charles Caleb Colton, a popular nineteenth century English cleric, advised, “Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.”

Wildlike, A Majestic Film, Challenges Boomer Males to Become Better Men.

Photo credit: Michael Seto

Life is strange. Every so often
A GOOD MAN WINS.

— Frank Dane, silent era film actor

Rene “Bart” Bartlett is such a man, although he struggles to liberate the good man from a troubled soul. His self-imposed exile into the Alaskan wilderness has him withdrawing from the searing ache of a recent loss. He is vulnerable and stoic. A seasoned backpacker seeking communion and healing from an unspoiled frontier. A loner by choice.

Then Mackenzie, a precocious runaway teenager, intrudes by sneaking from a balcony into his motel room, hiding under his bed then scrambling away as he awakens startled. The famished girl appears again the following morning to partake of the motel’s complimentary breakfast. Once more the resolute stranger rebuffs her. Nevertheless, she doggedly follows the grief-stricken, middle-aged trekker into Denali National Park, uninvited, unwanted, and unprepared.

For a third time, Rene repels the 14-year-old who by then has no safe way back to civilization. So they trek into the rough country together while a majestic mountain tableau draws them closer, demonstrating that an isolating wilderness can also inspire spiritual union between disparate humans of different backgrounds, ages, and cultures.

Photo credit: Michael Seto

Showing uncommon restraint during their backpack, Rene Bartlett allows the tragic back-story of the young interloper to unfold, barely whispers around a campfire. He intuitively experiences the girl’s burdens but does not yet know that she has been mistreated by an uncle living in Juneau, or that Mackenzie had been sent away from her home in Seattle so her mother can enter a drug rehabilitation program.

Not having his own children, Rene nevertheless calls upon some deep reservoir of insight, perhaps ancient DNA of noble masculine character, liberating a protector within. His astuteness about wilderness backpacking broadens to understanding of how he must help Mackenzie escape her uncle’s pursuit.

Photo credit: Michael Seto

Wildlike, a debut film written and directed by Frank Hall Green, is a nuanced, troubling, uplifting, beautifully rendered meditation on manhood and fatherhood. Its themes are timeless yet firmly rooted in here-and-now. A troubled girl being sent away by an incapable mother. A disturbed uncle who crosses the line. An older stranger who finally accepts his responsibilities when challenged to assist an innocent and vulnerable victim grappling with abuse.

Although this movie portrays broader multi-generational themes, older men will discover gentle reminders about the sacred role of elders in the development and nurturing of today’s youngest generations. This includes the millions of fathers and grandfathers who are fifty and older.

Further, about one-fifth of the Baby Boomer generation did not have children, nearly double their parents’ generation. Thus, roughly seven million Boomer men have had minimal experience with the trials and joys of raising children. Yet, Wildlike demonstrates how any good man, childless or not, can contribute empathy, strength, and wisdom to unrelated children besieged with misfortunes and challenges. The movie can inspire even childless males to teach, to listen, and to shoulder some of the difficult burdens of a generation growing up in complicated times.

Brilliantly portrayed by veteran Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood (Star Trek; I, Robot; Flight; and Thirteen Days, portraying JFK), Rene Bartlett craves wilderness separation to help him come to terms with his inconsolable loss. He yearns for aloneness and absolution.

Mackenzie, played by up-and-comer Ella Purnell (Never Let Me Go, Maleficent, and Kick-Ass 2) is at once intrepid and in danger. Unwilling to remain a captive of her uncle in Juneau, where she has been deposited by her struggling mother, Mackenzie decides to find her own way back to Seattle to reconnect with her mother in rehab.

Desperate and on the run, Mackenzie’s persistence leads her to follow the hapless, aging backpacker into the Alaskan wilderness where the two eventually find solace and support within each other’s private suffering. The healing that begins there becomes further embellished by nature’s grandeur: vast glaciers, fragile mountain flowers, soaring mountain peaks, and a curious grizzly bear.

Writer and director Frank Hall Green concludes his poignant story by raising a tender possibility. Rene and Mackenzie have not merely and fleetingly connected in the Alaskan wilderness; their relationship might continue—an unwavering journey toward recovery together.

 

Wildlike ends with a cover of The Parting Glass, a traditional Irish folk song dating back to 1770, as performed by The Wailin’ Jennys. Listen to it now to appreciate the spirit of this quietly majestic movie:

 

“I believe that adventure and the wilderness have the power to reawaken our humanity and, if hand in hand with the right people, can help heal oneself.”

