How to live like people in 'The Blue Zones'

Without actually living in a 'Blue Zone'

Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash

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Good afternoon, my friends! ☀️ (Or good morning — or good evening, even — depending on where you are in the world.)

Two weeks ago, when we last left off, it was week 18 of the half marathon training plan we’d been following together since the start of the year.

I was hearing from many of you that you were feeling good and ready to run; I hadn’t been as faithful as I’d hoped to the plan — a temptation I fall victim to all too frequently, I’m afraid — but I was feeling really strong on my runs in the weeks leading up to our race weekend.

Then, the week before our race together, I felt pain in my left foot. Sharp pain. Immediately under the arch, where it transitions into the flat part of the foot. (I realize I’m probably not using the correct biological names for the tendons and ligaments I’m describing, but hopefully you know what I mean!)

I stopped around the one-mile point of my run that day, and walked for a half-mile or so. Then I started up running again, and felt okay. The pain was gone.

Two days later, I went for a run again, thinking I could get in five miles or so. I successfully completed my five miles, but still felt pain, this time on the outside of my foot. Not as sharp, but still the kind of thing that makes you go “hmmmm.”

A couple of days after that, my foot grabbed me by the proverbial lapels as if saying, “it’s time for you to listen to what I’m trying to tell you.” When I was almost three miles into my run, I felt a pain so sharp, it felt like someone had stabbed a knife into the bottom of my foot — I’m not kidding, it felt like a lightning bolt had struck my foot.

I had to stop immediately. I limped for several strides until I could regain a normal footing. Then I walked slowly along the rest of the route I had planned back to my car.

And that, unfortunately, was that.

Since then, I’ve been resting from running. I’m going to keep doing that to give my foot time to heal, because I want to run again. (I really want to, in fact; I’d been feeling better than ever on many of my runs in the weeks leading up to our race day.) Hopefully this break won’t be long — I plan to try again in two to three weeks — but I may need to keep my runs to shorter distances, at least for a while. Like the saying goes, only time will tell.

I share that with you not so I can have a pity party, however. (Or, at least, that’s not the only reason.) Rather, it’s to give you an idea of why I’m planning to take the next “season” of the newsletter in a different direction — one that’s still (very much) related to running and health, just from a different angle.

I want to write about food. Let me tell you why.

For a while now, I just haven’t felt like my old self. Physically, I mean. I haven’t felt the same energy level I used to feel, the spring in my step that I once felt. Of course, I feel different when I’m on a run — then, my energy is almost always good, and I still feel that after-run glow we all know and love.

But soon after I’m done, I go back to feeling listless and blah. And I think I know why. The reason is, because for nearly my entire life, when it comes to eating and nutrition, I’ve essentially been like this:

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I absolutely love food. But when I eat, I rarely think about what I put into my body. I’ve always been promiscuous when it comes to eating, and still am. Now that I’ve crossed age 50, though, I see the pitfalls of those choices — in my energy level, in the overall way food makes me feel.

And I don’t want to feel that way anymore.

I’ve been tossing this around in the back of my mind for the past few weeks, realizing — of course! — that I need to make healthier choices about the foods I eat. (Who doesn’t?) Then I remembered an article I read several years ago in the New York Times Magazine, titled “The Island Where People Forget to Die.”

It was written by Dan Buettner, a writer then best known for his work in National Geographic, for which he had traveled the world to meet, interview and study people who were living unusually long lives. He wanted to discover what they ate, how they exercised, how they managed their lives to reach such old ages — many in their mid-90s, and many over 100 — and still be in good health.

The article kicks off with the story of Stamatis Moraitis, a Greek World War II veteran who came to live in the United States in 1943, after suffering a combat injury. I’ll let Buettner tell his story:

“He’d survived a gunshot wound, escaped to Turkey and eventually talked his way onto the Queen Elizabeth, then serving as a troopship, to cross the Atlantic. Moraitis settled in Port Jefferson, N.Y., an enclave of countrymen from his native island, Ikaria. He quickly landed a job doing manual labor. Later, he moved to Boynton Beach, Fla. Along the way, Moraitis married a Greek-American woman, had three children and bought a three-bedroom house and a 1951 Chevrolet.

One day in 1976, Moraitis felt short of breath. Climbing stairs was a chore; he had to quit working midday. After X-rays, his doctor concluded that Moraitis had lung cancer. As he recalls, nine other doctors confirmed the diagnosis. They gave him nine months to live. He was in his mid-60s.

