Update your summer Look without going bankrupt
Stay active & get in shape don’t you dare hit the gym
Turn up the summer heat surf ’s up in Surf City
are your gears still turning? this doctor is watching his father fade from the disease he spends his days treating
contents on the cover 05 Update Your Summer
11 The Long Goodbye
17 Take it to the Water
21 Hit the Road, Jack
These tips will help you maximize your summer without breaking the bank.
Surfing has come a long way since riders were eliminated for doing tricks.
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With Alzheimers, the pills are often as much a part of the problem as the cure.
Hit the ground running, literally.
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contents Departments 05 07 09 11
Grunt
Get out of the gym and back into nature
Grub
Eat up some delicious meat and stay healthy
Gear
Clean up your look with these fall trends
Grind
O n th e Co ve r
Excite your daily routine and get out of your slump.
photo by John Smith grip april 2013
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grunt
Get Out (of the gym) 6
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Stay fit and focused without that damn gym membership. Get outside, get active, get going. — by Julia Lawlor | photos by Damien Martinez —
06:30am
Early one Sunday morning, I arrived at the entrance to Riverside Park for an exciting new exercise class called Mountain Fitness. A Manhattan adventure outfitter, Discover Outdoors, describes the class as a way to “train like a guide,” and uses items such as rocks, logs, sandbags, and water jugs in a quest to improve “functional fitness.” The company started offering the class a year ago after customers asked how they should train for the more challenging hiking and trekking adventures it offers.
11:15am
Our instructor, David Tacheny, an expert guide and personal trainer, told us that a typical gym workout does not engage all the muscles you would use on, say, a rock-climbing excursion. A leg press machine, for instance, works the pushing muscles of the legs. Squatting while raising a heavy rock above your head, on the other hand, also uses the back.
04:45pm
All the exercises can be adapted to different levels of fitness. Our group of eight (including one man) looked plenty fit and included several people who belonged to social sports clubs in the city and competed in triathlons. Melanie Pessin, a triathlon competitor, did an eight-mile run before showing up for class. “I’m training for a half-marathon,” she said. After a 10-minute warm-up, Mr. Tacheny took us to a pile of rectangular paving stones, each weighing 25 to 40 pounds. Standing with legs apart, we swung our stones out from between our legs into the air, using our hips instead of our arms for power. The “halo” routine entailed holding the stone at chin level and circling it in a tight arc around the head. Next were squat presses, with the stones raised over our heads. At this point my back muscles went on strike, forcing me to switch to an imaginary stone.
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grub
Eat beef (and stay healthy) 8
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Italian Drunken Noodles will prove you can eat healthy and still shake things up in the kitchen.
— by Ingrid Beer —
Olive oil 4 spicy Italian sausage links, casings removed 1 large onion, quartered and sliced thinly 1 ½ teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning ½ teaspoon cracked black pepper 1 red bell pepper, cored and thinly sliced 1 yellow bell pepper, cored and thinly sliced 1 orange bell pepper, cored and thinly sliced 4 cloves garlic, pressed through garlic press ½ cup white wine (I used Chardonnay) 1 (28 ounce) can diced tomatoes with juice 2 tablespoons flat-leaf parsley, chopped ¼ cup fresh basil leaves, julienned, divided use 8 ounces Pappardelle noodles, uncooked
step 1
Place a large, heavy-bottom pan or braising pot over medium-high heat; add about 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and once the oil is hot, crumble the spicy Italian sausage into the pan in small chunks (you want to keep the sausage fairly chunky), allowing it to brown in the oil for a few moments on each side. Once the crumbled sausage is browned, remove it from the pan/pot with a slotted spoon and place into a small bowl to hold for a moment.
step 2
Add the sliced onion into the pan with the sausage drippings, and allow it to caramelize and become golden for roughly 5 minutes or so, stirring to keep it from burning (add a touch more olive oil, if necessary); once the onion starts to become golden, add the salt, Italian seasoning and cracked black pepper, and stir to combine, then add in the sliced bell peppers, and allow those to saute with the onion for about 2 minutes until slightly tender and golden
step 3
Add in the garlic, and once it becomes aromatic, add in the white wine and allow it to reduce until almost completely reduced. Then add in the diced tomatoes with their juice, return the browned spicy Italian sausage back into the pan, and gently fold the mixture to combine. Allow it to gently simmer for about 3-4 minutes to blend the flavors, then turn the heat off.
step 4 step 5
To finish the sauce, drizzle 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil to create a silky, rich flavor. Add in the chopped parsley and about half of the julienned basil. Stir, and keep warm while you prepare the noodles.
