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"  Originally published in the April 2011 &amp;quot;Extreme Health&amp;quot; issue Hypothesis: I can go hard on the partying if I go equally hard on the workouts. Symptoms: In the mid-&amp;#039;80s, I remember looking at David Lee Roth and thinking, That guy is a god. He did jumping splits off a twelve-foot drum riser and hardly broke a sweat. The guy could throw a leg behind his blond mane, screw your girlfriend from the fifth row while smoking cigarettes and slamming whiskey. He had paternity insurance, for chrissakes. I wanted all that. I wanted to be Tarzan, Bukowski, and Captain Kirk all rolled into one. I&amp;#039;ve been active my whole life. My pleasure receptors, wherever they are, have to be fed constantly. There&amp;#039;s a lot of running up mountain trails (I sometimes make my own), snowshoeing, biking, rock climbing \u2014 anything outdoors. On mountaintops, I like to reward myself with a cold beer, some good cheese. Sometimes I&amp;#039;ll pack a flask of bourbon. If I&amp;#039;m with company, occasionally I&amp;#039;ll pack a gun and see where that goes. I love to drink, and I have loved drugs in my life. I love going out at night and having that first glass of Scotch, couple rocks \u2014 it opens up the whole night. I occasionally bum a smoke and shoot the shit with a stranger outside the bar or restaurant. I&amp;#039;m out two or three nights a week, sometimes more. Last night it felt like I had about twenty drinks with the bone-in filet and creamed spinach. I see my trainer today at 1:00.  Treatment: I&amp;#039;m forty-two. And the fact is, if I don&amp;#039;t regularly work out as hard as my body allows \u2014 the same way I have as much fun as my body allows \u2014 I might be dead. Let&amp;#039;s call it the Curcuritian method, whereby one discipline counteracts the other: I bust my ass in the gym with the same enthusiasm as uncorking a fourteen-year-old bottle of Oban. When I do pull-ups, I imagine that I&amp;#039;m hanging off the side of a cliff and if I don&amp;#039;t do one more, I&amp;#039;ll fall to my death. I feel as if I&amp;#039;m squeezing the poison out of my body with each drop of sweat.  I started working out when I was thirty-two, after one morning/evening/morning in Vegas when I found myself missing a series of flights back to New York because I was at the Pow-Gai poker table, high as hell. I don&amp;#039;t even know how to play Pow-Gai poker. Back home, I joined a gym and hired a personal trainer. My current trainer, Carlos Velasquez, thirty-three, specializes in fitness and cock-strutting bravado. His motivation is something like &amp;quot;Hey, man, that girl is looking at you! You don&amp;#039;t want her to think you&amp;#039;re a pussy! You&amp;#039;re embarrassing me.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s never anyone around, but it still gets my adrenaline going.  Sample prescription: \u2022 Six-mile bike ride on a new machine called the Expresso, basically a bike/video game on which you race a pacer through different scenes at different levels of intensity. In fifteen minutes we get my heart rate up to 90 to 95 percent (165 to 170 beats per minute) for an anaerobic result. \u2022 On the basketball court, Carlos steps on two towels. He straps a harness around my shoulders, connected to a long, heavy-duty rubber band that goes around his waist. Then he picks up a forty-five-pound weight and yells, &amp;quot;Run!&amp;quot; With everything I&amp;#039;ve got I run diagonally across the court, with Carlos in tow. It&amp;#039;s as if he&amp;#039;s water-skiing and I&amp;#039;m the boat. I imagine that I&amp;#039;m running across a glacier and a crevasse starts to crack open under my feet, ready to swallow me. My heart feels like it&amp;#039;s about to smash through my rib cage onto the floor, but I turn around and run back just as hard, narrowly escaping the crevasse again.  \u2022 Then I sprint as fast as I can about twenty-five yards and catch a football just in time to smash into the padded walls. I walk back after throwing the ball to Carlos, and as soon as I reach him, I sprint out again to catch it. This happens five times. \u2022 Back to the water-skiing routine another four times. Pulling, sprinting, pulling, sprinting, pulling, sprinting.  \u2022 Something we call Spider-Man push-ups. Imagine Spider-Man climbing up a wall, but make the wall horizontal. Now go the entire length of a basketball court and back, with a little push-up as you touch your right elbow to your right knee, and vice versa. \u2022 At this point, Carlos is done torturing me and he&amp;#039;s now moved on to some lonely housewife in desperate need of attention. I go back to the Expresso machine for a nice, long, fat-burning ride. I punch in a ten-mile route and keep my heart rate below 140 beats per minute so as not to eat up muscle. This takes about thirty minutes, and I always do it when I know I won&amp;#039;t be hiking on the weekend. I&amp;#039;m completely wiped out after this, every muscle trembling from exhaustion, and I feel great.  Prognosis: The work-hard, play-hard diet is working. Carlos thinks my nighttime habits interfere with our goals, but he also says I train the hardest of any client in the gym. My doctor says I&amp;#039;m in great shape. I see him twice a year for blood work and checkups. Aside from 10 milligrams of Lipitor, which I&amp;#039;m told addresses problems that are mostly hereditary, everything checks out.  Just watch, I&amp;#039;ll drop dead as soon as this is published. Here lies David Curcurito. What an asshole. Carlos&amp;#039;s recipe for a hangover, by the way, is coconut water, B-12, and sweat. A note from the doctor: &amp;quot;If you want to have a steak, absolutely. Once, twice a month. It has to be done like anything else in life: You need structure. I do recommend people get a trainer. I went through it myself. I gained too much weight, got a trainer, dropped fifty pounds. I eat what I want. The Super Bowl, I had chicken wings. I&amp;#039;m exercising and I feel great. We&amp;#039;re genetically made to exercise. Get your heart rate up \u2014 depending on a few factors \u2014 to 90, 95 percent for twenty minutes four or five times a week. It pushes the sugar into the blood cells so we don&amp;#039;t develop diabetes. It releases endorphins so we sleep better, we have better sex. When you&amp;#039;re young, it&amp;#039;s important. As you get older, it can be lifesaving. If you like to swim, go swimming. Spinning class, whatever. There was a fascinating study \u2014 they looked at people who run marathons and are in super shape but only exercise on the weekend, and it turns out they&amp;#039;re not as healthy as people who do a little bit every day. Exercise makes a huge difference. Curcurito&amp;#039;s doing great. It&amp;#039;s motivation. This is human physiology 101.&amp;quot;  \u2014Bernard Schayes, David Curcurito&amp;#039;s physician "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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