Moraitis considered staying in America and seeking aggressive cancer treatment at a local hospital. That way, he could also be close to his adult children. But he decided instead to return to Ikaria, where he could be buried with his ancestors in a cemetery shaded by oak trees that overlooked the Aegean Sea…”

Were any of us in Moraitis’s shoes, we’d likely think, “Okay, this is it. I’ve had a good run, but no one lives forever. Let’s go live out our remaining years close to our family.”

And, if we stayed in the U.S. — where we’d continue to live a Western lifestyle, spending a large amount of time in our cars and eating the foods Americans eat and enduring the stresses most Americans take for granted — that’s likely how things would play out.

But that’s not how they played out for Moraitis. Not by a long shot:

“Moraitis and Elpiniki moved in with his elderly parents, into a tiny, whitewashed house on two acres of stepped vineyards near Evdilos, on the north side of Ikaria. At first, he spent his days in bed, as his mother and wife tended to him. He reconnected with his faith. On Sunday mornings, he hobbled up the hill to a tiny Greek Orthodox chapel where his grandfather once served as a priest. When his childhood friends discovered that he had moved back, they started showing up every afternoon. They’d talk for hours, an activity that invariably involved a bottle or two of locally produced wine. I might as well die happy, he thought.

In the ensuing months, something strange happened. He says he started to feel stronger. One day, feeling ambitious, he planted some vegetables in the garden. He didn’t expect to live to harvest them, but he enjoyed being in the sunshine, breathing the ocean air. Elpiniki could enjoy the fresh vegetables after he was gone.

Six months came and went. Moraitis didn’t die. Instead, he reaped his garden and, feeling emboldened, cleaned up the family vineyard as well. Easing himself into the island routine, he woke up when he felt like it, worked in the vineyards until midafternoon, made himself lunch and then took a long nap. In the evenings, he often walked to the local tavern, where he played dominoes past midnight. The years passed. His health continued to improve. He added a couple of rooms to his parents’ home so his children could visit. He built up the vineyard until it produced 400 gallons of wine a year. Today, three and a half decades later, he’s 97 years old — according to an official document he disputes; he says he’s 102 — and cancer-free. He never went through chemotherapy, took drugs or sought therapy of any sort. All he did was move home to Ikaria.”

(Let me state for the record that I don’t recommend foregoing chemotherapy or any other medical treatment when facing a disease like cancer. I’m a 100% believer that you should trust and listen to your doctors and nurses. After all, we can’t know for certain what helped Moraitis recover the way he did; he may be a special case, a genetically gifted person who simply got lucky.)

That said, I still think we have much to learn from what Buettner discovered when he traveled to Ikaria, research he later expanded into a book titled The Blue Zones — the name he gave to special places around the world where people appear to live longer, healthier and more satisfied lives than anyplace else in the world.

I picked up the book at my local Barnes & Noble over the weekend and have been thumbing through it, reading the stories of people not only in Ikaria, but also in Sardinia (an island off the coast of Italy), Okinawa, Japan; the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California — all places where people, particularly older people, seem to have found the secret to healthy living.

I’m completely entranced with their stories, and part of me would love to go the airport today and buy a one-way ticket to one of them, so I can start living the way they do.

Of course, I can’t actually do that. (Not without abandoning the people I love, anyway.)

So, what I’d like to do over the next several issues of the newsletter — perhaps through the summer, even — is explore how they live and what we can learn from it, and how I can implement as much of it as possible in my own life. And, of course, bring you along on this journey with me.

I hope to talk with people who can educate me on how to eat better — which will be essentially like starting from scratch for someone raised on Southern food, Cap’n Crunch and McDonald’s for most of his life.

Where I live, Atlanta, is perfectly suited to do this — especially from the perspective of food, and really everything we put into our bodies. We have farmer’s markets galore here almost every weekend, plus supermarkets and other food markets that offer a huge variety of things to eat you’d never find in a Publix.

My plan is to explore as many of them as I can, and to learn as much as possible about how to eat healthier in the way they do in the Blue Zones — and, hopefully, regain the energy I’ve lost.

Also along the way this summer, for paying subscribers I’ll provide training programs for shorter distance runs — like 10K’s and 10-milers — as that’s what I’ll be focusing on as I (hopefully!) recover from my injury.

As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running has been going. I’ve missed you all these past couple of weeks! But I’m back now, and ready to get started again.

Your friend,

— Terrell