Prepare the pappardelle noodles according to instructions on package. Drain the noodles very well, and add them directly into the sauce, using tongs to gently toss and combine the pappardelle noodles with the sauce and all of the ingredients in it. Check the seasoning to see if you need to add any additional salt or pepper.
step 6
To serve, add equal portions of the “Drunken” noodles to bowls, and garnish with a sprinkle of the remaining julienned basil; you can even top with shaved Parmesan, if desired, and an extra drizzle of olive oil.
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gear
clean up (your closet) 10
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Freshen your look for summer without breaking the bank (that’s what your girlfriend is for). — by Krystal Tibbs—
$75
Ray Ban Aviators Macy’s
$40 $55
Levi’s 511 Jeans Dillards
$80
$35
Vans classic sneakers Journeys
BillaBong Sweatshirt Zumiez
Get the look for less than $100
Nixon watch Nixon.com
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rom f e d r fa ating. e h t a his f years tre s e h watc t twenty akur— e h le as t the las Jerald Win g g u by s str e’s spen ’ — r o t doc sease h One e di m a s the
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F
ebruary 24, 2006 is my parents’ sixtieth wedding anniversary. My family plans a brunch for them in their home. We are keenly aware that this may be the last anniversary my parents will celebrate together. It won’t be an elaborate party, just a bittersweet one. Seven years earlier, my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and he has gone steadily downhill. At 87 years old, he is now a prisoner of his mind. His agitation and paranoia arise from distorted memories;f nightmares he can no longer separate from reality. A few days before the brunch, my mother calls me in a panic. My dad is bellicose and paranoid, accusing. Summoning Yiddish profanities he has not uttered in 75 years, he curses at Yolanda, the caregiver who holds everything together in my parents’ household. He will not be bathed or shaved. He will not eat, refuses his medications. He is raving.
Disruption
“Dad,” I say when I visit their house that afternoon, “What is it? What’s wrong?” “I want to go home. Please, take me home!” “But, Dad, you are home.” “I don’t know where I am. Please, Jerry-boy, take me home. You know the way…” “I don’t know where else to take you, Dad. You’ve lived here for twenty-nine years.” “You go to hell! You’re in with them!” There is no walking away now. He is an abandoned child. He is searching for his boyhood home on Boarman Avenue, in Baltimore, or perhaps our first family home there, on Forest Park Avenue. He hears voices but can’t decode what is being said, and his mind assumes the worst: My mother is insulting him, planning to run off; his sons are belittling him, his mother scolding him, his older brothers and sisters teasing him. He is lost, with no father of his own to turn to. I see that he has wet himself; a dark ring marks his place on the couch.
