CHAPTER 3 | Oola Fitness: Die Young at a Really Old Age

I noticed them the first time I sat in his office.

It was my first month of residency when Dr. Troy called me in. I wasn’t nervous. We’d already built a solid rapport, and it wasn’t like he was going to fire me. I was working for free, and half the time he wasn’t even there.

His office had a big dark oak desk, clean and organized, a couple of family photos angled toward him. He sat in a tall leather chair. I sat across from him in one of the smaller chairs with a cloth seat and plastic armrests.

Behind him was a bookshelf. While he talked, I scanned it the way you look for clues about a man when you don’t yet know how to ask him directly. And there, behind his right shoulder, two glass jars filled with marbles caught my eye.

One was noticeably fuller than the other. Everything else about this man was balance and order. Why would the one thing he chose to display be so obviously lopsided?

Between the two jars, a small chrome triangular stand cradled a single marble, like it was the most precious thing in the room.

I brought my attention back to the conversation. It was light. How’s it going? How’s reading X-rays coming along? How are you doing in the therapy bay? He wasn’t around much, and it struck me that he was asking how I was doing more than telling me what to do. After the check-in, we’d usually drift into just talking: his travels, his family, money, business, life.

That became the rhythm. Every two or three weeks I’d be back in that office. And every time, I’d see the jars. Nothing about them ever changed. They just never fit.

I stared at those jars for months before I finally decided to ask.

He didn’t just tell me. He reached back and set both jars in front of me, the single marble in the middle. The room shifted. Something in the way he set them down told me this was going to be one of those conversations that changes how you see things afterward.

He looked me dead in the eyes.

“Thirty marbles,” he said, pointing to the jar on my left. “One for every year I’ve been alive.”

Thirty marbles. Thirty years. It didn’t look like very much sitting in a jar.

“Inside those thirty marbles I’ve had good years and bad years. Moments of emotional pain, physical pain. Years where I felt like I failed. Lessons that cost something to learn. But I’ve also had tremendous joy. The birth of my children. This business I built from nothing. Summers at the lake with my family I’ll never forget. Every marble represents a year I’ve lived—the memories, the moments, the lessons. And I’m grateful for every one. Even the hard ones. Especially the hard ones.”

He set it down and picked up the second jar. Fuller. Noticeably fuller.

“The average American man lives to seventy-two. Subtract thirty, and this is what’s ahead. Forty-two marbles. If I’m average.” He held it to the light. “Most people never count this. They assume there’s always more time. But when you actually hold it—when each one is finite and irreplaceable—something shifts. Urgency. The right kind.”

Then he picked up the chrome stand, the single marble glowing in the light.

“This is the one I’m living right now. It matters more than any of the others, because it’s the only one I can actually do something with. This is the present. The place we need to live—learning from the past, planning for the future, but living in the present.”

That was the first time I ever heard the phrase present time consciousness. It was also the first time I started looking at my own life in marbles. If I'm honest, it was also the first time I quietly wondered if Troy had finally lost his.

Turns out, he hadn’t. By the time he set that jar back down, I was already pricing glass jars in my head.

After I left his office that day, I drove straight to a craft store. I bought two glass jars, a bag of marbles, and a small stand to hold one in the middle. I set the whole thing up on my own desk that weekend and never told anyone why.

Those jars have survived more moves than I can count. A few didn't survive at all. I've swept up broken glass and chased marbles across the floor more than once, joking that I was literally losing my marbles. The jars sitting on my shelf today aren't the originals. They don't need to be. The jars can be replaced. The count can't.

Fifty-three marbles in one jar. In the middle sits one marble, representing the year I'm living right now, my fifty-fourth. Eighteen in the other. That jar looks almost empty next to the first one, and some days that's a hard thing to look at.

Those fifty-three marbles hold five children and six grandchildren. They hold a divorce and a bankruptcy. They also hold the day I met Edina around marble forty-three, the gal who would become my wife.

They hold three books, the privilege of building and selling multiple businesses, and an unexpected speaking career that has taken me farther than I ever imagined.

They hold quiet mornings over coffee, long conversations that lasted late into the night, and adventures I never could have planned. A hidden beach in Phuket. One unforgettable night when Edina and I had an entire French castle to ourselves.

And before you start wondering what happened in that castle... let's just say some of life's best memories are meant to be relived, not retold.

When I picture those marbles, the accomplishments aren’t what stand out.

The people are.

The conversations are.

The moments that quietly changed me are.

I have real hope for what fills the eighteen still ahead. More love. More adventure. More marbles worth keeping. But I’m honest enough now to know that jar might also hold a bad diagnosis. It might hold the loss of my parents, both in their eighties. It might hold pain I can’t see coming. That’s not pessimism. That’s just what the jar actually is—the same jar the Guru showed me thirty years ago, sitting on a desk, telling the truth whether I want to hear it or not.

