Redlining: A Radical Approach to Fitness

Snow Country
November 1989
Original draft, by Tom LaRocque

"Okay go again," she ordered. Again Adkins started pedaling, wondering if he had done something wrong. Again the physiologist looked puzzled by what he saw on the screen. Again he gave Adkins the stop signal.

"You don't smoke, do you?" asked the physiologist.

"Nope," replied Adkins.

"Never have, have you?"

"Nope."

"You've got the heart of a teenager."

A teenage heart in a 68-year-old body. That characterization of his cardiovascular health came as a surprise even to Adkins. The year was 1978. Adkins sat shirtless in the only hospital in Sun Valley, Idaho, partaking of fitness tests designed for much younger corporate executives, drawn from other parts of the country. But no executive was he. The retired civil engineer had been invited in to the Sun Valley Health Institute to flush out the effectiveness of his new mountain-climbing fitness program, which was then as untested as it was unorthodox. Since then, Adkins has blossomed into something of a world-class athlete, which must be credited not only to an uncanny mental toughness, but to a revolutionary method of training he calls
"redlining."

Redlining involves charging up a hill of about a 30 percent grade at an all-out pace that sets your lungs on fire. Your heart races to the point where it feels like it might explode, which it might, since it's going at maybe 180 beats per minute. The whole point is to get your system going at a rate somewhere close to its "aerobic capacity," or top performance level. Your arms pump. Your legs scream for rest. You do that for 12 minutes, or 15 minutes, or as long as it takes you to climb 850 vertical feet. Adkins, now 76, does it four or tire times a week during Idaho's non-winter months.

Mornings, he is behind the wheel of his 1953 Ford pickup, rolling north on Highway 75 in the upper end of central Idaho's magnificent Wood River Valley. Two dogs are howling in the back of the truck as it heads toward the "stress slope" that Adkins has laid out on a mountainside two miles from his home. He's in his maroon warmup suit, which he'll peel off at the base of the hill. He'll stretch a bit click his stopwatch, and resolutely attack the hill. Fourteen minutes later, dripping sweat and sucking air like a vacuum, he'll click the watch again at the top.

Though he claims his main interest is in fitness rather than athletic supremacy, redlining has taken Adkins to the top in other ways as well. His first national championship came in 1981, when he won the U.S. Cycling Federation's 25-mile time trial bike race in the 70-74 age group. He turned in a time of 1:24:33 on a hilly course at Bear Mountain State Park, in California. "I'd been working on my bike the night before, and when I put it back together I couldn't get it into the lower gear," he recalls. "I had to stand up in the saddle and just burn on every hill, and it was a tremendous fight just to finish." He finished 20 seconds ahead of the previous age-group champ, Doug Gillette of Calif.

A year later, Adkins placed second in the USCF's annual 25-miler, in Tallahassee, Fla. In 1985 he entered the 75-79 age group. In the sweltering heat of Whispering Pines, N.C., he defeated Ed "Papa" Delano of California, who was previously unbeaten in USCF competition. "Loren was the only guy who looked like he was trying to win the race," a friend said later. He won with a time of 1:16:01, 49 seconds off the age-group record, which he plans to eclipse in 1986. In practice he has gone under 1:13 on a flat, windless course.

In skiing, since 1978 Adkins has placed second twice and third once in his age group in the Senior National Alpine Championships, sponsored by the U.S. Ski Association. He also took second in Nordic skiing in the 70-74 age group in national competition held in Sun Valley in 1982.

Speed-climbing, or running uphill, is the sport which most resembles Adkins's unique method of training. Unsurprisingly, he hods the course record in that sport's premiere event, the Pike's Peak Ascent Marathon, in the 70-74 age group. He has twice taken the over-70 gold medal in the 14.3-mile race, held each August near Manitou Springs, Colo.

The mementos of races past decorate the walls of a bedroom in Adkins's home, a pre-fab ranch house that he built six miles from Sun Valley, where he still lives with his wife of 49 years, Elsie. There are ribbons, medals and trophies, mostly for first-place finishes, but with several seconds and thirds scattered among them. "I don't mind not winning," he claims. "I'm the first one over to congratulate the guy who beats me." But whether it is in fact fitness or sport that makes him tick, judging by this room, would be a toss-up. Along another wall is a bookshelf full of exercise physiology textbooks with titles like "Basic Anatomy."