— Frank Hall Green, writer/director/producer

 

GE’s healthymagination, Baby Boomers and the Future of Healthcare Marketing

I see a clear mental image of my two friends, young, healthy and in love. David has dark, curly, shoulder-length hair and almost always a big smile on his intelligent face. Shawn is lovely in that moment with her flowing gauze blouse and locks of golden hair encircling rosy cheeks.

This moment has them standing before a gently flowing creek, sunshine of early spring beaming down on their heads and shoulders, warming them with the promises of a season of rebirth. Around them, lime green of newly leafing trees and pink  redwood blossoms add electric color to a Kodachrome moment. There they stand, embracing, warmth radiating from their young love: a moment of youthful passion, reverence for natural beauty, the bounty of a caring relationship.

This memory formed during the early seventies yet remains deep-seated, available for recall with the right provocation.

I spoke recently with David after nearly forty years have passed and reminisced about that good spring day we had spent together with Shawn, hiking around a Kansas ranch. He told me sadly that Shawn had died of breast cancer just a year earlier, a disease that had taken hold and spread beyond a cure before diagnosis—perhaps a preventable fatality.

So now my happy memory has a sad ending. I never had a chance to say good-bye to Shawn or reminisce with her about that special day when spring beauty and simple pleasures had brought us closer together.

Sad endings like this can be more preventable with early access to healthcare and the newest diagnostic tools. Creating happy endings has become the focus of General Electric, summarized by a new neologism: healthymagination.

The company is asking three critical questions about the future of healthcare:

• How do we improve access to healthcare for consumers?
• How can we usher in technologies that reduce the cost of healthcare?
• How can we improve clinical outcomes through better quality diagnostics?

Finding answers to these questions requires commitment, clear goal setting and capital. So GE is investing $6 billion over six years to develop 100 innovations that will improve healthcare quality while driving down costs.

GE’s website succinctly summarizes its lofty goals for the new healthcare initiative:

Healthymagination is about becoming healthier, through the sharing of imaginative ideas and proven solutions. It goes beyond innovations in the fields of technology and medicine, celebrating the people behind these advancements. Seeking to build stronger relationships between patients and doctors, GE created Healthymagination to gather, share and discuss healthy ideas.

Jeff Immelt, General Electric CEO, and Mike Barber, Vice President for healthymagination, have taken this vision into the realm of measurable action steps:

• Provide more affordable healthcare
• Make healthcare information technology more effective
• Commit to technology innovations
• Improve healthcare access worldwide
• Address prevention, earlier diagnosis and treatment
• Help GE employees become healthier while adopting innovative healthcare plans

One healthymagination television commercial in particular has caught my imagination, a spot simply called Beautiful.

I saw a couple who could have been my friends David and Shawn as they were in the early 1970s. And then soft music and slow pacing drew me into the commercial...

Regina Ebel, Executive Vice President and Director of Films for BBDO, conveyed her heartfelt story when explaining this spot in a BBDO video about the campaign:

“Beautiful is a very emotional spot about a couple that have been together their whole lives. It’s really special to me because I lost a sister to breast cancer,” said Ms. Ebel. “When I saw the images of this young girl going through life, it was my sister. It was that beautiful young girl. My sister didn’t have the good fortune to get the good news.”

“And (the story) ends with them sharing an experience when the wife finds out she is going to be okay. That’s the most beautiful moment.”

The commercial takes viewers through a series of vignettes conveying a romantic journey that will seem familiar and nostalgic to millions of Baby Boomers. Production techniques rely on soft, richly saturated images as would have been filmed by a handheld Super-8 mm camera 40 years ago. And then the montage of their young lives unfolds...

The story begins with a young woman on a beach at sunset. Then the setting cuts to a young couple together on the beach, huddled under a beach towel. The young man has curly long hair, like my friend, David, setting the period in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

He speaks as a voiceover in a soft, rich voice, full of authenticity:

“I’ve seen beautiful things. I’ve seen the sunrise paint the desert. Witnessed snowfall on the first day of spring. Watched fireflies dance about the evening sky.”

As he speaks softly, accompanied by the Second Movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, images continue to appear in this dreamy montage: sleeping on a train, perhaps a trip together though Europe, and camping in the desert in a VW bus.

 
 
Then the spot reveals their middle years becoming a family: playing in the snow with a toddler and hiking as a middle-aged couple with two young teenage children and a dog. Then another vignette suggests a party for her, perhaps a 40th or 50th birthday celebration, with many friends and family members surrounding her.   