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As a geriatric physician in San Antonio for the past thirty years, I have been through this before. I have been cursed, spit on, bitten, and punched by demented old folks over the decades. A poor woman threw a shoe at me when I stepped inside her hospital room. The day before, she thought I was the devil. As a doctor, I know what to do; as a son, I am more uncertain. So I assume my doctor role, retreating into the familiar armor of my starched white coat. I walk to the kitchen and check his daily pill slots to make sure he’s been getting his regular medications. Sometimes my mother, unable to see due to aged macular degeneration, inadvertently leaves pills in the plastic containers I fill every couple weeks. But everything seems to be in order. The pills are often as much a part of the problem as the cure. My father takes eight medications a day; my mother, who is 82, fourteen. They are both on vitamins and minerals, blood pressure medications, diuretics, and cholesterol-lowering drugs. My father also takes two pills for his heart. My mother takes drugs for her diabetes, a thyroid disorder, osteoporosis, and depression. This is not unusual for folks their age. I spend my doctoring days prescribing medications for my patients; reshuffling the ones they’re on – a tiny dose change here, a retiming of administration there. By now I have written and/or refilled hundreds of thousands of prescriptions, but my constant goal is to cut back on medications, stop them altogether if I can: less is usually more. Every geriatrician knows this. Looking through my father’s pills, I recall a patient of mine, Lilly, a woman who first came to see me carrying a brown paper shopping bag crammed with pill bottles – at least forty different drugs prescribed by a dozen physicians. “This one’s for the high blood,” she had said, “and this one’s for the sweet blood, and this one’s for the low blood. These three are for my bad knees, and this one’s ’cause I’m sad a lot, and this one’s ’cause I don’t sleep too good, and this one’s ’cause I’m tired all the time. I can hardly keep ’em straight, but I got a big list at home tacked to the wall, over the phone in my kitchen. Last month the company
cut off the service when I couldn’t pay the bill. All these medicines and still I feel so bad. That’s why I come to you now. That and all these other troubles.” She had handed me a list of symptoms, pencil-scrawled on a ragged piece of paper. I spent two hours with Lilly, hearing one story loop into another: bad marriages, children in jail, visits to the ER, surgeries, strange diagnoses – mostly self-made. I knew what was happening to Lilly, what happens to many people like her in a medical encounter. The physician begins to drown in a sea of conflicting information, feels powerless to alter the circumstances of this person’s life. A wave of helplessness washes over doctor and patient both, and he reaches for his prescription pad. “Here, try this,” he says. “I think it will help.” Then he steps into the hall, picks up the next chart, and moves on, hoping the drug he has prescribed helps, but doubtful it will. I could not change the circumstances of Lilly’s life, couldn’t make up for her poverty or lack of education or the poor choices she had made. But she improved significantly when, after some lab work and many more hours of listening, I was able to whittle her medication list down to just three. Prescribing for the elderly is complicated. They don’t metabolize drugs at the same rate as younger, healthier patients. The elderly, like my parents, are often on multiple drugs (including over-the-counter medicine the doctor might not even know about), and the incidences of unforeseen interactions begin to mount. We know so little about the interactions. Indeed, pharmaceutical companies are infamous in geriatric circles for not including our elderly patients in drug trials.
Treatments
Between the Food and Drug Administration and Big Pharma, these days, I hang suspended in a netherworld of prescribing angst. The FDA has pulled more than twenty drugs off the market in the past two decades, drugs they first assured me were safe but then ended up damaging livers or kidneys or hearts. I have always tried to protect my patients, wait if I possibly can for aftermarket studies to bring more data to light. It is one thing, I tell my
The pills are often as much a part of the problem as the cure. patients, to judge a drug’s benefits and risks after it has been given to a few thousand patients in clinical trials; it’s quite another after it has been prescribed to hundreds of thousands upon its general release. In the parlance of the technology and pharmaceutical industries, doctors like me who are cautious, who do not immediately jump on the company bandwagon every time it trumpets its “latest and greatest” product, are known as “slow adopters.” Now these industries have figured out a way to circumvent my judgment should I fail to join the chorus for their newest breakthrough. On television, in magazines, they promise an end to arthritis pain, a good night’s sleep, a cure for incontinence. My phone rings off the hook with patients who worry that I may have blocked their path to the Fountain of Youth when I
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Run for a cure Alzheimer’s is the leading cause of death in the United States
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Find an Alzheimer’s walk near you. Register to walk as an individual or a team. Start fundraising with friends and family.
