"Choco Papa`s Health Note"

  Last summer, I carried four grocery bags from my car to the kitchen. Two in each hand. Maybe 8 kilograms total. By the time I set them on the counter, my arms were shaking. Not sore. Shaking. Like I'd just finished a workout. Except I hadn't worked out. I'd carried groceries for 30 meters. I stood in my kitchen, staring at my trembling hands, and thought: I used to bench press 100 kilograms. Not a hundred years ago. Not in some distant previous life. In my twenties and thirties, as a professional baseball player, I pressed 100 kilograms for reps. I did lat pulldowns with the full stack. I threw fastballs that required explosive full-body power. My body was a machine built for force. Now that machine couldn't carry groceries without shaking. I went to my doctor the following week and asked for a body composition scan (체성분 검사, cheseongbun geomsa). The results were brutal. At age 57, I had lost approximately 30 percent of the muscle mass I'd had at 30. Thirty percent...

                        Every morning, I walk down the stairs from my apartment. Fourteen steps. And every morning, my knees announce each one. Click. Pop. Crack. Click. Pop. Crack. My wife says she can hear me coming from the bedroom. She doesn't need an alarm clock. She has my knees. I'm 59 years old, but my knees are at least 60. Probably 65. They've lived a harder life than the rest of me. While my brain was sitting in boardrooms and my hands were signing contracts, my knees were still paying the bill for what I did to them in my twenties. Let me do the math. In my professional baseball career, I estimate I slid into bases roughly 2,000 times. Each slide slammed my knees into packed dirt at full sprint speed. I squatted behind home plate for catching drills thousands of times — deep squats, full body weight, for hours. I sprinted from first to third, stopped hard, pivoted, pushed off. Over and over. Season after season. Tha...