Almost every time Dr. Troy and I have talked over the last thirty years, fitness has found its way into the conversation. What we’re eating. What we’re not. Cardio. Strength. Sauna and cold plunges at his lake cabin long before either had a hashtag. Sleep. Recovery. Stretching. We’ve sat across from each other more times than I can count, setting goals for this one F of Oola—missing some, crushing others, setting bigger ones the next year. Some years we lost weight. Some years we ran marathons together. If I’m honest, Troy is probably the biggest reason I’ve stayed as fit as I have—not because he ever pushed me, but because neither of us wanted to be the one who let the other down.

The gal I met around marble forty-three became my wife in marble forty-nine. If Troy taught me to count my marbles, Edina taught me there could be more of them. She's always been fascinated by longevity—not just living longer, but living better. She talks about healthspan as much as lifespan, reads the research obsessively, and has this uncanny ability to make me rethink things I'd already accepted as settled truth.

One afternoon she walked into my office carrying another glass jar. It was smaller than the first two. Inside were forty-eight orange marbles.

"These," she said with a smile, "are borrowed."

She explained that while the average lifespan might land somewhere in the seventies, researchers believe the human body is capable of much more. Some even suggest the upper limit hovers around 120 years. Seventy-two marbles represent what most people get. Forty-eight more gets you there.

Then she got quiet in a way that told me this wasn't about research anymore.

"I want as many of these with you as I can get."

That was love.

Edina is thirteen years younger than I am. I've joked more than once that the thought of her someday finding another husband might keep me alive longer than any supplement ever could. But truthfully, that's not what drives me. I don't want more years because I'm afraid of dying. I want more years because I'm in love with living.

I look at those fifty-three marbles, then at the forty-eight orange ones sitting beside them, and I imagine all the conversations we haven't had yet. The places we haven't seen. The grandchildren we haven't watched grow up. The ordinary Tuesday mornings we haven't shared over coffee. Whether I make it to 120 doesn't matter. What matters is never letting “average” decide what's possible.

The marbles have taught me one final lesson:

Die young…

at a really old age.

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I think about my dad.

He used to say he felt thirty until the day he looked in the mirror. Then the truth would hit him. He watched his classmates—men he grew up with, played ball with, worked alongside—start dropping. Heart attacks. Strokes. Diabetes. Bodies that had been strong went quiet. He never talked about it with drama. Just a quiet urgency. Like he could see the jar getting lighter and didn’t want to waste what was left.

That urgency is what the marbles finally gave me.

Looking at eighteen marbles changes the way you think about fitness. It stops being about six-pack abs and starts being about time. Time to chase your grandchildren. Time to hike another mountain. Time to laugh with your spouse. Time to fulfill the purpose you were put here to fulfill. Those remaining marbles are not guaranteed. They are not automatic. They are earned—or they are lost—by the choices you make with this body every single day. The quality of your health is the quality of your life. Hand a billionaire a severe headache and in that moment he isn’t thinking about his billions. He’s thinking about the headache.

So what does that look like in real life? Three places to start.

Reflection #1: What You Eat

What are you feeding your future?

Every marble in that jar was built—literally—from something you put in your body. Your cells get replaced over and over across a lifetime, and they rebuild themselves out of whatever you feed them. Most of us are overfed and undernourished at the same time, surrounded by more food than any generation in history and somehow less nourished by it. You don’t need a complicated meal plan to start. You need one honest question: Would your great-grandparents recognize what’s on your plate as food? If someone followed you around yesterday watching everything you ate, would they say you were eating for the life you want… or for the habits you settled into?

Reflection #2: What You Do

Is your body ready for the life you’re dreaming about?

We were built to move—carry things, climb, walk, feel real sunlight, real heat, real cold. Most of us sit for ten hours and call forty-five minutes at a gym a fix. The body keeps score either way. Somewhere in your jar is a dream: a mountain, a grandchild’s wedding, a trip you’ve been putting off, a version of your life you can already picture. If that dream happened tomorrow, would your body be ready to live it?

Reflection #3: Know Your Numbers

Do you know your numbers, or are you guessing? 

For years my annual physical kept telling me the same thing: "You're normal for your age." I believed it. Then at fifty, I stopped wanting to be normal and went deeper—over one hundred biomarkers, cognitive health, DEXA scans, VO₂ max—the full picture. What I found was shocking. Normal didn't mean healthy. My deeper numbers were all over the place, and I wasn't in a good place at all. That was the day I stopped accepting normal and started pursuing optimal.

Feeling fine is deceptive. It's like never checking a jar for a hairline crack—everything looks perfect from across the room until it doesn't. The only way to protect the years you still have is to know the truth about the one you're living right now. We're living in a time when cutting-edge science can help us extend not just lifespan, but healthspan—the years we remain strong, energetic, and fully engaged. We can't guarantee more marbles, but we can often earn the opportunity to borrow a few by taking care of the ones we have. Are you wanting to be normal or strive for more?

Every marble is a gift. The next one isn't guaranteed. Make every one count.