WRITING AND RESOURCES

We’ve been up here for three days, trekking the 10,000-foot ridges of the Schell Creek Range of east-central Nevada. I take a heavy breath and continue along another granite-and-limestone slope flecked with bristlecone pines—gnarled, 2,000-year-old survivors found only in the American West’s highest, harshest landscapes. The searing in my legs and lungs eases as the severe incline levels out into a grassy meadow ringed by aspens, their leaves quaking in the cool breeze. Donnie Vincent holds up a hand to halt me, and grins.
“This place looks elky,” he says, pointing to the aspens. “Those oval-shaped marks on the trees are from elk eating the bark.”
Elk are why we’re here. Vincent and I have spent months preparing to track old males, 7 to 10 years old, who can weigh upwards of 800 pounds and wear antlers that reach nearly as high as a basketball hoop.

Thanks to research, we know that a person’s heart can have a different age from that of, say, his kidneys or his brain, which is to say different organs within a single human body can show varying degrees of stress and strain. (Which, if you think about it, is really all age is: a manifestation of how much stress or strain your body has endured and exhibits.)
But we also know that for the average guy — let’s call him “you” — lung health and mental speed peak around your mid-20s. Beginning at age 30, your muscle strength and size start decreasing by about 3 to 8 percent per decade, and cardiovascular endurance dies off by about 1 percent a year. By 40, you’re slower on your feet. Once you hit 50, your brain is shrinking and bones are softening. From 60 on, it’s Murphy’s Law: What can go wrong will go wrong, all aches and pains and doctor visits. Then you hit age 76 and, if you’re like the average American male, you die.

On June 27, 2020, Eric Roza masked up and flew from Boulder, Colorado, to San Jose, California, where he rented a car and began driving south. A tech entrepreneur who made his name and fortune with a data company he sold to Oracle for $1.2 billion in 2014, Roza, 53, had just spent, according to one source, $200 million buying CrossFit Inc., the largest fitness chain in the world, somewhat bigger than Dunkin’ and somewhat smaller than Domino’s. At its peak, you could have found one of the more than 15,000 CrossFit affiliates at most latitudes and longitudes around the world—in Nuuk, Greenland; in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; in Païta, New Caledonia; in Gillette, Wyoming. Roza had big ideas that he believed could radically change the brand. And despite the Starbucks-level ubiquity of CrossFit boxes and the titanic role the company has played in the functional-fitness boom of the 21st century, CrossFit needed to change—desperately …

What makes a fad diet tip? That’s a question Adrienne Rose Bitar, Ph.D., a nutrition historian at Cornell University, has spent her career answering. “Most diets start with some unhappiness we have with our lives and bodies,” she says.
Then you need a simple, counterintuitive message that resonates at the right time and place and blames a single culprit for your dissatisfaction. Low-fat diet: Fat is bad; don’t eat fat. Paleo: Processed foods are bad; eat only preindustrial foods like a caveman. With keto, you just do what your doctor (and mom) told you not to: Eat fat and skip the veggies. While this partly explains keto’s rise, it overlooks a critical aspect. The keto diet, it turns out, wasn’t engineered for weight loss.

My mom got sober when my dad was in rehab. This was 1985. She was sitting in the bathtub sipping a vodka tonic and flipping through a paperback. It was the same book my father would be reading in his recovery program. She came across these lines: “Try to drink and stop abruptly. Try it twice.” After years of boozing and drugging, those words revealed an undiscovered truth: At 35, she, too, needed to clean up.
With their shared source of misery behind them, my parents found calm, and my mom soon became pregnant with me. But five months in, my dad, at 29, decided the party wasn’t over and that a pregnant, dry, drinking buddy was no drinking buddy at all. He walked out on his two-year marriage for good.

The haircut occurred without fanfare on January 14, 2015, at Hair A-Go-Go in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Patricia Smith was going short. “I mean short-short,” says the blonde physician’s assistant, age 40. Army Ranger short. Smith faced the mirror. As the stylist cut, shoulder-length hair fell to the floor.
“That’s when I felt the pressure,” says Smith, a first lieutenant who joined the Marines at 17 to escape her small town and later transitioned to the Army National Guard. “The pressure of what I represent to military women and civilians…it was overwhelming.”

The men in my family have a history of acting on impulse. My father once got drunk on St. Patrick’s Day, painted his horse green, and rode bareback into a honky tonk with a woman who wasn’t my mother. His booze-fueled bent for B.S. and bedlam came from my grandfather, who, I’m told was the most charming sot, liar, and cheat in Ada County, Idaho. Like my dark features and long nose, my penchant for recklessness and revelry is probably genetic. And I was starting to ride that same horse.

The madness is about to begin. Fifteen men stand against a wall in a 6,000-square-foot converted warehouse in Salt Lake City. They’re anxious, and it shows in their unconscious movements—shifting feet, tapping fingers, darting eyes. The punk music blasting from overhead speakers adds an almost palpable intensity as Gym Jones’s splendidly profane, superhero-size fitness director, Rob MacDonald, saunters up and down their ranks.
“You, 48. You, 54. You, 63,” says MacDonald, jabbing a finger at three men in turn. “That’s how many calories you have to burn—in one minute. If you don’t make it, you’ll keep trying until you fucking do.”

We talked to many men like Louis, Charles, and Van for this story. They range in age from 27 to 76, and their opinions on the drug go from “probably helpful but no better than exercise” to “easily the most important drug ever discovered by mankind and should be a key topic of discussion in the upcoming presidential election cycle.” They are manual laborers, academics, medical doctors, entrepreneurs, and everything in between. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these men quietly experimenting with rapamycin across the country. And if these guys are right, they could be like the lucky rodents in the research, walking around with improved brain health, heart health, and vitality while the rest of us surrender to mortality. Or they could be killing themselves slowly.