Finally, we see an older couple in present time, sitting in a doctor’s office and looking at images of her cancer on a GE Early Detection medical device. His eyes are red and damp from the emotional intensity of his wife’s prognosis, and he continues to narrate:

“But the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is the image on the screen that helped our doctors see my wife’s cancer was treatable.”

 
   

The spot cuts to a medical doctor, now explaining to the aging couple what he sees diagnostically. Voiceover narration provides the final insight about the sponsor of this advertisement and its purpose:

“GE technologies help doctors detect cancer early so they can save more lives… bringing better health to more people.”

The URL for this initiative fills the final screens: healthmagination.com. GE. Imagination at work. 

 
An artful and sensitive television commercial reveals some “teaching moments” for those who market healthcare to the Boomer generation, especially products and services addressing Boomer aging.

It’s quite remarkable how Don Schneider, Executive Creative Director for BBDO, and his creative team so fully captured nuances of Boomer life experiences reaching back as far as the late sixties or early seventies. (Then again, maybe it’s not as remarkable when you learn that Don Schneider is a Boomer who began his career at BBDO in 1980, further sharpening the point that if you want to capture this generation with great advertising, use talent from the generation to create the ads.)

Through BBDO’s rich tableau, Boomers, especially members of the leading edge born between 1946 and 1955, discover imagery that’s reminiscent of their own life experiences.

Not all Boomers frolicked on a beach at sunset; but many did. Not all Boomers camped in the desert or drove a VW van; but many did. Not all explored a new-fallen snow with a toddler; but many did. Not all Boomers took nature walks with their teenage children; but many did.

Somewhere in this cascade of artfully composed vignettes, most Boomers will recall something from the past—personally relevant slices-of-life that make the message and messenger all the more authentic. After seeing about twelve historical vignettes, a few images will be true and relevant to most viewers who are of the appropriate age.

An emotional catharsis—the scary possibility of losing a life partner and then learning with relief that doctors have found her cancer early enough—burrows into a universal fear of losing a spouse too early. Then GE provides salvation through its Early Detection imaging technologies. All those memories of young love and youth can be shared long into the future; now more memories will be created together.

It’s not over yet.

As Boomers continue to age, advertisers are going to discover more opportunities to reach this generation through nostalgic memories of a youthful period often idealized as the best of times.

GE’s healthymagination campaign demonstrates a sophisticated and nuanced case study in which a product can be associated with the most powerful of all motivations: yearning to hold onto and experience precious moments in our lives again … and again. When you join these memories with the promise of a future filled with equally entrancing stories, yet to be told, you’ve conceived a winning strategy for brand identity, emotional resonance and corporate image development.

David, my friend from the seventies, has become older as I have; Shawn has sadly passed away. Yet their vitality, love and warmth have been encoded in my long-term memory and this moment endures—a sunny day, a rambling creek and the evanescent promise of a joyful future together.

As sensitive advertisers reach into that wellspring of my life, they speak to me in a language beyond words or selling. They ask me to consider their brand as a valid part of my future because it so successfully understands my past.

Excerpted from Generation Reinvention: How Boomers Today Are Changing Business, Marketing, Aging and the Future. 

Motivation for Boomers to Achieve Fitness and Health Resolutions in 2015

When Mark Crooks, PhD, endured disfiguring cancer at age eight, he toughened up and battled a pernicious disease for the rest of his life. In spite of four recurrences, he thrived for the next 57 years.  

Ahead of me loped a towering athlete with one remaining lung. Cancer had destroyed his other lung two years earlier, although he never smoked cigarettes and had been a running pioneer since the 1970s. He was my benchmark for physical fitness--my inspirational deliverer from seven years of juvenile nicotine addiction--so I always took advantage of our infrequent opportunities to go jogging together.

Dappled sunlight spilled upon the forested trail where we ran, and I felt elation to see Dr. Mark Crooks pulling ahead, effortlessly. Though disabled with a single lung, he still could trounce me on the trail. As his wide shoulders and dark mane of wavy hair shape-shifted into elm tree shadows ahead, I reflected upon self-empowered living that he embodied.

He was a proud man who knew much about cancer, pain, and rehabilitation. When we jogged that spring day near his home in south Kansas City, he had already survived cancer for fifty-five years, battling nerve, thyroid, and lung cancers. He would face two more metastatic bouts--prostate and liver--before it would be over.

Cancer imposed egregious injustices upon an athlete and former marine who had earned a doctoral degree in exercise physiology and had dedicated many years to inspiring and teaching stricken men how to recover from heart attacks. His first mitochondrial mutation followed a head-and-neck X-ray in infancy: an untested therapy unwisely deployed by a physician to fight sinus infection. Then a sarcoma appeared on his neck at age eight.

