HABITS OF THE HEART
A new guy showed up in the YMCA locker room today with a slip of paper in his hand and a bewildered expression on his face. He was a new member, seeking to match the number a staffer at the front desk had given him with a locker in the “Men’s Area.” We have a steam room there, which works some of the time, and a bank of six showers, and a sauna with a new Finnish-made stove, and a big tile hot tub which I never set toe in – too much like a cauldron of human soup – and now a new guy wandering around the banks of 300 lockers, looking for his. I’d never seen him, and here we are in January, and so I assumed he was a New Year’s resolution guy. They come and they go.
I’ve been a member of the Y here for twenty-one years, have had the same locker for all of that time, and I am a regular. Five days a week, morning hours, mostly group-exercise classes with the occasional stint on the stationary bike and some lifting on my own in the weight room. Before the Y in Walla Walla, the Y in Missoula, and before that, the Western Montana Sports Medicine Center, also in Missoula. Total it up, and I’ve been doing my fitness routine – religiously – for just under forty years. I only miss a week when we’re traveling (we seldom travel) or I’m leading a Lewis and Clark history tour across the Northwest (12-day trek, once a year, not every year).
I have seen a lot of New Years resolution people come and go. Mostly, they seem to go.
The guy looked to be around 45 or 50, not fat but a tad on the chunky side, with a pleasant face and a chipper “good morning” for me. I thought to help him out until I remembered that I don’t how the locker numbers run, either. No sense two of us blindly wandering around, and I was only half-dressed anyway. As I watched him, a sudden thought popped into my head in the form of a phrase: the best of the good habits. I wanted to tell him: this is the best of the good habits, but it only works, really, if it becomes a true habit. Find your bliss in it, brother, and stay with it. Make it a good marriage, no matter the condition of your actual marriage. With the abundant rewards this pays over time, you literally cannot do anything better for yourself. But I said nothing to him since, after all, saying to a total stranger what I just said above would be presumptuous, rude, even haughty. I don’t mean to be any of those things. I do mean to let a person know, this habit can save your life.
It saved mine.
In 1999, I was 48 years old, holding down two stressful jobs, and loving life in Missoula. I had been a member of the Sports Medicine Center for around 15 years and had made a habit of my fitness regime. Stairmasters and Gauntlets eventually bored me to death, so my perceptive wife Dorothy took me by the hand and introduced me to a step aerobics class one Sunday afternoon. Step was still big then, and I was bewildered and embarrassed in a low-ceiling room packed with twenty lycra-clad females, wall-length mirrors, and very loud music. I of course was the only male, and humiliated in the way that only foolish self-conscious men can be. Somehow my idiotic pride simmered down, and I finished the class, and then went back for another class, and another – and soon Dorothy gave up her membership to work out at home, and I kept going. I was hooked – routinely clocking in at peak workout heart-rate of 154 back then, and loving the danciness of the class. That I was always the only male became, in time, a new point of pride. The better kind.
One day in the step class, heart rate soaring and music throbbing, I felt a strange sensation – an odd little pain that started in my chest and then radiated up into my right shoulder. I’d once been treated for acid reflux, and it felt sort of like that but not quite. I stopped my workout, took a long drink of water while everyone else continued, and let my heart rate drop. As soon as it did, the little pain subsided. I went back to stepping, cranked things up, and the pain returned. The class soon ended, the pain disappeared, and I didn’t think about it again until the next day – same class, different teacher. And the same cycle of pain – low-level but unmistakable, radiating out to my shoulder – but only at max heart-rate. It was something to take to the doctor’s. I lucked out and was able to see my GP a day later, told her my symptoms, and expected her to agree that this was the return of acid reflux – tho it had been years since my treatment. She said, “Let’s put you on a treadmill just to make sure.” When she looked at the stress test readout, she immediately ushered me down the hall to the office of a cardiologist named Mark Sanz.
The following morning at 6 a.m. I checked into St. Pat’s heart center for an angioplasty. One stent went in – the left anterior descending artery, the spot often known as the widowmaker. My blockage exceeded 90 percent; Dr. Sanz said it was probably only a matter of days, maybe a week or two, before I would have experienced a massive heart attack. The widowmaker may well have been the end of me before age 50.
More than one thing saved my life. Certainly, Dr. Sanz’s remarkable skill and the immense technology at his disposal. Certainly, the perceptiveness of my GP, Dr. Judy Visscher, who placed my feet on a stress-test treadmill in the nick of time. But also the thing that initiated my turn toward the life-saving operating room in the first place: my fitness. I knew my body; I knew it under the stresses of daily workouts; I knew in a heart beat that something was wrong. If I were not in the shape I was in, if I did not possess such intimacy with my body – heart, lungs, sweat glands, arteries and veins – you and I would not be having this conversation. I changed my diet, went on meds, and agreed to long-range series of heart check-ups. But I did not change my workout regime.
The best of the good habits. But it’s a lot more than the drama of a life-saving alert. I feel better, I think better, I sleep better, I hike better, I drive better, I eat and drink better, I heal faster, I don’t get viruses, my blood pressure and resting heart rate seem stable and good – because of the exercise habit. The sociologist Robert Bellah wrote a book back around that same time I was stepping in a Missoula fitness class. The book, discussing patterns that form strong human communities, had absolutely nothing to do with exercise but carried the perfect title for it: Habits of the Heart.
I didn’t stay to see where the new guy finally found his locker, but as I left the Men’s Area I was saying a little prayer to Nautilus for him under my breath: Please let him keep that locker for a good 40 years.