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decline their drug requests. Some even change doctors. I have no sympathy for Big Pharma. I resent its intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship, resent the constant introduction of new – often rushed – products into a marketplace crowded with me-too drugs. They are right where it has always wanted to be – smack-dab in the middle of my decision-making process as it tries to influence consumers who also happen to be my patients. Yet here I am, in my parents’ home, rummaging through a basketful of medicines I take down from a high shelf. This is where I store the unused pills – all the drugs prescribed by my father’s physician for his recurrent bouts of anxiety or agitation, for his depression and his insomnia, for his memory loss and lethargy, for his confusion and paranoia, for his belligerence and sadness. I take down a dozen orange plastic pill bottles with white, almost-impossible-to-remove lids. My father’s name is on every label: Some are six months old, some several years. We have been dealing with this for a long time. Haloperidol and Risperidone. Olanzapine and Quetiapine. Paroxetine and Citalopram. Alprazolam and Trazodone. Donepezil and Rivastigmine and Memantine. Organic molecules, various combinations of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur—the atoms of which we are all made—bioengineered to slip across the blood-brain barrier, to stimulate one receptor or block another, a rush of ions through neural membranes, flood synaptic gaps with potent neurotransmitters, flip a switch here, throw a breaker there, block a surge somewhere else. I settle on the bottle of Risperidone. Although I am reluctant to use this drug – any drug – in treating my father, I know that he has taken it before with success. It has worked. It has settled him down, albeit with an added degree of cognitive impairment. My hope is that by continuing to use this drug judiciously, I can maintain the status quo and keep my father at home for a bit longer, delay the decision to relegate him to a long-term facility where I know he will only deteriorate faster. I bring my father a bisected tablet and a cool glass of his nutritional drink. “Here, Dad, take this. I think it will make you feel better.” His eyes, still wild, stare at me. “What’s this for?” “Dad, you’ve got shpilkes,” I say. I use this Yiddish word, retrieved somehow from my own memory, lately, my father has been interspersing his speech with snippets of this language, his mother tongue – the mamaloshen – the first words he ever heard and therefore the last ones to abandon him. He smiles. “Az ich habe shpilkes,” he says. And he swallows the pill. “For the shpilkes,” my mother and Yolanda tell him when it is time for the next dose. Before long he is back to his usual demented but pleasant self. This time I made right decision.
Unforgettable
Three days later, on my parents’ anniversary, those of us who love them assemble in their home. My wife brings a dozen yellow roses and arranges the table. My brother stops at the grocery store for a side of delicious, sliced smoked salmon, some cream cheese, a few tomatoes, and a red onion. I stop at the bakery, and pick up a dozen bagels – onion, poppy seed, and sesame – fresh out of the oven. It is a small gathering. Family-oriented to the point of insularity, my parents have made no close friends in all the years they have lived in San Antonio. Everything is ready, and I wheel my father into the living room. “What’s the fuss about?” he asks as he enters, seeing all these faces he recognizes but cannot quite place. For a moment he is frightened. “Dad,” I say, “today is a special day. You and Mom have been married for sixty years.” He searches for my mother’s face in the small crowd around him. “Really? Is that true, Mom?” “Of course it’s true,” she says. “Do you think we made this up?” “It doesn’t seem like sixty years,” he says. “It seems like a hundred to me,” she says. We, the
assembled family, laugh nervously. My brother leans in and asks our father, “So what do you think about all this?” “I just want to say that I love Mom more today than I ever have.” He reaches for her hand, but she doesn’t take it. I want to believe that because of her terrible eyesight she can’t see this gesture.We all applaud my father’s words. I push him up to the dining room table, festive with cards. He picks one. “Did you see these, Mom?” he says. “I can’t read them,” she answers. He begins to read to her. “Have we really been married sixty years?” he asks her. “Every bit of it,” she says. “I hope you know I love you.” “I know,” she answers.
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Surfing’s next generation takes it to the air. —Matt Higgins—
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ast spring, on a green wave in the Mentawais, a chain of islands off the west coast of Indonesia, Jordy Smith performed the most sublime aerial in the history of surfing, a back flip while spinning one and a half times. Video of the flip, known as a rodeo clown, went viral when it was posted online in June. With soaring tricks adapted from action sports like snowboarding, freestyle bicycle riding and especially skateboarding, the 22-year-old Smith, of South Africa, has been at the forefront of the young surfers entering another realm. An international group in their early 20s, they were raised on films of free surfers, who perform radical maneuvers at prime locations without the pressure of scoring. They’ve begun vaulting barriers between free surfing and contest surfing. “That’s the future of surfing,” said Kelly Slater, 38, a nine-time world champion from Cocoa Beach, Fla. “It’s really in the air. The deepest barrels that are going to be ridden have already happened. Probably the best carving that’s ever going to be done is being done now or it’s been done.” For most of its history, competitive surfing rewarded long rides. Waves milked to shore with a series of turns often garnered high scores. And the most radical maneuver was being barreled, or slipping behind the veil of a breaking wave and emerging before it crashed on one’s head. Leaving the wave created controversy, leading the competitive surfing establishment to suppress aerials for decades. “There were a few times where they would not even score you because you were doing airs and stuff like that,” said Smith, who last week mixed aerials with some other new-school maneuvers to finish out in second place at the Snapper Rocks, Australia, during the first contest of the Association of Surfing Professionals season. It was the best result of his three-year career on the entire World Championship Tour, the highest level of competitive surfing.