Adkins made himself. With the careful deliberation of an engineer, he studied the subject of physical fitness. He applied his knowledge to the task of transforming himself into an athlete. And having done so, he is afflicted by no false modesty. Sharp of memory and articulate of speech, he recalls even the finest details of this athletic triumphs. But he believes his brand of extreme-exertion training could produce comparable results in most anyone. "The only thing I might have over somebody else is I'm mentally tough. I can take the beating."

Even more remarkable that Adkins's athletic stature is the path he took to attain it. He began training in earnest at 68, an age at which most men do nothing more athletic than fishing. The intensity of his training violates the tenets of nearly all the conventional exercise currently peddled by popular fitness theorists. He does, however, applaud the efforts of Dr. Kenneth Cooper, the aerobics pioneer noted for pushing back athletic parameters for the senior set. But Adkins, whose oversize ears and quizzical countenance make him resemble Dr. Cooper himself, disdains most other fitness experts. "According to them, I'd be dead two or three hundred times by now," he snorts.

"I've been in this training program for eight years, and I'm living proof that it works. At age 68 to 75, you're supposed to be aging to beat hell. You know people 68 to 75? Hell, they get old so fast it's scary."

The story of Adkins's athletic ascent began 38 years ago, when, at half his present age, he suffered a midlife crisis of sorts. He fell 12 feet from the roof of a house he was building for his mother in Auburn, Calif. His body dropped between two exposed floor joists, and he caught himself by the arms. His legs shot out wildly in opposite directions, causing an extremely severe rupture of the sacroiliac joint in his lower back.

The pain was nearly overwhelming at first. He went from one physician to another seeking relief, but the medical profession was unable even to diagnose his problem correctly for more than a year. Today, seeming slightly amuse, he stoops over and imitates his posture during that year,
shuffling along like, well, an old man. "I couldn't get my chin off my knees," he says.

Complicating matters, or perhaps simplifying them, was that he was between careers at the time. He had found living in Los Angeles, where he worked as a chemical engineer, dissatisfying. "There was nothing particularly objectionable about it. I just wasn't happy with it," he says. "I didn't like driving through all the damn traffic to get to basketball games and football games and cabarets and to go swimming and dancing and everything else you do. I just wasn't happy with it." With characteristic resolve, he left a comfortable job with Shell Oil in 1948, and decided to leave the city as well.

So in spite of his untimely injury, Adkins had a decision to make. Where to go: to the mountains of Idaho, where he has spent much of his childhood or to Alaska, where he could live the life of a seafarer with his wife, in the bays of the southern gulf. The young couple has invested a good deal of time and money in a single-hull sailboat, which Adkins carefully crafted by hand in a garage in Los Angeles. To solve the dilemma, they set off on a six-week road trip to Alaska, in a modest military jeep.

The pain in his lower back made the trip almost unbearable for Adkins. "It was horrible," he recalls. "I could hardly do anything." At one point the jeep began to roll down a steep hill, and Adkins was unable to stop the vehicle by depressing the brake pedal. After disassembling and inspecting the jeep's front wheel, he realized the trouble was in his back, not his brakes. He was unable to impart even enough force to activate the brake shoes.

Nonetheless, the road trip "served its purpose," he says. Seeing the rough seas and stark lifestyle of Skagway, Alaska convinced Adkins and his wife not to settle there. On the way back home he signed on as a civil engineering aid with the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads in Boise, Idaho.

Back briefly in California, he met a chiropractor who diagnosed and treated his back trouble. "He said it was the most severe rip of the sacroiliac joint he had ever seen or heard about," says Adkins. "He was a great big fellow, about 250 pounds, and he put his arm underneath my back and took my leg over this way and ran it around in a circle. I just screamed bloody murder, and the sweat was pouring off of me and I was about to pass out."

But the treatment was effective enough to enable Adkins to stand erect again. In the fall of 1949, he and his wife hit the road again, this time bound for Idaho, where the mountains would eventually play a part in his physical transformation.

He worked on government road-building crews for the next 22 years, except for the two years he spent earning a degree in civil engineering from the University of Idaho. He was 45 at his graduation--"older than any of my teachers," he says. Shortly thereafter he spent two summers carving a road through the rugged Sawtooth National Forest, 25 miles north of Sun Valley, Idaho. He bought land just south of the forest's southern boundary, and
retired in 1971.

