Why I Built the Super Age Games

I was sitting in a lawn chair next to a friend of mine, an Olympian who was getting ready to do commentary for NBC coverage of the games, and I said it out loud for the first time: "We should do the Super Age Games." 

She looked at me like I'd lost my mind. Fair. But here's what was behind it. I've been in gyms for 40 years, and so have most of my friends. And one day the question just landed: What are we actually training for? Nobody's drafting me into the NFL. There's no podium waiting. So what's the goal? 

When I got honest about it, the answer was simple. I'm training for maximum aliveness. 

A Vision for How You Want to Live 

If you want to know how to train, you need a vision for how you want to live. Mine is specific: I'm 96, hiking in the Alps with friends, fully present for all of it. To make that vision even remotely possible, everything upstream must be in place. I need strength, balance, endurance, a working brain, and, critically, friends who are still capable of hiking up there with me. 

The technical term for what I'm describing is closing the gap between healthspan and lifespan. Picture a chart: vitality on one axis, age on the other. For most people, the vitality line slopes down for years, a long, slow fade. What we want instead is a square wave: full vitality, full aliveness, held for as long as possible. In America right now, the gap between health span and lifespan is about 14 years. Those can be 14 years of fading, or 14 years of hiking, lifting, learning, and laughing with people you love. That gap is trainable. That's the point of the Super Age Games. 

I came to this the hard way. Decades ago, in the middle of a demanding photography career, I developed a rare autoimmune disease that put me in and out of the hospital for a year. I lost my spleen and gained a completely different relationship with my body, with medicine, and with time. That experience began a slow awakening: The way I was living was not the way I could continue to live. Everything I've built since, first AGEIST and now Super Age, grew out of that. 

Whole-Human Longevity 

Here's where I part ways with a lot of the longevity world. The blood-panel-and-supplement crowd tends to chase what's easy to measure. But the research keeps pointing to the same five interlocking circles: exercise, nutrition, sleep, stress regulation, and connection. That last one, your connection to yourself, to others, and to a sense of purpose, is as powerful a longevity factor as anything you can do in a gym, and it's the one almost everyone ignores because you can't strap a wearable to it. 

Whole-person health isn't a trend; it's the premise. The Super Age Games are the same premise turned into a single, joyful, measurable day. 

And one more thing about those five circles. Don't just do more of the one you're already good at. We all want to focus on what comes easy. But at Super Age, we’re suggesting you level up the weakest one first. That's where the return lives. 

Eight Markers You Can Actually Train 

When Heather Hurlock, our founding editor, built the framework for the Game markers, she set strict criteria. Every marker had to be testable in about five minutes with minimal equipment, backed by deep peer-reviewed mortality and health span data, and trainable in weeks, not decades. Then we took the research to the Buck Institute for Research on Aging for validation. 

I asked Buck CEO Eric Verdin what he does that actually moves the needle on longevity; his answer was essentially one thing: hard exercise. And it’s true. If you can only focus on one thing, VO2 max training drags nearly everything else along with it, from blood sugar to cardiovascular health. And as Buck’s Nathan Price told us, there's no supplement that raises your VO2 max. You have to do the work. That's exactly why it's worth doing. 

The eight markers we validated with the Buck became the eight Super Age Games trials: The Inferno (VO2 max), The Hang (grip strength), The Tightrope (balance), The Over Under (agility), The Synapse (working memory), The Net (functional strength), The Sync (relational capacity), and The Super Age 800 (endurance under load). 

Yes, relational capacity is a trial. Aliveness is a team sport. 

What the Games Will Feel Like 

We brought in Andy Walshe, who ran high performance for Red Bull and helped build the U.S. Olympic team's Center of Excellence, to design the trials, and coach Junior Kennedy to build the training. But let me be clear about what this is not: It's not a beast fest. There are enough of those. Every trial is designed so that anyone, at any fitness level, can do it. You choose how hard to push. 

You'll walk in, warm up in a corridor full of your fellow participants, and then step into the main arena, where it's game on. Everyone’s there for one reason: To find out how alive they are and to leave with a validated snapshot of their healthspan showing exactly where they're strong and what to work on next. The people buying tickets so far range from their 20s to their 80s. Roughly 20% are physicians, physical therapists, or other credentialed health professionals. Families are coming. Teams are forming. I assumed this would be a New York thing. And it’s not. People are coming from across the country and beyond. 

Try This: The 60-Second Hang 

You don't have to wait for the Games to take your first measurement. Find a pull-up bar (a sturdy playground bar works) and simply hang, with both hands, feet off the ground. 

Everyone assumes they can hang for a minute. Around 30 seconds, it gets interesting. Around 60, it gets honest. Grip strength tracks with whole-body strength and shows up again and again in the mortality research, and it's also deeply practical: if you ever slip, you want hands that can catch a railing and hold. 

Don't worry if you struggle. That's useful information, and it's trainable in weeks. Farmer's carries, a weight in each hand while you walk, are one of the simplest ways to build it. 

Want a bonus? Tonight, brush your teeth while standing on one leg. Balance is a cognitive skill, and your brain gets lazy about it when your eyes do all the work. Dim the lights to make it harder. My wife has watched me do this for years. She's used to it. 

Come Find Out How Alive You Are 

The Super Age Games will take place Nov. 7 in New York City. Train for them beforehand or just show up curious. Either way, you'll leave with a score, a plan, and probably a few new friends, which, as it turns out, is the point of the whole thing. 

Because the goal was never just to add years. It's to be maximally alive for every one of them, all the way up the mountain.