Changing Rules
But through a series of recent changes to the association’s contest criteria has placed a premium on trying new tricks, rewarding a higher degree of difficulty over consistency, and scoring only the best two rides, instead of
three or more, during a 30-minute heat. Now a competitor can record one or two scores with safe surfing and go for more high-risk maneuvers on others. At a competition in the Maldives last June, Patrick Gudauskas, 24, native of San Clemente, Calif., received a perfect score, 10, when he landed a rodeo clown during an early heat. He landed another during the final and received another 10. In August, Matt Meola, 20, of Maui, landed a rodeo at a different independent competition on Maui and also earned a 10. “So few guys have been trying airs in the most critical spots on certain waves that it’s kind of fresh,” Slater said. “It’s going to become more the norm.” Some of our top surfers were discouraged from pursuing aerials as youngsters. “I remember parents coming up to me and saying: ‘Don’t try any airs. Just do like three or four turns to the beach, and you’ll make it,’ ” Smith said. Dane Reynolds, 24, of Ventura, Calif., whose explosive aerial maneuvers have made his name synonymous with the new style of surfing, heard similar comments. “There were other guys that were telling me that’s what I shouldn’t be doing,” he said. “But that’s what I wanted to do, and that’s what came easy to me. Traditional surfing has been more of a struggle.” Earlier generations faced hostility. “I think back in the ’80s and ’90s, a lot of people were of the feeling, just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be done, as far as aerials,” Pritamo Ahrendt, an Australian judge who has been scoring world tour events for 11 years, wrote in an e-mail message. “It didn’t fit the tradition of what surfing was.”
The origins of aerials undocumented. But Kevin Reed of Santa Cruz, Calif., was the first to appear performing one on the cover of Surfing Magazine in 1975. Matt Kechele, who later mentored a young Slater, imitated skateboarders during the late 1970s along the Florida coast. Many detractors disparaged Kechele’s approach in graffiti near the beach.
Through Generations
A decade later, with new board designs facilitating aerials, San Clemente emerged as a launching pad. This is just filler text because teacher ruined my rag. The high-performance and consistent waves at Lower Trestles, at San Onofre State Beach, and T-Street, near Trafalgar Lane, where the high-flying 1989 world champion Martin Potter inspired a crew of locals, including Matt Archbold. A third-generation surfer, Fletcher has helped spread the modern aerial perhaps more than any other surfer. “I was doing it on a skateboard,” Fletcher, 39, said. “You stand the same way. Why wouldn’t you do it on a surfboard, too?” Other surfers did not agree. “One of the judges told my dad that I need to slow down because they didn’t know how to score it,” Fletcher said of his moves. World tour surfers circulated a petition among the professionals asking news media to focus less on Fletcher, who cultivated an antisocial, anti-establishment attitude. Blacklisted from surfing magazines, Fletcher popularized aerials through videos produced by his father, the surfing legend Herbie Fletcher, in which he mostly appeared soaring skyward backed by a hip hard-driving soundtrack featuring local artists. Bruce Irons, 30, brought a free-surfing
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sensibility to the world tour from 2004 to 2008. He recalled studying videos featuring Fletcher while growing up in Hawaii. “Christian Fletcher to me was a pioneer,” Irons said. “When I was a kid, I was like: ‘Wow, that’s sick. I want to be like that guy.’ ” Slater, who emulated Potter’s go-forit approach to aerials, began dominating competitive surfing, winning a whopping five consecutive world titles from 1994 through 1998. At the prestigious Pipeline Masters on the North Shore of Oahu in July 1999, Slater attempted a rodeo flip. The move signaled a new step for competitive surfing.