Though the years had diminished his back trouble considerably, the pain lingered. As a roads engineer he had, by, necessity, done some hill-climbing.  Doing so was endurable, if not enjoyable. Still, he harbored an ambition to climb mountains for fun, as he had as a boy growing up in Idaho. He recalls his initial trepidation about scaling the steep ridges surrounding his new home in 1971. "Well, are they close?" he nervously asked himself. "They're not too high, are they?"

He began taking short climbs, struggling up the least challenging terrain, enjoying the scenery and ignoring his discomfort. Slowly he gained agility and confidence, and his climbs grew longer. Within a few years he was spending as much as 12 hours at a time in the mountains, scaling the highest peaks of central Idaho. He would eagerly pack a lunch, kiss his wife good-by, and return home in the evening sweaty and exhausted, but somehow deeply satisfied in his ability to climb.

Through the fatigue, Adkins realized that his long-pained lower back was beginning to heal. He also noticed that the healing effect seemed greater after shorter, quicker climbs than after longer ascents. So he began picking up the pace and cutting back the time, first from 12 hours to eight, and later experimenting with all-out bursts lasting no more than 20 minutes. It was around 1978, he says, that he began to take note of astounding changes in his physical condition.

"I found that I was able to run a little bit and ride a bike. In the winter I was able to cross-country ski," he says. His weight dropped from 150, at which he felt quite lean, to 135. His resting pulse went from 80 to 50; his blood pressure from 169/96 to 120/80.

"My eyes became less dry and more tolerant of sunlight. My hemorrhoids healed up and went away, and my tooth decay--I used to have a big dental bill every year--just seemed to stop. The arthritis behind my knees disappeared, and my hands were better able to withstand the cold," he says.

His reputation as a climber began to circulate in the heavily athleticized Sun Valley area, where countless former and future Olympians reside alongside commonfolk, and where everyone runs, bikes, climbs, skis, or feels inexorably left out. Adkins was invited for a Sunday afternoon climb
with Gary Steinbach, then the 34-year-old administrator of Sun Valley's Moritz Community Hospital.

Impressed by his climbing partner's vigor, Steinbach asked Adkins in to the hospital for tests at the Sun Valley Health Institute, of which he was director. The health institute's aim was to cater to executives, evaluating their fitness levels and customer-designing exercise programs to their
needs. Its business-suited clientele would arrive by Lear Jet to spend long weekends at the Sun Valley hospital. There, Adkins was pronounced to have "the heart of a teenager" by Dr. James White, who now directs the University of Southern California's exercise physiology lab in San Diego.

His colorful diagnosis of Adkins, he says, was only slightly exaggerated.  The telling test involved imposing a resistance load of 900 kilogram-meters per minute on the ergometer-equipped stationary bike, and observing the response of Adkins's heart. An electrocardiogram showed the 68-year-old's heart holding stubbornly below 125 beats per minute, while the befuddled
White and his nurse fiddled with the machinery. "His response (to the workload) was that of a well-trained athlete 30 to 40 years younger," says White.

As a physiologist, White has worked with thousands of subjects, from stroke victims to world-class athletes. What sets Adkins apart from others his age, according to White, is his attitude. "Most 76ers are in a rocking chair whittling or watching TV or something. Loren's different. He has too many things going to die right now. In fact, when he does die, you'll probably have to take his heart out and beat it with a stick."

Steinbach, whose invitation brought Adkins to the health institute in the first place, recalls Adkins as uniquely dedicated to a purpose. "Loren had a real strong interest in getting involved in his own fitness. I don't think he realized his own capability. Elderly people tend to be cautious--I've got to cut back, I can't increase. Loren was open to hearing a different message."

Duly pleased with the results of his fitness tests on that day in 1978, Adkins asked to be tested to the point of exhaustion. An exhaustion test involves steadily increasing the workload until the subject can no longer maintain a constant speed on the bike. Health institute physiologists
consented, and scheduled an exhaustion test for Adkins several weeks in advance. Adkins went home and began training for a peak performance.

But on the day of the scheduled test, after weeks of training, and after Adkins had risen for breakfast at the required 4 am, the health institute refused to go through with it. "They found out I had a heart irregularity because of the fact that I drank coffee," he says. Occasional irregular heart beats are in fact common among coffee drinkers of all ages, but the condition's presence in Adkins was enough to dissuade the physiologists from stressing his 68-year-old heart to exhaustion.

Adkins was thoroughly upset by their decision, and in his anger went out for a climb. "I was PO'd because I'd been training so hard, and on the way up the hill I thought, 'My god, this is stupid. I don't need their laboratory. I've got an outdoor laboratory right here. All I have to do is measure this (vertical distance) accurately weigh myself, and time myself going up, and I've got an absolute energy output that's far better than any ergometer or treadmill.' When you lift your weight from here to here in a certain length of time, you can't deny that."