But I knew his mind well after three decades of friendship. He wasn't thinking about the injustice of metastatic disease. He was thinking about a beautiful day --fresh air, sweet scents of budding trees, and his daily mastery over inertia. He wasn't trying to intimidate me with superior conditioning either. Mark just ran far and away in the manner he chose to spend part of each day. His only unrivaled competitor was the nemesis lurking within since childhood. Early immersion in mortality propelled his life course and had given him uncommon determination to fight evil with science, experimentation, and risk-taking.

Most lives cannot be summed up by a single incident; rather, most human stories are collections of actions and reactions, an amalgam becoming a narrative, of plots and subplots spanning decades. This was also true for Mark's story, but in one oddly defining moment he leapt from the apex of a bridge crossing a dangerous river, plunging ten stories and landing in nine feet of coffee-colored water.

For weeks he had honed his physique with free weights and running, living a Spartan existence and practicing mid-air orientation through trial jumps in the Missouri Ozarks. From successively higher limestone cliffs, he had jumped into space, landing as if a professional cliff jumper. He then picked the Paseo Bridge in Kansas City, a final jump location from which several tortured men had committed suicide.

As he launched into the void from the lip of that bridge, an eighteen-wheeler blasted by him. Wind draft pushed his torso forward, introducing the possibility that he would land imperfectly and break his back. Then in midair he mounted an invisible bicycle and pedaled for the finish. His body became vertical within a free-fall reaching sixty-three miles per hour, and he slipped splash-less into choppy, mucky currents. Seconds later he exploded through the surface, arms extended in Olympic victory.

Jumping from a bridge into a river did not define Mark, but that single courageous act illuminated his incandescent spirit while elaborating his message: humans can achieve greater wellness by taking calculated risks.

His risks were bold and brash; the doctor became his own experiments. Yet he did not advocate for mere mortals to follow in his jump stream. He saw risk as relative: one man's Arctic Circle trek is another man's casual day hike; one woman's skydiving free-fall is another woman's tethered zip-line. Risk lies more in the heart of the actor than in the act itself.

Endorphins are a gift for taking risks: opiate pretenders that can reduce pain and create well-being, and, according to some authorities, become the biochemicals of longevity. Those same neurotransmitters had also molded an image of contentment that I witnessed in a super-athletic, one-lung man leaving me to follow his footprints in damp loam of a Kansas running trail.

I could also see Mark in the flow, and to him that word meant more than going with the flow. Flow means unwavering immersion in activity-- the ultimate way to harness emotions in service of high-performance, a loss of reflective self-consciousness. The pinnacle of the flow experience includes feelings of spontaneous joy and rapture. Often achieved through planned risks, flow is one critical wellness strategy to combat stress hormones. Taoism has for millennia recognized this mindset as "action of inaction" or "doing without doing." An assertive man with many reasons to doubt his prowess had conquered uncertainty, depression, and anxiety as he achieved flow transcendence--capturing states of being that had also empowered Michelangelo as the Master painted the Vatican's Sistine Chapel.

Whether swimming 375 miles nonstop in the frigid Missouri River from Kansas City to St. Louis for five grueling days, or scaling the exterior of the tallest skyscraper in the Midwest, Mark commanded intense focus with each selected feat. He pushed himself forward with wisdom succinctly articulated by Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century existentialist: "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." That which did not kill Mark made him stronger, and he gained strength with leaps, dives, and near-misses.

Following our final run together, Mark shared his thoughts about aging, disease and decline, an unholy triumvirate that had visited him when much too young. "I still have a warrior mentality," he said. "I'm a fighter. My whole life has been about overcoming things. Adopting fitness as a way of life and part of your daily regimen will keep you more mentally stable.

"I still feel that the best of my life is yet to come. I have certain optimism because I don't realize the limitations that most sixty-three-year-old men have."

His hourglass emptied two years later within the solitude of the Kansas City Hospice. Even then he shoved an intravenous cart around the corridors for glorious minutes of independent movement. Though death was at his doorstep, he still defied mortal inevitability, a diminished man but a noble spirit unwilling to submit until left no further options.

Mark Crooks, PhD, died on July 8, 2010. He finished life on his terms. He prevailed for decades over disease, depression, and disinterest. He found satisfying self-expression through running shoes and countless T-shirts drenched with sweat. And he defied aging, not to deny the inevitable but to thwart its pace, a warrior to the end.