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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Mr. Natural (Cont.)

OR YOU COULD CHOOSE otherwise and be yourself. As the afternoon at Lahey wore on, there was one exam left: the stress test. I stripped down to my shorts while a pretty nurse shaved my chest and hooked me up to a set of monitors. I climbed aboard the treadmill and began to walk, in accordance with the standard Bruce protocol for the Treadmill Exercise Stress Test, beginning at 1.7 miles per hour on a 10 percent grade and getting steeper and harder every three minutes. But—and this will amaze health club athletes—you get to hold on to the front bar. It's true that by the time the 21 minutes were up, my forearms were cramping. But it's also true that I was going six miles per hour up a 22 percent grade. And I was still able to wheeze "No problem" every time the nurse asked me how I was doing. I aced the test—me, my own out-the-door-every-afternoon-for-a-run-bike-ski self.

"Now I'll be able to say yes when people ask if anyone's ever gotten all the way through," the nurse said. Could one impress pretty nurses with a nonbeating nanoheart? Could one impress oneself? When I sat down with the doctor, we looked over all my numbers and calculated that there was a 3 percent chance I'd die of a coronary before the decade was out. Three percent's not nothing, and in the next decade it will get higher, and the decade after that, and then, by God, it will someday happen. But I'll take it. I can deal with being a real human.

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