His first official stress slope was blazed into a mountainside less than a quarter-mile from his home, where he was accustomed to working out. Using his civil engineering skills and equipment, he marked off 50-foot increments in elevation gain along a narrow path that curved through the sagebrush. The total rise was 850 feet.

Between 1979 and 1980, from April to October, Adkins climbed the stress slope nearly every day. He timed himself, recorded his pulse, and plotted his performance on graph charts in his home. At first his times exceeded 20 minutes. "I though I was as good as I could get because of my age. I though I could expect nothing but getting slower and slower. But hell, I was getting better and better. When I got down to 17 minutes, I was on Cloud Nine. Then I got down to 15 minutes."

After a neighbor who disliked his dogs threatened to start "poisoning gophers," Adkins moved the site of his stress slope to another hill, two miles away on U.S. Forest Service land. With the help of local fitness consultant Willy McCarty, and movie actor Scott Glenn, who is a friend of
McCarty's, he cleared another winding trail into another sage-covered mountain, and marked off its 100-foot increments. At that slope, with an 850-foot vertical rise identical to that of his first slope, he has clocked a time as low as 12:51.

McCarty, now 43, recalls his first workout with Adkins in 1980. The two met in the winter, and arranged to train together when the weather broke.  They met at Adkins's original stress slope the following spring, McCarty recalls. "We set our watches and ran to the top. I got up in like 12 minutes. I was sort of proud of myself that I didn't go over my (pulse rate) limit."

"I turned around and Loren was right behind me. He almost crawls to the top, with slobber hanging off his face and chest, breathing as hard as he can. He can barely stand up. I give him his time and after a couple of minutes I said, 'Loren, what was your pulse rate?'"

McCarty imitates Adkins's deeply resonant voice in recalling the answer: "Two-ten." In those early stages of experimentation with the redline method, Adkins actually pushed his heart rate to 210 beats per minutes. McCarty recalls his exasperation in hearing Adkins's reply. "I was just
terrified and I said, "Loren you can do that. It'll kill you.' He says, 'Hell, I did it all last summer.'"

McCarty travelled with Adkins to the U.S. Cycling Federation's 25-mile bicycle championships in Whispering Pines, N.C. in 1985. He recalls the 75-79 age-group race. "I went up the road three or four miles and parked the car and waited. The first guy came along, and he was kind of tenuous, I guess, like he didn't want to get hurt. Then the second guy came along and he kind of looked pained, like he was trying not to fall down. And the third guy was Loren--head down, sweat rolling off his forehead, pedaling as hard as he could. I looked at him and I thought, this is a different kind of guy.

Then the next 10 guys go by and every one of them looked like he was just trying to complete the course. Loren was the only guy who looked like he was trying to win the race." Adkins, of course, won the race in the 75-79 age group.

As a fitness consultant in the Sun Valley area, McCarty has served a number of celebrity clients, among them Bette Midler and Cher. He trained actress Mariel Hemingway, who resides part-time in Sun Valley, for her 1982 film "Personal Best." Hemingway portrayed a contender for the Olympic pentathlon, and prepared for her role by scaling Adkins's stress slope three times a week. Co-starring in the film was Scott Glenn, who also resides in the area, and who has worked out frequently with Adkins and McCarty.

What his celebrity clients share with Adkins, McCarty says, is that they are "very intense human beings determined to get the most out of themselves. " They differ from others in that they tend to concentrate on their potential strengths, rather than their hindrances and limitations. "I
have so many students from so many walks of life. They come to me telling me all their 'poor me' stories--I hurt my knee when I was 18 so I can't run, and so on. I use Loren to convey that you're not stuck with what you've got. I've told the Loren Adkins story to nearly every student I've had."

McCarty himself is a dedicated athlete who competes in as many as 50 endurance races per year. He now uses redlining as part of his personal training routine. "Other forms of exercise don't seem to service the same purpose. You can't go that hard because your competence level won't allow it. On a bicycle it's very difficult to pedal that fast for 15 minutes, and it's also very dangerous. The hill takes care of it for you. There's always that
resistance. It's like a combination of aerobics and working out with weights. When you're going up that hill you can say there's nobody in the world who's training any harder than you."