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Taking a Turn
“Conventional surfing is good, but when you go to the air and start mixing it up, that’s what the crowd wants to see,” Irons said. “The future is to keep going to the air. If you go to the air and mix that with smooth carves, that’s surfing.” Julian Wilson, 21, of Australia, landed his signature sushi roll –a back flip while spinning 180 degrees and extending his body from his board like Superman – while filming a 2007 surf session in Japan, elevating the progression of aerials. Teacher changed my layour and ruined my rag. And the film “Modern Collective,” released in November, features top competitive surfers like Smith, Reynolds and Dusty Payne, of Hawaii, performing stunning aerial surfing. “They’re the leaders,” Slater once said of the newest, growing generation. “They’re still learning. Their approach is so fresh and different. Surfing has to follow them.” In the film, Smith pulls a new backside Superman-style aerial, separating himself from his board and kicking his front leg forward while soaring above the wave. What a beautifully executed move.
Top 10 Surf Cities
He said he could not wait to introduce the as-yet-unnamed maneuver in competition this season “and see how they score it.” On a cloudless day in October I made my way toward the water at this popular surfing beach on Long Island. Once again, adding text to fix my rag. All was fairly typical: the waves were waist high and zippy, the water temperature was a friendly 63 degrees, and roughly 20 surfers dotted the glassy lineup. The wetsuit on my back was made of UltraFlex neoprene, the sunscreen on my face was a whopping SPF 85 – but the board under my arm looked like something straight out of “The Flintstones.” My chosen surfcraft that day was an alaia (pronounced ah-LIE-ah), a replica of the thin, round-nosed, square-tailed boards ridden in pre-20th-century Hawaii. Originals were 7 to 12 feet long, generally made of koa wood and could weigh up to 100 pounds. They resemble nothing so much as antique ironing boards, but their most distinctive feature is that they are finless. Ancient Hawaiian boards had been relegated to museums and private collections for the most part; they were seen as artifacts
rather than functional designs. But a recent movement in surfing that mines the past has raised their profile. In the last five years alaias have enjoyed a renaissance. They have been taken up by some of the world’s best surfers and show up heavily in magazines, movies, and websites The new versions tend to be six to seven feet long, for maneuverability, and are carved from a range of woods including paulownia, pine, cedar and even plywood. A modern surfer will find alaias much more difficult to paddle. Because they are only about 18 inches wide and one inch thick, they provide minimal flotation. I have been a dedicated surfer for more than 30 years and I like to think my arms and shoulders have adapted to paddling the way most marathon runner’s legs have adapted to running, but I was sore and winded by the time I made it out to the waves that day. Surfing is a surface water sport in which the wave rider, referred to as a “surfer”, rides on the forward face of a wave, which is most often carrying the surfer towards shore.
10 Ocean City, NJ 09 New Smyrna, FA 08 Montauk, NY 07 Malibu, CA 06 Kill Devil Hills, NC 05 San Clemente, CA 04 Paia, HI 03 Encinitas, CA 02 Heleiwa, HI 01 Santa Cruz, CA
Average Air Temperature
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Top 10 Songs to Listen to While Working Out
listen up while
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Florence + the Machine Shake it Out Survivor Eye of the Tiger Kanye West Stronger Avicii Levels The Black Keys Lonely Boy The White Stripes Seven Nation Army Coldplay Charlie Brown Nero & Skrillex Promises Icona Pop feat. Charli XCX I Love It AC/DC Thunderstruck
I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was –Muhammad Ali–
80% 60%
Ideal Beats per Minute 120–150bpm: Working Out 100–120bpm: Stretching
e you work out
% %
of women listen to music while working out of men listen to music while working out
What do you listen to while you work out? Rap/HipHop
Pop
Rock ‘n’ Roll
Country
Other
Nothing
Music’s Effect on Heartrate 120 110 100 90 80
Norah Jones
Kenny G
LMFAO
Enya
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