It is doubtful, in McCarty's opinion, that redlining will ever catch on as a widely popular training practice. But that's not because 850-foot mountainsides are scarce in places like Manhattan. "You need a hill," he says. "But you've got that. You go up the stair in the World Trade Center
of the Empire State Building. All it lacks is the scenery." The reason redlining won't play elsewhere is simple, he says. "Most people aren't willing to push themselves to that level of intensity."

Adkins makes no bones of his differences with recognized fitness authorities over whether it is wise for a man of 76 to push himself so hard. He has slowed down somewhat since the early days, when he would routinely reach heart rates in excess of 200. But it hasn't been because of any adherence to conventional wisdom. Now he typically ranges between 175 and 180. Most popular aerobics programs advise an exerciser against exceeding about 85 percent of his "maximum" heart rate, which is calculated by subtracting his age from 220. Thus a 76-year-old would be limited to a pulse of 122 (which is 85 percent of 220 minus 76).

To exercise writer Covert Bailey, Adkins refers with a hint of disdain as simply "Fit or Fat,": which is the name of his best-selling book. Of John Jerome, who writes about exercise physiology for magazines including Fifty Plus, Adkins is no fan either. "They just can't see training beyond 75 or 85 percent. They say oh, well, you'll get in there and you'll begin to burn muscle instead of fat. You'll get weak and you'll get tired," he says in a voice of mocking meekness.

Particularly irksome to Adkins are geriatric formulas based on the theoretical "clock of aging," which sets forth and ostensibly unavoidable schedule of physical deterioration. Changes in a person's maximum achievable heart rate and aerobic capacity are directly tied to his or her age. One such formula was published last year by Fifty Plus, ironically a magazine devoted to easing the transition to advanced age. "I think it's horrible for Fifty Plus to let people think there's no hope, this is the way you're going to do it. I think you can cut your aging way down," he says.

Adkins's theory explaining redlining's effectiveness centers on the body's circulatory system, particularly the capillaries. A human body contains some 10 billion capillaries, which if laid end-to-end would stretch 62,000 miles. As a person ages, many capillaries collapse or become restricted. Adkins believes pumping blood through them at a high pressure differential keeps them open, elastic, and strong. In effect the capillary beds become denser in the sense that there are more functioning capillaries. In turn, according to Adkins, the organs of the body are fed a more complete blood supply, even while at rest. So their deterioration is retarded.

In spite of having studied exercise physiology thoroughly, Adkins recognizes his theory as just that. It if not fact, and he is reluctant to defend it, or even convey it, in the absence of concurring scientific evidence. But he has been frustrated by the scientific community's apparent lack of interest. A letter to Harvard University's school of medicine in 1982 went unpublished. An article by Adkins sent to a medical journal in Evanston, Ill. went unpublished.

Adkins has, however, written articles on redlining for local publications in the Sun Valley area. In "The Very Best You," last year, he extolled the method's virtues, but he cautiously avoided recommending it, particularly to older people. His article advised readers to make their own decisions about redlining, based on stress tests and physicians' opinions. He also suggested first achieving the "good" or "excellent" fitness levels established in Dr. Kenneth Cooper's "The Aerobic Way."

Adkins agrees with McCarty that high-exertion hill-climbing will probably never replace jogging or racquetball as America's exercise of choice. In an era of hedonistic health spas, enduring the excruciation of a redlining workout, even for 15 minutes a day, is a price people need not pay for fitness.

But for Adkins, the benefits of doing so have far exceeded the costs, he says. In what might have been the uneventful years of his retirement he has travelled the country, won friends and won races. There have been modest financial rewards, if not fortune, in the form of ski equipment endorsements; and recognition, if not fame. In 1984 a local athletic acquaintance who directs a theatre troupe invited Adkins to audition for a bit part in a movie being filmed in Sun Valley. He appeared as a scruffy sourdough miner in Clint Eastwood's "Pale Rider."

"You don't get that by finishing second," he notes.

"McCarty, whom he also met through athletics, now strives to spread the spirit of Adkins's attitudes toward exercise. He also emulated his 76-year-old friend. "I teach people to train for life, not to get in shape of lose a few pounds. I see myself redlining to whatever age it is and then dying of a massive heart attack, not of little aneurysm where you're in the hospital for 12 months before anything happens.

"People ask me what I'm training for and I say I'm training to break all of Loren Adkins's records. When I'm 76 I want to see if I can ride a bicycle any faster or run a ten-miler any faster than he can. Longevity is a big part of it."